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Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

986 points by tech234a 3y ago

dfee 3y ago
Feature request: native iOS safari support. I have a redirect set up, an extension. But the ability to change it for real (ie without redirect) would be huge. (I believe this feature request is targeted at Apple!)
ignoramous 3y ago
Most documentation sites along with the stackoverflow sites and the venerable wikipedia are among the top most boosted. Only if someone brought search to books, wouldn't that be wonderful?
buggy6257 3y ago
Looks like the summary here is “f** Pinterest”. Soooo many stack overflow scraper sites too god I hate those.
- TillE 3y ago
  It's incredibly annoying to be searching for a thing, and get a result from Pinterest that's just a bookmark of that thing. As far as I know, this is more a failure of Google's inexplicable algorithm than Pinterest doing anything specifically bad.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    Pinterest does a whole lot specifically bad - they tend to trap users with login prompts on entry and make it impossible to see the full image. If I'm searching for a meme to DM to someone or a photograph of a landmark Pintrest is something I avoid like the plague. It's essentially a black-hole for images - people pin them and then they are lost forever.
  - WillPostForFood 3y ago
    I like Pinterest, it is a useful site. But it is basically a (image) search engine itself, so it's pages shouldn't be in Google results. Just like you don't want Bing or DDG image search results showing up in Google searches.
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    Pinterest could simply tell robots to 'noindex,follow' the page to help search engines understand there is no utility in it appearing for a search. But agree, perhaps it shouldn't rank first anyway. Guess it depends on whether it's UGC entirely or whether the CMS could note these kind of pages. Again, shouldn't be hard if it's just a simple link as the main content of the page.
    - data-ottawa 3y ago
      Why would Pinterest do that? They’ve conquered image search SEO, and I expect most sites on the internet want to play as greedily as possible. Google are the ones who should be looking at the situation and asking if this is the state they really want.
      - ricardo81 3y ago
        There's precedent that would make it in Pinterest's best interest. IIRC Google's "Panda" algo update basically wiped out search referrals to certain content farms overnight, can't recall specific examples but there were some at the time. They were labelled as low quality and subsequently faded into obscurity. //added EHow is an example of a site that was flagged
- Arnavion 3y ago
  For the SO clones: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
jasonpeacock 3y ago
I love that they also provide, in the same page, the option to update your own configuration. Easy pre-emptive blocking/boosting :)
- deepspace 3y ago
  Yes, that forward-thinking UI design immediately stuck me, and reminded me again why I am a loyal customer.
12907835202 3y ago
I've never quite understood the w3schools hate. It can be quite useful. My most used page is this one when I need to jog my memory: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php It's much better than this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selectors https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto... Or any of the other results on the first page
- dixie_land 3y ago
  my 2 cents: w3schools tend to oversimplify the concepts to the point of technical inaccuracy. and the tone of the articles read more like tutorials instead of reference manuals.
  - ghayes 3y ago
    Yeah MDN is the de-facto reference guide for web frameworks. W3schools feels like beginner tutorials. For me, I want “what happens if I pass undefined as the second arg to this function” and w3schools doesn’t answer that. It’s fine as a site, I suppose, it was insane when it outranked more complete websites. Off topic I see this more and more with Stackoverflow where semi-related questions outrank official docs.
- CobaltFire 3y ago
  w3 schools is on several of those lists, including "raise", so your opinion is shared by others.
- andirk 3y ago
  It often outranks MDN official docs which these days are very readable, in-depth, with examples, and a simple UI and the only time I click to inappropriately named W3Schools is by accident because it's the top result and I'm expecting MDN and then I click back and that's why I don't like it.
  - thayne 3y ago
    I have similar feelings about baeldung.com. It isn't that the content is inherently bad, but it is super annoying that when I search for a java class the first few results are from baeldung instead of the official javadocs.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
I wonder why brietbart and Washington post are filtered so much?
- aemreunal 3y ago
  I'm sure you can guess why Breitbart is blocked so much...
- axblount 3y ago
  For the Washington Post, it's probably because of the paywall.
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
  It has the "wrong" bias for most of the HN crowd: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg To be fair, it is biased, but then so are most outlets one way or the other: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
  - int_19h 3y ago
    The problem with Breitbart isn't just bias, it's the amount of outright blatantly false claims. (This isn't to say that other major media outlets don't have problems with accuracy. But the magnitude is very different.)
    - Vicinity9635 3y ago
      [dead]
    - zo1 3y ago
      But like what? Genuinely curious for an example of "blatantly false claims"? As I'm on the "right" side of the spectrum, and these kinds of comments come from a criticism of "misinformation". Also, as an aside. What is a "false claim"? If it's a claim, they're asking you to believe it, which means they need to motivate it and provide details to back it up. Seems precisely where all the media generally is (including CNN/BBC/etc), pandering to peoples' bias without saying anything factually incorrect.
lolinder 3y ago
This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's what makes their results so much better than Google's: where Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains as you go!
- scarmig 3y ago
  Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.
  - davidmurdoch 3y ago
    They did. And w3schools was in my list back then.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      And can't forget about expertsexchange.
      - delfinom 3y ago
        Even 2 decades later, you can never unsee it
        p1mrx 3y ago
        It's only obvious when you format it that way. They primarily used "Experts Exchange" and http://www.experts-exchange.com/ http://www.experts-exchange.com/
        mmh0000 3y ago
        Yeah, now they use that, but back in the good old days of the internet, they did not.
mostlysimilar 3y ago
Simple, common sense features for any search engine that actually wants to help you find what you’re looking for. Such a stark difference from what Google offers.
MrVandemar 3y ago
The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals. I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, and if so, how they would be able to actually reach them.
- freediver 3y ago
  > It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals. I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here). > I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, Yes, we are :) > if so, how they would be able to actually reach them Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my family members on board a paid search product. I might add that "Kagi for Kids" is the first true attempt at having a search engine made specifically for kids, with a host of parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason. We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but are tech-savvy) becoming members. This may be followed by non-tech savvy users in the future. I do see the first signs of the age of ad-supported, "free" search, coming to an end [2]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan [2] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
  - jonReadingNews 3y ago
    I was hesitant to configure my partner’s devices (family plan) to set as default engine but eventually convinced them and they haven’t even brought it up once since. I assume no news is good news! I would be less hesitant to recommend to other non-tech friends/family if it were easier to configure as default on Safari. Heck, I’d even entertain gifting subscriptions. The quality of results for me has been incredibly reliable. Enjoyable, even. And, I didn’t even take the time to start configuring these kinds of rules. Love this. Great product. Wishing long, lasting success.
    - freediver 3y ago
      Thank you very much for the kind words. Unfortunately we can not influence the choices that Safari makes, but we did pull an effort to build an entire browser [1] to replace it because of that :) [1] https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
jeffbee 3y ago
So, kagi has a couple hundred actives?
- kccqzy 3y ago
  While this comment has a snarky tone, I agree with it. We need active user numbers to determine how statistically relevant this might be.
  - epgui 3y ago
    To me, the results seem interesting regardless of whether they are representative of the population or not. There are questions you can answer without relying on that assumption. For example: "Can you imagine what your search results would look like if you had access to this tool?"
