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I'm in the opposite camp. One thing Kagi did for me was to remove that mental barrier you're talking about — I'm now okay with paying for a search engine if it

I'm in the opposite camp. One thing Kagi did for me was to remove that mental barrier you're talking about — I'm now okay with paying for a search engine if it keeps me from being the product. My problem is that lately Kagi has felt a bit like Google in that no matter what I'm searching for, retailers and low-quality blogspam seems to be at the top of the results. At this point, if there was another paid search engine, I'd probably jump over to that one.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Fortunately, at least some of those cases are solvable on Kagi using the domain-level ranking overrides - so if the blogspam is coming from the same set of domains, just set their ranking override to "Lower" or "Block", and/or set the legitimate results (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow) to "Raise" or "Pin". The thing I don't understand is... how come this is even a selling point? This is an obvious feature that was loudly demanded by people since time immemorial. It's something you realize you want five minutes into using your first search engine. Yet for some reason, neither Google nor Bing nor DDG nor literally anyone else I know of has ever implemented it. It took until ~2020 for Kagi to do it, and for me it's ~40% of reason I'm a paying user (the other ~40% is because they implemented a feature I proposed on their feedback board: the ability to rewrite result URLs via regular expressions - something I wanted to avoid having to use an extension to turn "reddit.com" results into "old.reddit.com" automatically).
- karaterobot 4y ago
  > how come this is even a selling point? There is an extension I used to use which did it for Google, though it's been long enough that I don't remember what it's called. I think that it is an okay workaround, but if I need to trim out this kind of stuff, I consider it a problem with the underlying system. It would be nice to be able to import or subscribe to someone else's list of domain-level overrides. But at a certain level, if you're subscribing to Kagi, you're probably looking to avoid that stuff by default, and you should just not have to deal with it in the first place.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Since before Kagi existed I use a localhost-bound forward proxy to turn reddit.com into old.reddit.com and a variety of other tasks. I do not use popular browsers much for recreational browsing which is probably why this works so well for me.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Right, there was always some way to do it. I wanted to have this in the search engine, and I'm happy Kagi implemented it, because 1) I feel this is where this functionality logically belong, and 2) it's automatically available at every machine I use, including mobile devices, without requiring any extra work. 2) is what makes browser extension route a no-go to me: too much hassle in getting an "unlocked" Firefox on Android.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Fortunately, at least some of those cases are solvable on Kagi using the domain-level ranking overrides - so if the blogspam is coming from the same set of domains, just set their ranking override to "Lower" or "Block", and/or set the legitimate results (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow) to "Raise" or "Pin". The thing I don't understand is... how come this is even a selling point? This is an obvious feature that was loudly demanded by people since time immemorial. It's something you realize you want five minutes into using your first search engine. Yet for some reason, neither Google nor Bing nor DDG nor literally anyone else I know of has ever implemented it. It took until ~2020 for Kagi to do it, and for me it's ~40% of reason I'm a paying user (the other ~40% is because they implemented a feature I proposed on their feedback board: the ability to rewrite result URLs via regular expressions - something I wanted to avoid having to use an extension to turn "reddit.com" results into "old.reddit.com" automatically).

karaterobot 4y ago
> how come this is even a selling point? There is an extension I used to use which did it for Google, though it's been long enough that I don't remember what it's called. I think that it is an okay workaround, but if I need to trim out this kind of stuff, I consider it a problem with the underlying system. It would be nice to be able to import or subscribe to someone else's list of domain-level overrides. But at a certain level, if you're subscribing to Kagi, you're probably looking to avoid that stuff by default, and you should just not have to deal with it in the first place.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Since before Kagi existed I use a localhost-bound forward proxy to turn reddit.com into old.reddit.com and a variety of other tasks. I do not use popular browsers much for recreational browsing which is probably why this works so well for me.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Right, there was always some way to do it. I wanted to have this in the search engine, and I'm happy Kagi implemented it, because 1) I feel this is where this functionality logically belong, and 2) it's automatically available at every machine I use, including mobile devices, without requiring any extra work. 2) is what makes browser extension route a no-go to me: too much hassle in getting an "unlocked" Firefox on Android.