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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

#481

Post by Barbing »

jeltz wrote: post #203
Barbing wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have read this comment before multiple times, even a year or two ago. Hence my “unreasonable” demand for screenshots if someone has the minutes to script it. - Hmm, really should be a live site to track over time... Can make that and Show [Three People On] HN! (Google could give better results to those unloyal to them, as one example, so testing needed! We could be getting wildly different results or just have starkl…

Waiting for your screenshots. Do the legwork yourself first. And obviously there is no astroturfing here from DDG. That you could have seen from a tiny look at my profile. I have a pretty public persona on the internet.

Thanks, and important to say beyond not accusing them I was _definitely_ not accusing you!

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

#482

Post by readthenotes1 »

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 AI overview has made Google search usable again for me.

I often use Perplexity for more complicated questions though.

In both cases, I really like that. I can actually ask a complicated question and get a reasonable answer.

For example, check the answer to "what is the source of vertical straw in the movie The sixth Sense with the flying taxis and all?"

(I said sprawl but the voice to text understood strawz so I left it)

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

#483

Post by nobodywasishere »

ljm wrote: post #298
nobodywasishere wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms? I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?

That's what SlopStop is for :) developing methodologies that scale for detecting slop.

I mean it sounds like that already has a lot of overlap with our Small Web indexing efforts, so that part of our indexing efforts could be an extension of that. A lot if this is still in development though so I can't speak on specifics just yet.

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

#485

Post by nobodywasishere »

xnx wrote: post #249
nobodywasishere wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> We're actively working on building our own indexes Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".

It's funny you say that as we just switched the Wikipedia widget over to our own internal index. We don't intend to stop there either.

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

#486

Post by nobodywasishere »

rpdillon wrote: post #344
nobodywasishere wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not in production yet, so will have more to share in time.

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

#487

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"... didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to ..."

"... I thought their aspirations were higher ..."

It sounds like the decision to send search queries (and money) to Kagi was based at least in part on reasons other than the quality of the search results

This is interesting psychology

What if all (cf. only sum of) the money sent to Kagi was actually invested in an alternative way to search the web without using an index created by a corporation or a non-profit with commercial subsidiaries

Defensive HN replies may focus on the quality of the search results from commercial indexes, e.g., "Google is the best. That's why everyone 'chooses' it."^1 But if the consumer is choosing Kagi based on other reasons, e.g., "investing in additional search infrastructure", then clearly there is more to these decisions

For example, some search engines claim to be planting trees or some such. Nothing to do with the quality of the results

1. Apple is being paid 20+ billion for choosing Google as the default in iOS but Apple's choice is not based on the money. Yes, that makes sense

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

#488

Post by upmind »

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…

Agreed. I really like the feature. For people saying it's quite bad, from speaking to an engineer on that team at Google he says it's literally the output of a tiny LLM being fed the top websites results which makes sense to me.

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

#489

Post by magpi3 »

simianwords wrote: post #186
magpi3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.

Curious to know your stance on Google discouraging Adblock. And whether users are morally obligated to not use Adblock.

I don't really have a stance one way or the other, but I don't think people just produce content for ad revenue. A lot of people produce content just to get their name out there/increase their branding, an incentive that AI summaries undermine. There really is no motivation to produce something if it is just going to be regurgitated by AI agents. And, yes, I know they cite sources in their responses (at least Google does), but that is a pretty paltry substitute for actual traffic to your site.

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

#490

Post by fooker »

kgwxd wrote: post #143
timpera wrote: post #65

Brave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.

Brave is such a horrible brand. I don't think they'll succeed, but they're definitely trying to do MS-style EEE. Browser, search engine, and security (nefariously called "ad blockers" by the people that don't want users fully controlling traffic and code that reached and runs on their machines) should forever be separate entities.

Brave's MITM for ads (supposedly) after client side decryption has killed the brand for me.

They seem to have walked back some of this, but it seems pretty unclear what and why, and I'd rather not try to find out given there's nothing stopping them from doing such things.

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