- freediver 3y ago
  Mulitply that by the factor of ~50. Not all users use the feature or if they do, block same domains (our user base is very international). We plan to launch full stats (including number of members and queries/day) next week. "Domains" is meant to be just one of the tabs on this page that got pushed earlier to prod.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
munk-a 3y ago
I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app. It is a true shame that so much useful information gets trapped within their ecosystem.
- lolinder 3y ago
  A lot of people actually disagree with you—Reddit is number four on the Raise list and on the Pin list, and every few months there's a thread on HN talking about how the only way to get useful information out of Google is to add "reddit" at the end of the search.
  - fyrn_ 3y ago
    I think they were talking about the raise list, not the block or lower list
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Clearly not, they think it's clunky and desktop and too annoying on mobile, (I agree but put up with it often) they're not saying they want more of it.
    - munk-a 3y ago
      I was indeed talking about the lower list - simply because of the information presentation is so poor. The information itself is usually quite high quality.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. It's on two lists. > Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app. I have the old-reddit extension on every device I use. It's my 3rd most essential extension, after uBlock Origin and Kill Sticky.
sockaddr 3y ago
Ok wow, seeing these lists might have just made a customer out of me. I’ve been vaguely aware of Kagi and know the general premise but this made it real.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Similarly, I had no idea about this feature, but I now know I want it... I think I just need it to be cheaper, maybe $5 unlimited (or enough for me, which I think is certainly higher than 300, probably higher than 1000, at least without behaviour change) and I'd be in I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling & development/SRE that's expensive - so should (or at least could) come down as more people adopt it, driving further adoption from relative cheapskates like me? It seems great, but I use DDG 'bangs' (which are also a Kagi feature) loads of times a day, rather than going directly to websites - especially !w & !wikt, !arch & !aur & !archpackages only slightly less - I'd blow through the monthly limit in no time on that alone. (Which also seems a bit unfair, they're just redirects, not using index, there's an argument they shouldn't be included? I suppose if you're so motivated you can work around by using Firefox's feature for it instead of search engine anyway.) Edit: oh wait, I just found in the FAQ that 'bangs' actually aren't counted as searches. I may have to trial it, see how many searches I actually use how quickly. (And how reasonable the 1.5ç overage seems in my usage.)
  - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
    I have gone over the limit (on the grandfathered 1500 search plan), and paid the extra $1-2 for it. It's fine. The cost of search has made me think about what terms I use now and what I search for. Google made me lazy, I now use my phones world clock app rather that searching for "current time X", and word my searches more thoughtfully.
  - elxx 3y ago
    Kagi doesn't charge you for bangs. (Disclaimer: Happy paying Kagi user here, just FYI)
    - 3y ago
amelius 3y ago
Google: we need to have your personal information because that allows us to provide you with a better experience. Me: Ok, please block these domains: "pinterest.com, w3schools.com, ..." Google: Sorry, can't do that!
- zeusk 3y ago
  Pinterest is absolutely the worst; most of the time the linked page doesn't even have what I was looking for.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    It has blown my mind for years the extent to which the Google Image Search team let Pinterest completely undermine the usefulness of their product, and they just kept on giving pinterest the top search result spots. It's honestly more useless than the pages with a list of 1000 phone numbers that you get when you try to search for who an unknown number is. Does anyone even work on Google Image Search? Is it run by a bunch of undercover Pinterest employees who infiltrated the team and pushed out the Googlers?
    - jart 3y ago
      I'm honestly surprised by all the Pinterest hate because I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it.
      - sp0rk 3y ago
        >I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it. You just don't do it according to whom? I would consider viewing the fullsize image to be core functionality for an image search, and it used to work just fine on GIS up until a few years ago.
      - otikik 3y ago
        > It's like drinking from the dead I get that this must be something bad, but what does it mean, exactly? Drinking blood from a corpse?
Havoc 3y ago
Interesting yes, but feels more like a measure of their very niche userbase than a reflection of the websites value. The average human out there is not boosting developer.mozilla.org Still...I'm thankful that they publish the stats. It's a useful mental reference point if nothing else
mhrmsn 3y ago
Definitely the best feature of Kagi! I sometimes wish there was some way to slightly adjust how this works. As I also have Wikipedia on raised priority, I'd still like some official product/company/etc. website to rank higher than the Wikipedia article of it. Also, a custom priority ranking among the raised importance domains would be nice.
Modified3019 3y ago
ublacklist works with many search engines. A little bit of very easy effort goes a LONG way to cleaning up your results. https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist And here's two bonus things you need if you make use of youtube Sponsorblock. As it says on the tin, automatically skips sponsor sections. https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock Dearrow. An open source and crowdsourced tool replace youtubes stupid fucking clickbait title cards, and replaces many titles with better ones. You can contribute! https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow
- lukas099 3y ago
  Followed the Firefox link on DeArrow, and it leads to an "Oops! We can't find that page".
  - Given_47 3y ago
    Worked for me: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
    - scode2 3y ago
      That is the listing for SponsorBlock, not DeArrow.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/122 https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/122
    - folmar 3y ago
      In short: it was temporarily removed due to XSS vulnerability and the fixed version is in review.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
syntaxing 3y ago
Can someone share some insight what “Pin” means? I get what block, lower, raise means but pin is a bit confusing to me
- freediver 3y ago
  Pin means that if a result from that domain would appear anywhere in 50 or so relevant results that Kagi usually surfaces on the first page, it would be 'pinned' to the top of results.
sa46 3y ago
Does “at least 20 users” imply the list of blocked domains is all blocked domains with at least 20 users? If so, I would have expected a much longer tail.
replwoacause 3y ago
I’ve been a customer for quite a while and never configured this feature. Shame on me. Thanks for bringing my attention to it.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
surprised not to see ehow, wikihow, etc
- freediver 3y ago
  Could be because they do not surface in the results much to begin with.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    I guess you're right. I haven't seen them in a while either. But for a while there they would be among the top results for all kinds of searches, and the content itself was always garbage. But I don't get pinterest very often lately either. Not never but not most of the time either.
mysterydip 3y ago
Surprised to not see fandom.com on there. Just copy/paste plus SEO of actual wikis plus so many ads you can't read the content.
- howenterprisey 3y ago
  Unfortunately, fandom has a decent amount of original content in addition to the copy/paste stuff, so you'd miss out on quite a bit if you block them.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    That's unfortunate, thanks for the info.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    The trick is to use https://breezewiki.com https://breezewiki.com instead. There's an extension that redirects Fandom links to it automatically.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      Kagi has another feature that can rewrite search results' URLs based on regexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html. I guess you could use that to make the redirect automatic?
abhayhegde 3y ago
Kudos! But would it be too divulging that other competitors can offer presets to block the mentioned sites?
loveparade 3y ago
I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year and didn't know about this feature! That's amazing, I can finally block all these spam sites completely.
version_five 3y ago
I found the right wing media blocks interesting. I wondered if that was in response to getting search spammed by them or some "principal". Because I don't think I've ever seen Fox News or Breitbart in search results anyway. Same comment for CNN and wapo that I see are also there. Maybe I'd dont search current events enough, they all seem like odd things to block to me.
