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> Google will return irrelevant results from today rather than relevant results from 10 years ago. Tip: leave Google behind for now. That site has the last fe

> Google will return irrelevant results from today rather than relevant results from 10 years ago. Tip: leave Google behind for now. That site has the last few years been very useful but only in the same way as my very cheap electrical saw: because I didn't have access to anything better. For someone who has tried good tools like Festo, Milwaukee, Hitachi or old Google it is just a painful reminder of the past and how good life used to be. It works but hasn't sparked joy for close to a decade. After kagi and marginalia came into my life my life has improved significantly. Note: I'm not saying Googlers are evil or dumb now but I will point out that engineers there have incentives stacked against them.

endisneigh 5y ago
What’s better than Google?
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Kagi for serious stuff (work, health). I've no idea how since they build mostly on Google and Bing but something they do makes an enormous difference. Marginalia for fun stuff.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Kagi seems to use both Google and bing results and will cost a minimum of $10 a month. Seems like the worst of all worlds to me. It’s a good option I suppose for those who want to pay.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google but manages to get good results! I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        I don’t see what’s magical about taking results from other sites lol. What happens if bing and Google block them? I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.
        jsnell 5y ago
        They are paying for API access, not scraping results. Why would they be blocked?
        endisneigh 5y ago
        Where did you see that they’re paying for API access? Their FAQ says that they’re making anonymized requests but don’t go into more details than that. That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them? In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors. Happy to be proven wrong.
        jsnell 5y ago
        If they were just illegitly scraping results, they could not provide any kind of consistency in quality as they would be getting blocked on and off. And the small search engines like DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc have been making these kinds of deals for more than a decade and with more users than Kagi is likely to ever have without having their contracts terminated due to "too much traction".
        eitland 5y ago
        Late but I have texted a number of times with the Kagi team and they do pay for API access.
      - CountDrewku 5y ago
        >That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.
- tleb_ 5y ago
  https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    I just tried "python convert datetime to unix timestamp" on marginalia and it came out with nothing. Kagi I signed up for the beta and I'm on a waitlist. Still nothing better that Google for me.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Yeah it's not quite the sort of query it's good at. It's more geared toward discovery than answering questions. You can answer that particular question if you tune the query a bit though. https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+unix&profile=yolo&js=default https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+un... Has this as the first result, though: http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-conversions http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-con...
      - 3pt14159 5y ago
        You're right. It works better when I think "hard keyword search" than what I'm used to with DDG and Google. I tried "python super classmethod" and got here: https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3135/ https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3135/ which perfectly answered my question.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        Isn't it beautiful that something so amazing can run on a standard tower PC in a living room in Sweden? Holding up against a HN hug of death last month, providing an absolutely refreshing search experience!
    - shrikant 5y ago
      I got access to the Kagi beta a week or so back, and have been daily-driving it as my default search engine ever since. I've only ever "fallen back" to Google for a small handful of searches since then, and only out of curiosity for what it might look like in comparison to the Kagi results. Although it's only been a small amount of time, I'm sticking with Kagi for now because the search results are at least on par with Google's, and significantly less encumbered by Google's SERP dark patterns.
- 0xedd 5y ago
  Define better first. If by better you mean supporting a competitive market that doesn't strengthen the monopoly Google has on search and their results which, as years go by, are augmented for their benefit but not yours, then anything is better than Google. If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. That being said, when it comes to tech, with most answers found in open git issues or stackoverflow, i find brave search sufficient. So much so that i haven't used any of Google's services in over a year. The real question is, what are you willing to compromise? There's an in-between for the two extremes above and the choice is subjective. An exciting alternative is https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ I'll happily pay money for a privacy oriented search engine as i do for email, cloud storage and NextCloud. We shouldn't expect things to be given to us for free. I work, they work, we can do a fair trade with some iou derivatives.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    > neeva A website that requires me to sign up to see what their premium account may cost ... this sounds pretty scammy to me.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Also not available in my region. Straight from the playbook of big film ;-)
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    I was excited for Neeva at first. But then I saw the premium includes some kind of NFT trash attached to it. I'll take my money elsewhere. I signed up for the Kagi beta and am hoping it will be better.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. Hasn't been true since at least December. Kagi is better now by almost an order of magnitude. Of course my Google is not your Google. Still I have experimentdd so much with Google over so many years, logged in, logged out, from multiple addresses that I am confident in saying that it hasn't been itself for a decade and finally now we have a better alternative.
dijonman2 5y ago
It’s very clear Google has censorship and biases. If you search for some subjects you will get vague unrelated results, but legitimate results from say Bing. An example of this is anything related to the sex industry. I find this with coronavirus as well.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  All search engines have some form of implicit bias. An unbiased search engine would be beyond useless at actually finding anything but extremely well specified queries. The trick is to tune the bias to favor results that are interesting and relevant. This is also why having just one big search engine is a bad idea.
  - otherotherchris 5y ago
    Not bias, deliberate disappearance of specific categories of ideas. Independent blogs and forums not owned by large silicon valley companies have disappeared, for example. So have all discussions of current events, except for "mainstream" news publications. Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.
    - wadadadad 5y ago
      Can you give examples of search queries, and blogs and forums that you would expect to show up from those queries?
      - z80x86 5y ago
        Here’s an example on Google search: ‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    At the very least though, I would expect my search engine to rank results higher, if they contained the words I was looking for, without having to wrap in +"..." every single word. This seems to be something, that few search engines are capable of. Is this very basic thing labeled as "advanced" now?
PinguTS 5y ago
Don't know what you want to tell us by comparing software tools with hardware tools. Quality hardware tools from the last century are still doing what they are designed for and in professional context even work bettern then most current tools as the old hardware were designed to last.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Point is last fall I had both - inferior power tools (because I couldn't afford good ones last I bought) - inferior search tools (because Google has broken itself) The similarities are that I was stuck with bad tooling and when you know how big the difference is it hurts. For people who never took advantage of how good Google used to be or who have never used good tools it probably wouldn't hurt as much.

