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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#341

Post by AlecSchueler »

ljm wrote: post #320
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity

It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?". Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western. The logical a…

> Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft?

A completely reasonable question that you should be able to answer if you're giving your money out to them.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#342

Post by voakbasda »

nosioptar wrote: post #285
rpdillon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie. Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.

I have found few CEOs capable of telling nothing but the truth. Based on that, I am nearly certain that lying is part of the job description.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#344

Post by rpdillon »

nobodywasishere wrote: post #162
rpdillon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.

I did not intend to spread misinformation here, and would like to hear more about the general-purpose index Kagi is working on. I had based my comment on several Kagi pages, but mostly https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm..., which mentions Teclis as Kagi's own index, but https://teclis.com/ makes it pretty clear that it's a "small web"-focused tool:

> Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.

> Teclis includes its own crawl as well as results from Kagi Small Web index and results with permission from Marginalia Search.

> Teclis works best with broad queries such as 'machine learning', 'vegan diet', 'religion' etc..

Is there another crawler doing the general-purpose stuff?

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#345

Post by mort96 »

yehat wrote: post #274
jwr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.

Censorship of search results and deciding which companies to do business with are two completely separate topics.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#347

Post by pndy »

0xAstro wrote: post #257

I am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.

There's uBlacklist extension for browsers that helps filtering out search results from "offensive" sites and it works with most popular engines - including Brave Search

https://ublacklist.github.io/docs

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#348

Post by randallsquared »

nekzn wrote: post #18

I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature…

The primary way that Google's AI Overview appears in my life is having to correct the misapprehensions of older family who see the immediate answer on top of their search and just uncritically accept it. Based on that, I think it must be wrong quite a lot.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#349

Post by espadrine »

Fnoord wrote: post #169
d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it. I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber). What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Alt…

I use Le Chat as default search engine, using this search engine string: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%...

(In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.)

A negative is the high latency.

(Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.)

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#350

Post by yard2010 »

rpdillon wrote: post #100
d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

If anything, this makes me want to pay them twice. Once for search and once for exploiting google.
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