Technology

Downvote me into oblivion but Kagi ain't shit. It's a glorified Google frontend. The author is right that the web is filled with AI generated articles and fake reviews and lists but Kagi is not immune to this enshittification.

I even tried the same query the author was bitching about. Here is Kagi's first two links for top 10 air purifiers. Notice how the first result is a BS website called top10.com and the second one is one of the "fake review" websites .

And here is Google's. First result is Wirecutter, and this might be subjective but I trust Wirecutter reviews on most things.

Rest of the Google results are exactly what the author was mentioning. But Kagi was no different.

So $10/month to get the same shit? No thank you. I agree that Google turned to shit compared to what it was but it is still the best search engine out there. Now if the article was about privacy concerns then they would have a point. Which is what Kagi is all about anyway. So let's stop the fucking act.

I'm still steering clear from Kagi after how they handled criticism after they started including Brave's index

One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.

If kagi is just an aggregate of other search engines why not just use a searx instance instead? Its open source and customizable.

I started using Kagi a few months before $10 became unlimited queries.

When I first switched I'd still, occasionally, swap back to google using bangs because I had to unlearn all the hacks I had to make Google turn up useful things. Now I can't go back, Google is unsable without those hacks. Its barely usable with them.

Plus Kagi has a "fediverse forum" lens that lets me search Lemmy much more effectively than Lemmy's search.

Okay, but it doesn't know where I am. When I type 'dunkin', Google doesn't just know I want hours for a dunkin donuts, it knows which two or three stores I'm probably looking at hours for and it does it without me having to specify.

If I'm looking stuff up on my phone or just want a quick answer, I actually do want the context of all that data on me. I like that when I type the word 'glamour' it knows I'm probably thinking of the bard subclass, and that when I type 'Conan' it knows I probably mean Exiles, not O'Brien. I mean like, I know it doesn't know these things, but it fills in that gap much faster.

I do like the way their search is layed out for doing something more complex, though. It really is a better designed search engine, but I feel like a search engine is the one place I want data collection of some kind, literally because it benefits me.

10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.

I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn't quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it's just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn't enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.

Maybe I'll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.

Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3

Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.

How is it that Cory Doctorow hadn't hear of Kagi until March of 2024? It's been widely discussed in tech spaces for quite a while now!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

No, I'm not having that! That's rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this "weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista" but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.

Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.

I use Kagi, stract, and a self-hosted searx-ng instance. Kagi is so well polished that it's what I use most of the time, but I keep an eye on the other two and continually ask myself if I'm ready to drop Kagi to get away from financially supporting Google and Microsoft.

I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive, contrary to what most users seem to feel. I don’t know. When ddg and Google fail me, I will try Kagi and I think maybe only once or twice has it actually made finding what I’m looking for any easier.

I will mention though, you can do a lot of personalization on the results unlike other engines. So maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.

No matter how many times people claim "X search engine" is universally better than Google, it has just never been true in my experience. And this is coming from someone who puts up with the frustrations of other search engines to avoid Google's data harvesting. Like Google's search engine can have rapidly deteriorated and still be miles better than the competition. Both can be true, but people always seem to act like the SEO spam has made it unusable and that is just not reality at all.

Requires a log-in. That means that there's absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn't include a Monero option), you can't make that work.

Pass.

My issue with Kagi is that it relies on aggregate results from other search engine indices

I've wanted to test out Kagi for some time, but I don't really do a hell of a lot of deep-dive searches anymore. I mostly passively read a combination of RSS, stuff I see on Lemmy, and videos that I still watch on the old site while not logged in. And some YouTube stuff.

When I do search for something, it's typically something that I hear about in a podcast and I wanna know more and in the moment I just use my default (goog). I'm not thinking of Kagi cause I'm listening to something already and thinking about that.