- coolliquidcode 3y ago
  Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and nytimes. As well as Wapo and CNN. I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires that own the other media they think they are decent news sources. Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com. I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there.
  - internetter 3y ago
    > Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and nytimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies Really? > I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires that own the other media https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2017/aug/28/the-guardian-announces-the-launch-of-a-new-us-nonprofit-to-support-story-telling-and-independent-journalism https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2017/aug/28/the... And the NYT is publicly traded (The CEO has an estimated networth of only 10mil) Verge doesn't really do journalism that makes me worried about who owns it. > Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com. rtings does colour profiles of plenty of slightly less popular monitors that no one else does. It's been an invaluable resource for me. This comment is genuinely nonsensical. I'd think that it's obvious that rich owners tend to push a conservative economic spin to preserve their wealth. > I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there. Most people end up on goodreads from search to see the reviews people left for the book....
LAC-Tech 3y ago
I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions. const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com", "economist.com", "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com", "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com", "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com", "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com", "arstechnica.com", "independent.co.uk", "axios.com" ] Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a")) .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain))) .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement) .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling, elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]) .forEach(elem => elem.remove())
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  ...BBC? Ars Technica? ...KQED and VOA? You're blocking discussion of some of the most reliably factual reporting on the planet.
  - LAC-Tech 3y ago
    shrugs I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. If the resulting conversations suck, aren't relevant to me, and clog up the HN front page - in they go.
    - alex_lav 3y ago
      There's something uniquely social-media-y about a person posting a list of websites they don't enjoy the contents of or discussion around, and then posting that they've filtered them out in a way that only impacts them, and then that person getting questioned and challenged on their filtering.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      > I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. You were quite willing to promote the specific and lengthy list of disliked-sites to strangers. A sudden switch to fatigue and disinterest does not seem genuine to me.
karaterobot 3y ago
Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked. I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.
- deprecative 3y ago
  W3schools intentionally placed themselves as a representation of the W3C (similar to what Fedex does with its name) and sold, still does I'm sure, certificates under that misconception. These were worthless. This is in addition to the other complaints.
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  I agree, I love w3schools. They provide real examples for real-world uses right on the page.
- zacmps 3y ago
  It was offensively bad and incorrect, and while I've heard it has improved since I think a lot of people just remember how it used to be and don't use it.
- navanchauhan 3y ago
  I never knew W3Schools had such a bad reputation. I learned HTML from that site almost a decade ago and found it pretty helpful. I loved their Try it Online!
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Historically, at least, it had a lot of examples that technically did what they were supposed to do, but in ways that you really, really, really shouldn't be doing them.
  - 0x073 3y ago
    I knew many developers that used w3schools that thought it was official source because w3c, I know it's not completely the sites fault but they named the domain. That's one reason I dislike, additional the quality of w3schools is compared with mdn for beginners that are not interested into the details.
abtinf 3y ago
The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari. It is infuriating and is the one thing that has caused me to seriously try other browsers on mobile. The problem is, they are all terrible in some small paper cutting ways (including Orion, though that has been rapidly improving).
- justintoon 3y ago
  I realize this is probably not the solution you want, but there is an official iOS Safari extension that will intercept all address bar searches and route them to Kagi. I don’t remember how much it costs, and it doesn’t seem to work super well with private browsing, but it’s better than nothing and works well for what it is. Ymmv https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id1607766153 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id16077...
  - abtinf 3y ago
    I should give it another try. I believe the last time I tried it, I was frustrated because of the private browsing login issue. Maybe one day (probably not) Apple will allow setting a simple URL for custom search engines. Orion needs a lot of polish, but I am hopeful they will get there.
    - justintoon 3y ago
      I took a closer look and the iOS extension supports entering a “session link” which allows the Kagi redirect to work in private windows. Entering it is a bit cumbersome—you have to first open a private window and then any random page so you can see the extension button in the address bar, at which point you can tap it and then the Kagi icon to get to the session link field—but it appears to stick after that and the redirect works as expected (although you do get a brief flash of Google or whatever — they suggest changing it to DDG which looks a bit smoother). Agree that it feels hacky, but sometimes you just have to take what you can get.
    - deviantintegral 3y ago
nfriedly 3y ago
I find it amusing that reddit managed to make all of the lists! I personally still find it to be a useful source of information - I wonder if all of their recent drama with third-party apps has led to it earning a place on the negative lists, or if it was there all along.
- malikNF 3y ago
  I an part of the former. I do miss it. Glad to see there’s more people who are doing this. You shouldn’t be allowed to treat your community this way and get away with it.
- developer93 3y ago
  I think it might be more understandable if you could block individual subreddits, I found experience to vary greatly depending on your topic since the moderation isn't uniform.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abtinf 3y ago
Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive. That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month, then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the limits. I will simply say that I cannot imagine going back to being a “user” of a “search provider” over being a paying Kagi customer. It is the single most critical service I worry about losing. If they octupled the price tomorrow, I would murmur an expletive under my breath, then thank god that they didn’t choose to go down the path of fucking me over by materially changing the business model to adtech, and continue paying them. I am actually not sure what at what price point I’d drop the service. I’d probably start looking at canceling less used subscriptions first. Another shitty Gal Gadot Netflix movie has negative marginal value for me. If you haven’t tried it for an extended time and used its core features, then you don’t get it and no one can explain it to you. “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.” Edit to add: this is search we are talking about. It is literally your entry point to the world’s entire body of knowledge and ultimately affects your decisions and actions both daily and over the long term. And nearly everyone is perfectly happy to let it be run by companies that make more money when they lead you astray to click bait, hot take, content farm, and AI generated sites. Garbage in, garbage out, both in software and the knowledge you depend on to live a thriving life.
- berdon 3y ago
  Yep. As a developer my life is infinitely better because of Kagi. The product is wonderful, the team is wonderful and responsive - it’s everything I want from a company I pay money to. I sound like a shill but I’m not. I’ve just been a happy user since their private beta and have had genuine, kind, and personable email back and forth with Vladimir.
- metadaemon 3y ago
  I feel the same way. I've been a very happy customer without any desire for going back to other search providers.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > That it should be unlimited. Isn't that what their $25/mo plan gives you?
junon 3y ago
Hehehe, one of the top results for the example search topic is a repo of mine. This explains a lot. Maybe it's a sign to try Kagi after all.
arealaccount 3y ago