endisneigh 5y ago

What’s better than Google?

skinkestek 5y ago
Kagi for serious stuff (work, health). I've no idea how since they build mostly on Google and Bing but something they do makes an enormous difference. Marginalia for fun stuff.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Kagi seems to use both Google and bing results and will cost a minimum of $10 a month. Seems like the worst of all worlds to me. It’s a good option I suppose for those who want to pay.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google but manages to get good results! I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      I don’t see what’s magical about taking results from other sites lol. What happens if bing and Google block them? I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.
      - jsnell 5y ago
        They are paying for API access, not scraping results. Why would they be blocked?
        endisneigh 5y ago
        Where did you see that they’re paying for API access? Their FAQ says that they’re making anonymized requests but don’t go into more details than that. That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them? In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors. Happy to be proven wrong.
        jsnell 5y ago
        If they were just illegitly scraping results, they could not provide any kind of consistency in quality as they would be getting blocked on and off. And the small search engines like DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc have been making these kinds of deals for more than a decade and with more users than Kagi is likely to ever have without having their contracts terminated due to "too much traction".
        eitland 5y ago
        Late but I have texted a number of times with the Kagi team and they do pay for API access.
    - CountDrewku 5y ago
      >That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.
tleb_ 5y ago
https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I just tried "python convert datetime to unix timestamp" on marginalia and it came out with nothing. Kagi I signed up for the beta and I'm on a waitlist. Still nothing better that Google for me.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Yeah it's not quite the sort of query it's good at. It's more geared toward discovery than answering questions. You can answer that particular question if you tune the query a bit though. https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+unix&profile=yolo&js=default https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+un... Has this as the first result, though: http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-conversions http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-con...
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      You're right. It works better when I think "hard keyword search" than what I'm used to with DDG and Google. I tried "python super classmethod" and got here: https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3135/ https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3135/ which perfectly answered my question.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Isn't it beautiful that something so amazing can run on a standard tower PC in a living room in Sweden? Holding up against a HN hug of death last month, providing an absolutely refreshing search experience!
  - shrikant 5y ago
    I got access to the Kagi beta a week or so back, and have been daily-driving it as my default search engine ever since. I've only ever "fallen back" to Google for a small handful of searches since then, and only out of curiosity for what it might look like in comparison to the Kagi results. Although it's only been a small amount of time, I'm sticking with Kagi for now because the search results are at least on par with Google's, and significantly less encumbered by Google's SERP dark patterns.
0xedd 5y ago
Define better first. If by better you mean supporting a competitive market that doesn't strengthen the monopoly Google has on search and their results which, as years go by, are augmented for their benefit but not yours, then anything is better than Google. If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. That being said, when it comes to tech, with most answers found in open git issues or stackoverflow, i find brave search sufficient. So much so that i haven't used any of Google's services in over a year. The real question is, what are you willing to compromise? There's an in-between for the two extremes above and the choice is subjective. An exciting alternative is https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ I'll happily pay money for a privacy oriented search engine as i do for email, cloud storage and NextCloud. We shouldn't expect things to be given to us for free. I work, they work, we can do a fair trade with some iou derivatives.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  > neeva A website that requires me to sign up to see what their premium account may cost ... this sounds pretty scammy to me.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Also not available in my region. Straight from the playbook of big film ;-)
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  I was excited for Neeva at first. But then I saw the premium includes some kind of NFT trash attached to it. I'll take my money elsewhere. I signed up for the Kagi beta and am hoping it will be better.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. Hasn't been true since at least December. Kagi is better now by almost an order of magnitude. Of course my Google is not your Google. Still I have experimentdd so much with Google over so many years, logged in, logged out, from multiple addresses that I am confident in saying that it hasn't been itself for a decade and finally now we have a better alternative.

dijonman2 5y ago

It’s very clear Google has censorship and biases. If you search for some subjects you will get vague unrelated results, but legitimate results from say Bing. An example of this is anything related to the sex industry. I find this with coronavirus as well.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
All search engines have some form of implicit bias. An unbiased search engine would be beyond useless at actually finding anything but extremely well specified queries. The trick is to tune the bias to favor results that are interesting and relevant. This is also why having just one big search engine is a bad idea.
- otherotherchris 5y ago
  Not bias, deliberate disappearance of specific categories of ideas. Independent blogs and forums not owned by large silicon valley companies have disappeared, for example. So have all discussions of current events, except for "mainstream" news publications. Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.
  - wadadadad 5y ago
    Can you give examples of search queries, and blogs and forums that you would expect to show up from those queries?
    - z80x86 5y ago
      Here’s an example on Google search: ‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  At the very least though, I would expect my search engine to rank results higher, if they contained the words I was looking for, without having to wrap in +"..." every single word. This seems to be something, that few search engines are capable of. Is this very basic thing labeled as "advanced" now?

PinguTS 5y ago

Don't know what you want to tell us by comparing software tools with hardware tools. Quality hardware tools from the last century are still doing what they are designed for and in professional context even work bettern then most current tools as the old hardware were designed to last.

skinkestek 5y ago
Point is last fall I had both - inferior power tools (because I couldn't afford good ones last I bought) - inferior search tools (because Google has broken itself) The similarities are that I was stuck with bad tooling and when you know how big the difference is it hurts. For people who never took advantage of how good Google used to be or who have never used good tools it probably wouldn't hurt as much.