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Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#71

Post by nucleardog »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #61
andrewstuart wrote: post #44

Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web? There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing. I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web? I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something? Does anyone know of anyt…

There have been some websites in the past that allowed one to browse www content by IP address, covering what seemed to be the full range of IPv4 address space. For example, a page with a list of IP address ranges where each address range is a hyperlink. One could then drill down by following hyperlinks to a specific IP address and view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting)…

> view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting). Not sure why these websites do not persist.

You probably answered your own question here--I imagine at this point the amount of things on the internet that aren't using some sort of virtual hosting are quite tiny.

Even ignoring everything else, with the IP address exhaustion and the push for SSL (can't get a certificate for an IP address), websites available directly at an IP address just aren't really a thing anymore.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#72

Post by nucleardog »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #41

As someone who hasn’t used paid search services, what sort of problems has this solved for other HN users that make it worth it? How does it compare to “AI” based search tools like Perplexity?

I use the internet basically as an extension of my brain. There's very little barrier between having a thought and seeking information. Search is the usual way those two come together.

Google, these days, seems to mostly ignore whatever I've tried to search for and instead return results that I'd call "more popular". So the top results are mostly generic, useless results and below that it's mostly blog spam or wildly unrelated things.

This is especially bad when I'm looking for specific technical documentation or trying to understand unusual or obscure problems. Usually it's returning nothing useful at all.

Kagi returns results actually related to what I'm looking for more often than not.

The thing that convinced me to pay for it was a single search. I kept hitting _something_ that was causing the Apple TV to stop showing how much time was remaining in a show and instead show something else.

I went to Kagi and searched "netflix apple TV showing wrong time remaining" (my incomplete but best understanding of the problem at the time). Kagi surfaced a result that explained what this was and how it was getting triggered as the fourth result.

I went back to Google and searched the same. Top result was "If you can't change the time or time zone on your Apple Device" from Apple. Second was "Netflix audio is out of sync" from Netflix. With the benefit of knowing what the answer was, I did find a single relevant result about 25 results down mixed in with some blog spam on removing a show from "Continue Watching" on Disney Plus, listicles on hidden ways to make the Apple TV app on your phone even better, and a link to a Google Books copy of a 2008 Men's Health Magazine (?!).

Every time I accidentally end up back on Google it's... jarring to say the least.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#74

Post by benhurmarcel »

bugtodiffer wrote: post #57
icar wrote: post #56

I wish Kagi was cheaper. It's expensive in many countries and it doesn't help that we are bombarded with subscriptions everywhere.

I wish Kagi would use the money to build a search engine. But instead they use it to build a browser no one wants and an email service no one needs. Yet their search website is still broken here and there...

I’ve had good results requesting fixes on https://kagifeedback.org/ , even minor/aesthetics stuff.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#75

Post by elashri »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #69
ethbr1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's essentially search-space limitation, based on what you want to nudge the engine into responding with. I.e. what power users used to do with Google, before it decided to ignore user intent

I don't know how you could ever do kagi small web with google. That's not a simple hard filter but changes what types of results are more or less preferred.

Lenses are different from kagi small web. I encourage you to read the docs on both.

You are replying on someone explaining lenses which is something google had something similar in the past when they allowed power users to control search.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#76

Post by ethbr1 »

elashri wrote: post #75
Brian_K_White wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you could ever do kagi small web with google. That's not a simple hard filter but changes what types of results are more or less preferred.

Lenses are different from kagi small web. I encourage you to read the docs on both. You are replying on someone explaining lenses which is something google had something similar in the past when they allowed power users to control search. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

You can still use -site:{url} and related:{url} and after:{yyyy-mm-dd date}

But really, this is 2024. I shouldn't have to manually enumerate things in Google to get it to spit out serviceable results.

And the above nudges are pretty blunt force, compared to how much more it used to respect exact keywords.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#77

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #61
andrewstuart wrote: post #44

Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web? There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing. I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web? I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something? Does anyone know of anyt…

There have been some websites in the past that allowed one to browse www content by IP address, covering what seemed to be the full range of IPv4 address space. For example, a page with a list of IP address ranges where each address range is a hyperlink. One could then drill down by following hyperlinks to a specific IP address and view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting)…

Organisating a directory of websites, or information about websites, by IP address/range is still common. For example, we can see news.ycombinator.com listed here:

https://www.robtex.com/cidr/209.216.230.0-24

https://www.robtex.com/ip-lookup/209.216.230.240

The above directory has been online for at least 18 years.

Here is one I can remember that disappeared:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090907060026if_/http://onsamei...

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#78

Post by throwaway14356 »

pierrefermat1 wrote: post #51
throwaway14356 wrote: post #21

> Google has built a massive index of the internet that covers close to 100% of the accessible web. While their index (of other peoples stuff) is enormous it far from includes everything. It is easy to disqualify and people would be screaming if content farms would be included. What even is a content farm nowadays? One can return a reasonable article for any query with llms rich in links to other pages that don't exi…

It seems like in their mind the snake ate it's tail without realising, so they don't even know what's outside of Google's index.

on the outside are people who could make websites but cant see the point of it. They are on Reddit on facebook on hn on twitter on youtube or they just don't bother. On platforms they make very crappy low effort content (with unearned audience) compared to what they could be making. There is room for casual chatter but almost anyone can make an effort to write down their perspective on something and with some practice enlighten someone or a lot of someones. One might become someone if only in the world of pokemon collectors.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#79

Post by mystified5016 »

pennybanks wrote: post #16
ldayley wrote: post #2

I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing wi…

i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free

Kagi allows you to permanently blacklist Pinterest from appearing in any search ever.

It also gives you exactly what you ask for. If you put words in quotes, you only get results matching that phrase. Same with +- modifiers, and all the other "advanced" search operators.

Meanwhile on any free engine, they often completely ignore your query to show you unrelated SEO slop. You can completely forget modifiers and advanced queried, they aren't even parsed. About the only thing that still works is the site: modifier. And I'm pretty sure they only keep that because 40% of google searches include site:reddit

As well, if Kagi can't find a result for your query, it returns nothing. Try searching something incredibly obscure on google or DDG. You get pages upon pages of results and they're all useless garbage or just straight up ads disguised as results.

That's why I pay for Kagi. It stays the hell out of my way and only gives me exactly what I ask for and absolutely nothing else.

Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

#80

Post by abcdefg12 »

enasterosophes wrote: post #46
pennybanks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free

When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests. When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines w…

I wonder if there are any big companies paying for kagi for their workers.
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