Tried out a few searches that I’ve recently struggled with on both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially if I can get a license through work. I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.
- freediver 3y ago
  > I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers. SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.
  - internetter 3y ago
    Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Cool. I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For research I certainly search like a professional, but don't have the income stream to compensate.
    - ftaghn 3y ago
      > Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and their knowledge of it is why early google was good. https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-sergey-brin-larry-page-1998/ https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-... > Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998) > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side. > “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They know exactly what it is that they are doing.
qingcharles 3y ago
Half these sites are my guilty pleasures, pinterest.com, dailymail.co.uk, tiktok.com...
- input_sh 3y ago
  Is TikTok even search engine friendly? I don't remember ever ending up there by searching for something (that's not explicitly someone's TikTok account).
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Surprisingly very search engine friendly. It only uses the titles and tags, though, I think.
- coolliquidcode 3y ago
  pinterest has it's place. It's bad rep is because you have to be logged in to see anything.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    You definitely don't need to be logged in. I used it in other browser sessions sometimes and you just have to scroll down about half a page and click "Explore" and it works fine.
gcanyon 3y ago
I've been shouting for years how google should know by now, if there is a relevant wikipedia page, it should be at the top of the results -- not number 2 or 3, number 1. Every time. Likewise IMDB (not that I'm fond of the site, if there were an alternative I'd switch in a heartbeat) -- if I search for "bogart bacall" then the top six results should be IMDB and Wikipedia for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo. How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery. It has. Google knows exactly what it's doing. It's just that Google makes money from keeping you searching, not from giving you the right answer.
  - Tenemo 3y ago
    Let’s dispel with this fiction that Google doesn’t know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're trying to change the internet.
    - cyberlurker 3y ago
      Is this a Rubio quote?
      - sebzim4500 3y ago
        Yeah, it's so good he said it twice.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    Yeah, I said they hadn't figured it out, but generally I agree with you that they know, they're just willing to ignore me for $0.003
- DrRobinson 3y ago
  Trakt.tv is a good alternative to IMDb btw
sklargh 3y ago
The interplay between Mayo Clinic being a trusted source and WebMD being hard blocked is fascinating.
atrudeau 3y ago
Similar alternative for Google Search: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidh... Even the defaults match this Kagi top list.
- rosywoozlechan 3y ago
  This third party browser extension looks like it hides UI contents whereas with Kagi your preferences are used in what is actually returned from the search engine and in what order. I don't think these things are all that similar.
  - slaw 3y ago
    Kagi used Google behind. If results are the same, what is the difference for the end user?
    - jorams 3y ago
      Google is one of the sources for Kagi's results, but not the only one. The results are not the same.
jrflowers 3y ago
It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    Doxing isn't doxing if it's part of a documentary.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Not sure what you are implying but doxing has a specific meaning.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose. I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
        3y ago
isatty 3y ago
I don’t use Kagi but I really want the ability to pin Wikipedia to the top.
tmnvix 3y ago
Interesting that nytimes.com is on both the 'block' and 'raise' lists.
- ssd532 3y ago
  Good to see diversity
- duckmysick 3y ago
  Possibly because of their paywall.
malikNF 3y ago
One of the main reasons I don’t mind paying for kagi is my absolute hate for pinterest.
- slaw 3y ago
  What keywords give you pinterest in result set? I use mostly Bing and I don't recall ever to see pinterest in any search results.
eviks 3y ago
Are there shared lists you can subscribe to (and extend) instead of having to waste a lot of time implementing your own from scratch?
- ptrrrrrrppr 3y ago
  Isn't this page a shared list? As Kagi user I can click a button next to every domain here to apply given setting
  - eviks 3y ago
    no, thousands and thousands of clicks isn't what makes a list shared
rchaud 3y ago
Reminder that W3Schools is good now (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP) and has been good for several years. In the pre-Flexbox, pre-grid days, I used W3schools to build a framework-less mobile site as part of a JS bootcamp admissions test. The explanation on W3Schools about creating multiple floats with media queries was so clear, I stuck around.
emrah 3y ago
It's interesting to see some websites on both the block and raise/pin lists, such as reddit and nytimes
dotcoma 3y ago
People sure love Pinterest! ;)
GhostWhisperer 3y ago
this page is so galvanising – to see those domains on the top list of blocked domains pushed me to subscribe to kagi, nice hack marketing dep.
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago
  feedback: 1. make the homepage simpler, get rid of the dog and the moving clouds 2. this price won't fly on other geographies 3. don't make me 'add credits' to use the api, just accumulate some costs then bill me, once a week or even daily if that helps you sleep at night 4. you opted me into receiving product updates, don't do that, don't make me add you to my junk list, this was going so well, look what you're making me do, ohhhh
mbork_pl 3y ago
I might be tempted to use Kagi (especially for my family), but the thing I'm afraid of is the quality of search in non-English (specifically Polish) internet. Anybody knows how does that work?
- developer93 3y ago
  The first 100 searches are free, just need an email address that can be a throwaway to sign up, so you can check it for yourself with just a bit of time expended.
- ptrrrrrrppr 3y ago
  I started using Kagi specifically because of more accurate results in Polish comparing to other search engine. A teraz jestem płacącym użytkownikiem, już chyba z pół roku :)
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  It has a quick region switcher like DDG (a must-have for me), and the results are way better than DDG. Give it a try! I just did a Google vs Kagi vs DDG test on "grzyby marynowane" (pickled mushrooms, usually pickled champignons, a common snack on Polish family gatherings). Google: Starts with recipes, then there is Allegro ("Polish Amazon") where you can buy jars of them, then Google page ends (10 results/page). Kagi: starts the same, but there is more (20?) results/page. It continues with some podcast episode about pickled mushrooms on Soundcloud, a Wikipedia page, some more recipes in Polish and English and finally a Pinterest page (:rage:). DuckDuckGo: first page is just recipes. I decided to give it a bigger chance, so I checked out a second page. There you have pretty unrelated articles like "where to pick wild mushrooms" and an Allegro link in between. However, as happy Kagi user I still have to note that they are using Apple Maps for maps/POI search. As you well know, they are quite useless to us compared to Google Maps, so I keep using !gm bang to get redirected. Bangs work almost like DDG, the only difference is that they must be at beginning or end of your search (DDG lets you put it in between words too).
- smodo 3y ago
  It works well enough for me, can’t say I’ve really looked back since I signed up.
xlbuttplug2 3y ago
Either they've filtered out porn sites or they have a long way to go in terms of adoption.
- slaw 3y ago
  I think porn sites are already filtered by Google. Kagi doesn't have it's own search, it is just layer over Google search.
  - RGBCube 3y ago
    Not just Google, they use Bing and Yandex(?, might be something else) too, I think.
  - JopV 3y ago
    Kagi does have its own search index of niche sites, they even have an API for it. This is combined with Google results; they used to combine with Bing as well but stopped due to Microsoft charging too much money. Very different from DuckDuckGo and Startpage which are still just a Bing proxy and a Google proxy respectively.
    - slaw 3y ago
      You are correct. Kagi is more than a Google proxy. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wanderingmind 3y ago
Although boosting cant be done, blocking can be achieved using ublockorigin and custom filters. Here is an awesome spam filter list that removes spam and copycat domains from google and ddg searches[1] [1]https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
anoncow 3y ago
The top websites that people like are Wikipedia, Stack overflow and Mozilla Developers
warpspin 3y ago
Starting to try kagi now after this. I knew the diverse browser add-ons for blocking results, but being able to lower instead of all-out block something seems nice. Just wished they made it easier to block/lower all the international versions of pinterest though, lol.
