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Kagi Small Web

blog.kagi.com

81–90 of 191 posts

Re: Kagi Small Web

#81

Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?

I love it, though my only complaint is that I usually want sites in English from the US, but if I want to switch to finding sites in French in France, I have to switch regions. Google is much better at localizing me, and so I'll use !g for those.

Have you tried adding a custom bang like !fr? Point it to:

    https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&r=fr
Where `fr` is the region code

Re: Kagi Small Web

#82

Pretty cool - just wondering why one of the requirements is "The website can appear in an iframe"?

That is a requirement for it to be featured in the KSW website (as it uses iframes to embed). We will still crawl it and surface in search results regardless..

Ah gotcha, I misunderstood that part :)

Re: Kagi Small Web

#83
post #57

> These notes will vanish in about a week as we cycle in new content - emphasizing the fleeting, imperfect nature of the small web. Kagi could just admit they don't want to moderate notes or store them permanently. No need to push down the small web, because a lot of small sites preserve their content. I get that Kagi probably has data indicating the reality of how often sites down, but it seems from my experience th…

That's a funny sentence indeed, most personal sites take painstaking care to not break their 10 or 20 year old links :P

Re: Kagi Small Web

#85

Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?

The ability to block SEO garbage sites like GeeksForGeeks and not filling the first 3-5 results with ads is worth it alone. Not to mention the ability to boost certain sites results over others on a personalized level. Unfortunately for me, I end up regularly going over the "Pro" tier of searches a month (partially because I accidentally search all the time, but also I'm heavy search-engine user) is a bit of a letdow…

> I end up regularly going over the "Pro" tier of searches a month

I'm now halfway through my billing period (22 aug - 21 sep) and I'm on 488 searches. Would be tight on the pro plan (1000 searches), but I'm still on the early adopter pro plan (1500 searches).

Re: Kagi Small Web

#86
post #73

Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?

Yes, second that. Happy paying user for bit over a year now (and was in the beta before that). It feels a bit like how it felt discovering Google back when AltaVista was still a thing.

...because I wasn't sure if this was just nostalgia or fake memories so I went down the rabbit hole of trying to refresh my memories about why I switched from AltaVista to Google

I had some memory of AltaVista being full of SEO (as I recall it was mostly a keyword search engine) spam.

And that was probably true, but I also came across this Quora page https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-g... and it reminded me about two other things stand out to me as true

1. AltaVista was slow and you needed to know your syntax to find things 2. AltaVista was cluttered. Google had very clean results.

I think on 1 google is still fast, but 2. not so much. Google's results are far from "clean", instead it feels like the main goal is showing you as much ads as possible and preferably getting you to accidentally click on one.

This in and the fact that Kagi results are as good or slightly better (and much more customisable) than Google is probably the main reason I'm so happy with Kagi.

After all, Kagi sources results from Google so it's no surprise the quality is similar https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Re: Kagi Small Web

#87

Vlad, you're awesome! It's hard to tell to what extent it is actually beneficial for users or your company, but I feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing these kinds of things still happen in modern Internet.

Hah, thanks. It was one of those things that I just wanted to do and I actually wrote 100% of code for this end to end which took me a good part of a month. Not the best use of CEOs time you might say, but it was fun and felt right.

As an investor, this is exactly what I want to see the CEO doing, at least occasionally.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so neat! So happy so see the small, independent and more humane web being highlighted. I’m trying to do my part[0] but I have no doubt that a search engine—even if still a niche one— can have a much bigger impact. Really well done Vlad! [0] https://peopleandblogs.com

I kinda wish there was a sort of proper blog-DMOZ. Would make this sort of stuff a lot easier. Right now everyone and their grandma is curating their own blog list. Lots of wasted effort that could be saved by collaborating somehow.

ooh.directory gained some traction a few month ago [0] - and they are steadily adding blogs although they do it slowly. Manually reviewing and trying to have some diversity is no easy task.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983

Re: Kagi Small Web

#89

This sort of stuff makes me really happy to be a Kagi subscriber. Not only do i get value out of Kagi, but this shows me that the money is being used to develop Kagi in a way i agree with. By comparison, Spotify (just picking one of my subs) feels hostile to me. I pay them, but would cancel in a heart beat if i felt i had options. I really appreciate Kagi's development matching what i feel like i'm buying. Thanks Kag…

Music streaming is such a mess. I've tried a ton of services in an attempt to find one that's decent, and have found embarrassing problems for all of them.

Spotify: Really hostile, manipulative, and terrible to artists. On my end I hate how commercial the homescreen is, and the CarPlay interface is just a user-hostile to a degree that is frankly unsafe disaster.

TIDAL: Pretty good in a lot of ways. They pay their artists well. The recommendations are decent. The apps have some really stupid bugs that have persisted for years though, the most annoying of which is that if you shuffle a playlist it only shuffles the dozen or so tracks that the interface had pre-cached from the top. So if you try to shuffle your full library you wind up just hearing the same dozen songs only, over and over again.

Deezer: Wanted to like it, but the apps aren't great, and I ran into more missing tracks than I'd like.

So I finally settled on Apple Music. I've got an iPhone, so it's a natural fit there, and the CarPlay interface is great. They also pay artists almost as well as TIDAL. The recommendations are super good enough, and I don't really feel like the home page is constantly trying to push me to whatever the huge labels are paying them to promote (damn you Spotify). The Windows apps are terrible (like flat out embarrassing), and the Linux apps are non-existent, but luckily there's a pretty great open source app called Cider that solves that.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#90

And yet in the article they reference their Discord channel and Twitter sigh

Rooting for small web does not mean one needs to be against other technology. For example Kagi uses Google and even hosts on GCP - I think Google's technology and people are great, it is just the business model that is rotten and contributes to the deterioration of the web. And interestingly enough, at least Discord (and to some extent Twitter) are trying to have a business model that does not put more ads down your…

> “trying to have a business model that does not put more ads down your throat”

Twitter isn’t really trying to do that. It’s just something the owner likes to claim, but what he’s actually done is the opposite:

- Hired a CEO from the ad world

- Increased personal data collection (with updated Terms of Service to reflect that)

- Limited tweet access without login (those views would be harder to target with ads)

As a Tesla customer I’m fed up with this person’s endless lies. Seems like you got a taste of it with your Twitter subscription too.

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