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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

#91

Post by nekzn »

eb08a167 wrote: post #82
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…

Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.

What they’ll do is embed ads in the text, which will also be unblockable. I imagine the future will entail running an LLM to remove the ads that another LLM generated :P

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

#92

Post by Bombthecat »

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…

As a user: I love it!

As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.

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

#93

Post by niam »

dmd wrote: post #84

I really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better. I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd -…

Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.

The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.

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

#94

Post by wongarsu »

jvidalv wrote: post #75
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 mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially. I only use Google to search for reddit posts. The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.

If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries

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

#95

Post by justinclift »

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…

The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats

Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.

It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)

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

#96

Post by robin_reala »

xstas1 wrote: post #62
Shank wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it great for Japanese, provided you search in the Japanese language mode.

How do you set it to search in Japanese language mode?

Second filter from the left on the results page is the location / language filter.

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

#97

Post by data-ottawa »

vitally3643 wrote: post #27
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've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now. If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it. It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face.…

I mostly interact with their AI through bangs.

An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.

!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.

I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.

Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.

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

#98

Post by westurner »

They used to have:

  - Organize the world's information
  
  - Don't be evil
Who was president at this time? Was this while they were denying students the option to code on the computers we bought for them because security?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil :

> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"

That sounds like NY to me.

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

#99

Post by aloisdg »

BrunoBernardino wrote: post #79

While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")! [1]: https://kagi.com [2]: https://uruky.com

is it foss?

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

#100

Post by rpdillon »

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 in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.

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