enduku 3y ago
Kagi search is brilliant in this aspect. There used to be a similar service [0] not too long ago that blocked many spam sites from the search results. [0] http://millionshort.com/ http://millionshort.com/
account-5 3y ago
As a beginner w3schools.com is likely my first port of call for something that it covers. Easy to navigate and use, and covers a wide range of things. I'm aware of its history but it's never steered me wrong. MDN I only use if I can't find the information elsewhere. I need ELI5, MDN is harder to understand when trying to grasp a subject, at least for me.
tschumacher 3y ago
Anecdotally when searching for Python standard lib docs on Google, python.org is never at the top. I think this is because they have a single page titled "Built-in types" instead of dedicated pages titled e.g. "str.split". Above python.org I get links to w3schools.com, programiz.com, python-reference.readthedocs.io (some inofficial project abandoned 2015), geeksforgeeks.org, codegree.de and freecodecamp.org.
- aldanor 3y ago
  If on macos, highly recommending Dash for all your programming docs needs for any language. Real gem and a time saver.
charlieyu1 3y ago
Surprised to see kknews.cc here, probably the biggest content farm in Chinese by far
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
iamflimflam1 3y ago
You have to feel for anyone who works at pinterest - they just be getting that “are we the bad guys vibe” https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY
kouru225 3y ago
Why y’all blocking alternativeto.net?
moonshinefe 3y ago
I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall geeksforgeeks being ok a few years ago. But I've started avoiding it because it seems like there's multiple nag screens in a row whenever I make the mistake of clicking. Seems a lot of people agree. Is the issue here these sites aren't putting up the barriers to the crawlers, and are getting high ranking in all the results despite all the friction to normal users? It'd be nice if there were a way for a search engines to tell if paywalls / nag screens are a thing on sites and to demote them from the results accordingly. It seems like it wouldn't be hard for them to tell, but maybe they don't want to de-rank sites with these patterns. But really, from the consumers' perspective, who wants these sites in the results? I'm all for subscribing to something if I use it repeatedly, but that doesn't describe 90% of the sites I visit and I don't have the money for 1000 subscriptions. Maybe they could just have a filter to filter for free sites only. I don't know what the solution is, but having blocked domains while nice is just a band-aid.
baxuz 3y ago
I expected to see snyk up there.
naillo 3y ago
This kinda illustrates how dead easy it would be for google to improve their search engine. There's no way they couldn't figure out a similar list as this and just re-rank things to down prioritize these sites.
- freediver 3y ago
  One should note that Google is already constantly improving their search engine for their customers. It is just that they are not the same as their users.
danpalmer 3y ago
This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me wonder whether this is just the marketing so far, or a more fundamental limitation on the market that will actually draw value from Kagi. Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?
- smallerfish 3y ago
  It does. They have a lean team, and I believe are bootstrapped.
- VHRanger 3y ago
  > Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher revenue per user compared to paying users.
- freediver 3y ago
  > Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? It depends on your definition of "works as business"? I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users. Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs. Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers. For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale. Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost. Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget. So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
mezobeli 3y ago
Great product from a great team! Pretty expensive for non-casual searching, I do a lots of searches in a day. Currently self-hosted SearchXNG does the trick but would love to start use Kagi for all. Would love if they manage to find ways to increase limits or reduce pricing. We can use uBlock for ads + ddg for results, but for masses and in general for healthier search engines I would be happy to use Kagi daily.
Tanjreeve 3y ago
Pinterest is really unsurprising. Unbelievable Google doesn't spike them it's utterly useless as a search result.
kimi 3y ago
Serious hint to any Google engineers reading: just penalize those exact freaking sites, and you are half-way there in fixing your results issue. It's not AI-driven or anything, just a regexp will do.
user3939382 3y ago
I like Kagi but I’m willing to pay like 10-15$ for unlimited (actually unlimited) searches so I don’t have the emotional overhead of counting and worrying about how much I’m searching. I don’t like how they told people on older unlimited plans they’d be grandfathered in and then didn’t honor that.
teddyh 3y ago
I wonder if the Kagi users approved of the publishing of this data, taken from what I assume are their personal settings in Kagi.
- freediver 3y ago
  This, like many other Kagi features, came as a feature suggestion from the very Kagi users [1]. And the way the list is done is that it aggregates data anonymously and posts only domains that were acted upon by at least 20 users to preserve privacy. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/1098-a-page-for-a-list-of-sites-that-are-blockedpreferred-by-lots-of-users https://kagifeedback.org/d/1098-a-page-for-a-list-of-sites-t...
  - teddyh 3y ago
    I don’t think every single Kagi user asked for this feature, so I still wonder how those users who did not ask for the feature could approve of their private settings being used in this way.
madeofpalk 3y ago
I’m curious about the right-wing news sites appearing in the blocked list. I also want to actively avoid them, but they’ve never once appeared in google search results for me.
bermudi 3y ago
What surprised me the most was the fact that people have enough disposable income to pay for search to make this viable
- andrewmunsell 3y ago
  Search is one of the most critical pieces of technology for most people on the web. That, combined with the point another comment made that indicates the demographic of Kagi largely revolves around IT/SWE (who generally have more disposable income than other types of jobs), shows good reason why Kagi could survive long term
fosspowered 3y ago
One recommendation for Kagi is to also introduce region based pricing. I subscribed, but in my country, the base price is probably too much for most people (that said I doubt the mentality here would increase sales for you so it is not quite a no-brainer).
- kelvie 3y ago
  I think they're pretty transparent with their pricing, so I'm not entirely sure they can afford region-based pricing until their own costs go down.
- freediver 3y ago
  We get asked this a lot. The problem is that one search costs the same whether done from a desert in Africa or from San Francisco. And since we are not breakeven yet, there is nowhere to discount from. We mitigated some of the price anxiety by introducing the $5/mo plan, but we are still prioritizing sustainability over growth and will not let have a situation where we are on average losing money per customer (or otherwise eventually there will be no Kagi down the road).
BrotherBisquick 3y ago
How exactly does Kagi bill you for going over your monthly limit? Do they send you a bill at a later date, or are you meant to refill your balance before you can make more searches, or what? I assume they don't keep your credit card on file and charge you for each individual extra search.
- freediver 3y ago
  It will ask you if you want to upgrade your plan or to enable pay per use with customizable limits in place. More info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/billing.html#billing-settings-pay-per-use https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/billing.html#billing-set...
barrysteve 3y ago
This is a clear violation of Kagi's privacy policy. We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. Kagi's entire business is funded by its users and we have no intention to or interest in manipulating or monetizing user information in any way. How many months (or years) has it been since Kagi launched and they're already using User Data to advertize on HackerNews. Yawn. Not a dealbreaker for me, I am still a Kagi customer. But it's clear that written promises from CEOs are empty marketing fluff and not real commitments. As it always is, on the web.
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  I totally agree. I'm not sure how they can rationalize sharing this information with that privacy policy unless they let users opt into a "Kagi is allowed to use my private preferences to aggregate and share statistics." I totally see the appeal to share these statistics, but they are literally breaking their policy here.
ravenstine 3y ago
Funny, I was just wondering if Kagi would publish such statistics. Amazing! Hilarious as hell that Pinterest is at the top of the list. Kagi is great, btw. Get a subscription.
overnight5349 3y ago
The very first thing I did with Kagi was block Pinterest. Very satisfying to see that the top 6 most blocked domains are all Pinterest.

