no mention of kagi yet? Son, I am disappoint.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Asklemmy
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I'm really happy with Kagi. The fact that I can blacklist certain domains from showing up in search results is chef's kiss.
Back when I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, I found myself occasionally using the !g bang to fall back to Google results. So far I haven't felt the need once in Kagi.
This is like the 18th time I've seen people on Lemmy say good things about kagi, so I just bit the bullet. I like ecosia but I still end up going back to google for some searches, so I'll see how kagi does for me.
I’ve been using it for months and maybe popped back over to Google only a handful of times.
DDG is okay but it’s miserable in comparison. I haven’t tried Ecosia long enough to form a proper opinion but my first impressions weren’t great.
The only people who actively rail against it seem to be the standard group of Fediverse who are… a bit too online 😉
Yeah, since posting that i've been searching random niche things I've attempted with other search engines (like info on obscure instruments and foreign fashion subcultures) and yeah, Kagi is by and large the most useful I've tried. I search for something and it's not just pages of the most normie websites talking about things semi-adjacent to what I searched for, and not an advert in sight! I think I'm in love.
I'm also very happy with kagi. I get search results with no fluff to sort through or scroll past every time I search. It's such a breath of fresh air.
Kagi is also doing some interesting things with search and many, many things that let you customize how the results are presented to you.
Also, intesrtingly, kagi is growing rapidly and as yet they have spent literally zero dollars on advertisements. Purely word of mouth.
I've felt the need a couple times but Google results were always worse.
They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.
you are still paying for search, you just don't know it (yet).
It's not lost on me, I get it, don't pretend like you're the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That's the agreement with anything you don't directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.
sure, we all value things differently. For me this subscription is nothing but a rounding error.
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I only heard of Kagi in lemmy, very intrigued, however as I lived in third-world country, the price plan is unfeasible for me to consider.
You get the first hundred a month for free.
Maybe you could ration it for when you need high-quality searches?
You get the first hundred a month for free
Thats more rational, I thought it was just the first hundred searches were free.
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Isn't Yandex Russian?
I agree with the person who identified that ChatGPT is better than a search-engine, but you have to check it, because, unlike a normal search-engine, the ai-engine, itself sometimes produces disinformaiton, instead of only linking-to disinformation.
Checking is now required in both cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines
for some alternatives, btw.
_ /\ _
Thanks! Search results have recently been so bad that I found Yandex sometimes offers better results than Duckduckgo/Google/Bing etc. It's quite sad actually
Stupid question: is this a recent development? I remember that seaeching for stuff was no problem just 2 yrs ago. Is it becauae I search more niche stuff or bexause I sont use commands like specific sites and others?
The enshitification has been a gradual process. Think of it as slowly boiling a frog. I've observed the quality of search slowly degrading over the past 2 decades. Just recently, it has gotten to such a severe point that searching has been useless.
Thanks for elaborating. Do you think there is a reason for this besides „everyone want to make money fast“?
Conflict of interest is the best explanation. The goal of search engine companies is not to provide information as efficiently as possible but rather something else entirely.
A lack of competition is another factor as well with the monopolization of Google, Microsoft, etc. There may exist better search engines, but the average joe, and even some of us, have trouble finding them. The quality search engines don't get a chance to expand and or are bought out like with Altavista (Regarded as the best search engines from the golden age). For example, crowdview.ai is the best search engine (outside of kagi from what I've heard) but I'm unsure if they will be able to stay afloat for a long enough time to get a chance to expand and take shots at Google.
Makes sense, thank you. I think the general business climate is not conducive to fair and good companies.
The hierarchical order of things does not allow for the expert to rise to power but for the most ruthless. The biggest companies are just the most ruthless.
I don't think it's better, I think they serve different functions . I use both Kagi and Chat Gpt a lot for different things.
I heard that Yandex is actually good.
Isn’t Yandex Russian?
So?
I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.
Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There's no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there's a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.
I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn't need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.
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The best search I found is by asking questions to real people in forums such as this one. It's way slower than getting an immediate answer for a question, but the signal to noise ratio is higher.
This is the reason why I think Google is prioritizing reddit so much in recent years, because reddit became one of the only places where you can get real people (well, relatively speaking more than most other parts of the Internet) answering all kind of questions.
None: SEO is fucking everyone, and it's not something that search engines can control. If a search engine gets popular, websites will optimize for it.
And its always the websites that optimize the most that you're least likely to actually want
I personally use https://startpage.com, although I'm definitely gonna try out some of the ones recommended on this post!
I find my self-hosted searxng pretty okay compared to others. It aggregates most of the time everything I need without the AI, bots generate crap, unecessary noise... Sometimes there are some little search bugs, but It's foss and free of charge without beeing bombarded with ads, SEO and other braindumping crap !
oooh, wiby got a .org? nice.
I don't know about self-hosted search yet, but I think that's one place where federation might actually be a feature and not overhead.
Wiby is great! I love using it to discover sites. It's very similar to spirit of search engines from the early internet. Though it's not a general search engine it has its specialized uses so I thought I'd mention it
But Yandex sucks for actual search... Except their reverse image search which is really good, altho they nerfed it recently.
DDG, SearXNG, and occasionally Phind. DDG is my default search engine now.
I don’t know if there’s a “best” amongst these. They each do a job, but they turn up different results. “Best” is the one that lets me avoid Google or Bing. Sometimes I’m forced back to Google, but that’s getting rarer.
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