986 points by tech234a 3y ago

dfee 3y ago

Feature request: native iOS safari support. I have a redirect set up, an extension. But the ability to change it for real (ie without redirect) would be huge. (I believe this feature request is targeted at Apple!)

ignoramous 3y ago

Most documentation sites along with the stackoverflow sites and the venerable wikipedia are among the top most boosted. Only if someone brought search to books, wouldn't that be wonderful?

buggy6257 3y ago

Looks like the summary here is “f** Pinterest”. Soooo many stack overflow scraper sites too god I hate those.

TillE 3y ago
It's incredibly annoying to be searching for a thing, and get a result from Pinterest that's just a bookmark of that thing. As far as I know, this is more a failure of Google's inexplicable algorithm than Pinterest doing anything specifically bad.
- munk-a 3y ago
  Pinterest does a whole lot specifically bad - they tend to trap users with login prompts on entry and make it impossible to see the full image. If I'm searching for a meme to DM to someone or a photograph of a landmark Pintrest is something I avoid like the plague. It's essentially a black-hole for images - people pin them and then they are lost forever.
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  I like Pinterest, it is a useful site. But it is basically a (image) search engine itself, so it's pages shouldn't be in Google results. Just like you don't want Bing or DDG image search results showing up in Google searches.
- ricardo81 3y ago
  Pinterest could simply tell robots to 'noindex,follow' the page to help search engines understand there is no utility in it appearing for a search. But agree, perhaps it shouldn't rank first anyway. Guess it depends on whether it's UGC entirely or whether the CMS could note these kind of pages. Again, shouldn't be hard if it's just a simple link as the main content of the page.
  - data-ottawa 3y ago
    Why would Pinterest do that? They’ve conquered image search SEO, and I expect most sites on the internet want to play as greedily as possible. Google are the ones who should be looking at the situation and asking if this is the state they really want.
    - ricardo81 3y ago
      There's precedent that would make it in Pinterest's best interest. IIRC Google's "Panda" algo update basically wiped out search referrals to certain content farms overnight, can't recall specific examples but there were some at the time. They were labelled as low quality and subsequently faded into obscurity. //added EHow is an example of a site that was flagged
Arnavion 3y ago
For the SO clones: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

jasonpeacock 3y ago

I love that they also provide, in the same page, the option to update your own configuration. Easy pre-emptive blocking/boosting :)

deepspace 3y ago
Yes, that forward-thinking UI design immediately stuck me, and reminded me again why I am a loyal customer.

12907835202 3y ago

I've never quite understood the w3schools hate. It can be quite useful. My most used page is this one when I need to jog my memory: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php It's much better than this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selectors https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto... Or any of the other results on the first page

dixie_land 3y ago
my 2 cents: w3schools tend to oversimplify the concepts to the point of technical inaccuracy. and the tone of the articles read more like tutorials instead of reference manuals.
- ghayes 3y ago
  Yeah MDN is the de-facto reference guide for web frameworks. W3schools feels like beginner tutorials. For me, I want “what happens if I pass undefined as the second arg to this function” and w3schools doesn’t answer that. It’s fine as a site, I suppose, it was insane when it outranked more complete websites. Off topic I see this more and more with Stackoverflow where semi-related questions outrank official docs.
CobaltFire 3y ago
w3 schools is on several of those lists, including "raise", so your opinion is shared by others.
andirk 3y ago
It often outranks MDN official docs which these days are very readable, in-depth, with examples, and a simple UI and the only time I click to inappropriately named W3Schools is by accident because it's the top result and I'm expecting MDN and then I click back and that's why I don't like it.
- thayne 3y ago
  I have similar feelings about baeldung.com. It isn't that the content is inherently bad, but it is super annoying that when I search for a java class the first few results are from baeldung instead of the official javadocs.

lloydatkinson 3y ago

I wonder why brietbart and Washington post are filtered so much?

aemreunal 3y ago
I'm sure you can guess why Breitbart is blocked so much...
axblount 3y ago
For the Washington Post, it's probably because of the paywall.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
It has the "wrong" bias for most of the HN crowd: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg To be fair, it is biased, but then so are most outlets one way or the other: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
- int_19h 3y ago
  The problem with Breitbart isn't just bias, it's the amount of outright blatantly false claims. (This isn't to say that other major media outlets don't have problems with accuracy. But the magnitude is very different.)
  - Vicinity9635 3y ago
    [dead]
  - zo1 3y ago
    But like what? Genuinely curious for an example of "blatantly false claims"? As I'm on the "right" side of the spectrum, and these kinds of comments come from a criticism of "misinformation". Also, as an aside. What is a "false claim"? If it's a claim, they're asking you to believe it, which means they need to motivate it and provide details to back it up. Seems precisely where all the media generally is (including CNN/BBC/etc), pandering to peoples' bias without saying anything factually incorrect.

lolinder 3y ago

This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's what makes their results so much better than Google's: where Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains as you go!

scarmig 3y ago
Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  They did. And w3schools was in my list back then.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    And can't forget about expertsexchange.
    - delfinom 3y ago
      Even 2 decades later, you can never unsee it
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        It's only obvious when you format it that way. They primarily used "Experts Exchange" and http://www.experts-exchange.com/ http://www.experts-exchange.com/
        mmh0000 3y ago
        Yeah, now they use that, but back in the good old days of the internet, they did not.

mostlysimilar 3y ago

Simple, common sense features for any search engine that actually wants to help you find what you’re looking for. Such a stark difference from what Google offers.

MrVandemar 3y ago

The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals. I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, and if so, how they would be able to actually reach them.

freediver 3y ago
> It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals. I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here). > I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, Yes, we are :) > if so, how they would be able to actually reach them Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my family members on board a paid search product. I might add that "Kagi for Kids" is the first true attempt at having a search engine made specifically for kids, with a host of parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason. We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but are tech-savvy) becoming members. This may be followed by non-tech savvy users in the future. I do see the first signs of the age of ad-supported, "free" search, coming to an end [2]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan [2] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
- jonReadingNews 3y ago
  I was hesitant to configure my partner’s devices (family plan) to set as default engine but eventually convinced them and they haven’t even brought it up once since. I assume no news is good news! I would be less hesitant to recommend to other non-tech friends/family if it were easier to configure as default on Safari. Heck, I’d even entertain gifting subscriptions. The quality of results for me has been incredibly reliable. Enjoyable, even. And, I didn’t even take the time to start configuring these kinds of rules. Love this. Great product. Wishing long, lasting success.
  - freediver 3y ago
    Thank you very much for the kind words. Unfortunately we can not influence the choices that Safari makes, but we did pull an effort to build an entire browser [1] to replace it because of that :) [1] https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com

jeffbee 3y ago

So, kagi has a couple hundred actives?

kccqzy 3y ago
While this comment has a snarky tone, I agree with it. We need active user numbers to determine how statistically relevant this might be.
- epgui 3y ago
  To me, the results seem interesting regardless of whether they are representative of the population or not. There are questions you can answer without relying on that assumption. For example: "Can you imagine what your search results would look like if you had access to this tool?"
freediver 3y ago
Mulitply that by the factor of ~50. Not all users use the feature or if they do, block same domains (our user base is very international). We plan to launch full stats (including number of members and queries/day) next week. "Domains" is meant to be just one of the tabs on this page that got pushed earlier to prod.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

munk-a 3y ago

I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app. It is a true shame that so much useful information gets trapped within their ecosystem.

lolinder 3y ago
A lot of people actually disagree with you—Reddit is number four on the Raise list and on the Pin list, and every few months there's a thread on HN talking about how the only way to get useful information out of Google is to add "reddit" at the end of the search.
- fyrn_ 3y ago
  I think they were talking about the raise list, not the block or lower list
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Clearly not, they think it's clunky and desktop and too annoying on mobile, (I agree but put up with it often) they're not saying they want more of it.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    I was indeed talking about the lower list - simply because of the information presentation is so poor. The information itself is usually quite high quality.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. It's on two lists. > Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app. I have the old-reddit extension on every device I use. It's my 3rd most essential extension, after uBlock Origin and Kill Sticky.

sockaddr 3y ago

Ok wow, seeing these lists might have just made a customer out of me. I’ve been vaguely aware of Kagi and know the general premise but this made it real.

OJFord 3y ago
Similarly, I had no idea about this feature, but I now know I want it... I think I just need it to be cheaper, maybe $5 unlimited (or enough for me, which I think is certainly higher than 300, probably higher than 1000, at least without behaviour change) and I'd be in I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling & development/SRE that's expensive - so should (or at least could) come down as more people adopt it, driving further adoption from relative cheapskates like me? It seems great, but I use DDG 'bangs' (which are also a Kagi feature) loads of times a day, rather than going directly to websites - especially !w & !wikt, !arch & !aur & !archpackages only slightly less - I'd blow through the monthly limit in no time on that alone. (Which also seems a bit unfair, they're just redirects, not using index, there's an argument they shouldn't be included? I suppose if you're so motivated you can work around by using Firefox's feature for it instead of search engine anyway.) Edit: oh wait, I just found in the FAQ that 'bangs' actually aren't counted as searches. I may have to trial it, see how many searches I actually use how quickly. (And how reasonable the 1.5ç overage seems in my usage.)
- TheHappyOddish 3y ago
  I have gone over the limit (on the grandfathered 1500 search plan), and paid the extra $1-2 for it. It's fine. The cost of search has made me think about what terms I use now and what I search for. Google made me lazy, I now use my phones world clock app rather that searching for "current time X", and word my searches more thoughtfully.
- elxx 3y ago
  Kagi doesn't charge you for bangs. (Disclaimer: Happy paying Kagi user here, just FYI)
  - 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

Google: we need to have your personal information because that allows us to provide you with a better experience. Me: Ok, please block these domains: "pinterest.com, w3schools.com, ..." Google: Sorry, can't do that!

zeusk 3y ago
Pinterest is absolutely the worst; most of the time the linked page doesn't even have what I was looking for.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  It has blown my mind for years the extent to which the Google Image Search team let Pinterest completely undermine the usefulness of their product, and they just kept on giving pinterest the top search result spots. It's honestly more useless than the pages with a list of 1000 phone numbers that you get when you try to search for who an unknown number is. Does anyone even work on Google Image Search? Is it run by a bunch of undercover Pinterest employees who infiltrated the team and pushed out the Googlers?
  - jart 3y ago
    I'm honestly surprised by all the Pinterest hate because I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it.
    - sp0rk 3y ago
      >I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it. You just don't do it according to whom? I would consider viewing the fullsize image to be core functionality for an image search, and it used to work just fine on GIS up until a few years ago.
    - otikik 3y ago
      > It's like drinking from the dead I get that this must be something bad, but what does it mean, exactly? Drinking blood from a corpse?

Havoc 3y ago

Interesting yes, but feels more like a measure of their very niche userbase than a reflection of the websites value. The average human out there is not boosting developer.mozilla.org Still...I'm thankful that they publish the stats. It's a useful mental reference point if nothing else

mhrmsn 3y ago

Definitely the best feature of Kagi! I sometimes wish there was some way to slightly adjust how this works. As I also have Wikipedia on raised priority, I'd still like some official product/company/etc. website to rank higher than the Wikipedia article of it. Also, a custom priority ranking among the raised importance domains would be nice.

Modified3019 3y ago

ublacklist works with many search engines. A little bit of very easy effort goes a LONG way to cleaning up your results. https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist And here's two bonus things you need if you make use of youtube Sponsorblock. As it says on the tin, automatically skips sponsor sections. https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock Dearrow. An open source and crowdsourced tool replace youtubes stupid fucking clickbait title cards, and replaces many titles with better ones. You can contribute! https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow

lukas099 3y ago
Followed the Firefox link on DeArrow, and it leads to an "Oops! We can't find that page".
- Given_47 3y ago
  Worked for me: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
  - scode2 3y ago
    That is the listing for SponsorBlock, not DeArrow.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/122 https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/122
  - folmar 3y ago
    In short: it was temporarily removed due to XSS vulnerability and the fixed version is in review.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

syntaxing 3y ago

Can someone share some insight what “Pin” means? I get what block, lower, raise means but pin is a bit confusing to me

freediver 3y ago
Pin means that if a result from that domain would appear anywhere in 50 or so relevant results that Kagi usually surfaces on the first page, it would be 'pinned' to the top of results.

sa46 3y ago

Does “at least 20 users” imply the list of blocked domains is all blocked domains with at least 20 users? If so, I would have expected a much longer tail.

replwoacause 3y ago

I’ve been a customer for quite a while and never configured this feature. Shame on me. Thanks for bringing my attention to it.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

surprised not to see ehow, wikihow, etc

freediver 3y ago
Could be because they do not surface in the results much to begin with.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I guess you're right. I haven't seen them in a while either. But for a while there they would be among the top results for all kinds of searches, and the content itself was always garbage. But I don't get pinterest very often lately either. Not never but not most of the time either.

mysterydip 3y ago

Surprised to not see fandom.com on there. Just copy/paste plus SEO of actual wikis plus so many ads you can't read the content.

howenterprisey 3y ago
Unfortunately, fandom has a decent amount of original content in addition to the copy/paste stuff, so you'd miss out on quite a bit if you block them.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  That's unfortunate, thanks for the info.
- jsheard 3y ago
  The trick is to use https://breezewiki.com https://breezewiki.com instead. There's an extension that redirects Fandom links to it automatically.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Kagi has another feature that can rewrite search results' URLs based on regexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html. I guess you could use that to make the redirect automatic?

abhayhegde 3y ago

Kudos! But would it be too divulging that other competitors can offer presets to block the mentioned sites?

loveparade 3y ago

I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year and didn't know about this feature! That's amazing, I can finally block all these spam sites completely.

version_five 3y ago

I found the right wing media blocks interesting. I wondered if that was in response to getting search spammed by them or some "principal". Because I don't think I've ever seen Fox News or Breitbart in search results anyway. Same comment for CNN and wapo that I see are also there. Maybe I'd dont search current events enough, they all seem like odd things to block to me.

coolliquidcode 3y ago
Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and nytimes. As well as Wapo and CNN. I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires that own the other media they think they are decent news sources. Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com. I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there.
- internetter 3y ago
  > Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and nytimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies Really? > I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires that own the other media https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2017/aug/28/the-guardian-announces-the-launch-of-a-new-us-nonprofit-to-support-story-telling-and-independent-journalism https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2017/aug/28/the... And the NYT is publicly traded (The CEO has an estimated networth of only 10mil) Verge doesn't really do journalism that makes me worried about who owns it. > Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com. rtings does colour profiles of plenty of slightly less popular monitors that no one else does. It's been an invaluable resource for me. This comment is genuinely nonsensical. I'd think that it's obvious that rich owners tend to push a conservative economic spin to preserve their wealth. > I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there. Most people end up on goodreads from search to see the reviews people left for the book....

LAC-Tech 3y ago

I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions. const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com", "economist.com", "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com", "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com", "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com", "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com", "arstechnica.com", "independent.co.uk", "axios.com" ] Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a")) .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain))) .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement) .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling, elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]) .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

LeoPanthera 3y ago
...BBC? Ars Technica? ...KQED and VOA? You're blocking discussion of some of the most reliably factual reporting on the planet.
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  shrugs I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. If the resulting conversations suck, aren't relevant to me, and clog up the HN front page - in they go.
  - alex_lav 3y ago
    There's something uniquely social-media-y about a person posting a list of websites they don't enjoy the contents of or discussion around, and then posting that they've filtered them out in a way that only impacts them, and then that person getting questioned and challenged on their filtering.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. You were quite willing to promote the specific and lengthy list of disliked-sites to strangers. A sudden switch to fatigue and disinterest does not seem genuine to me.

karaterobot 3y ago

Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked. I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.

deprecative 3y ago
W3schools intentionally placed themselves as a representation of the W3C (similar to what Fedex does with its name) and sold, still does I'm sure, certificates under that misconception. These were worthless. This is in addition to the other complaints.
forgotmypw17 3y ago
I agree, I love w3schools. They provide real examples for real-world uses right on the page.
zacmps 3y ago
It was offensively bad and incorrect, and while I've heard it has improved since I think a lot of people just remember how it used to be and don't use it.
navanchauhan 3y ago
I never knew W3Schools had such a bad reputation. I learned HTML from that site almost a decade ago and found it pretty helpful. I loved their Try it Online!
- int_19h 3y ago
  Historically, at least, it had a lot of examples that technically did what they were supposed to do, but in ways that you really, really, really shouldn't be doing them.
- 0x073 3y ago
  I knew many developers that used w3schools that thought it was official source because w3c, I know it's not completely the sites fault but they named the domain. That's one reason I dislike, additional the quality of w3schools is compared with mdn for beginners that are not interested into the details.

abtinf 3y ago

The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari. It is infuriating and is the one thing that has caused me to seriously try other browsers on mobile. The problem is, they are all terrible in some small paper cutting ways (including Orion, though that has been rapidly improving).

justintoon 3y ago
I realize this is probably not the solution you want, but there is an official iOS Safari extension that will intercept all address bar searches and route them to Kagi. I don’t remember how much it costs, and it doesn’t seem to work super well with private browsing, but it’s better than nothing and works well for what it is. Ymmv https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id1607766153 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id16077...
- abtinf 3y ago
  I should give it another try. I believe the last time I tried it, I was frustrated because of the private browsing login issue. Maybe one day (probably not) Apple will allow setting a simple URL for custom search engines. Orion needs a lot of polish, but I am hopeful they will get there.
  - justintoon 3y ago
    I took a closer look and the iOS extension supports entering a “session link” which allows the Kagi redirect to work in private windows. Entering it is a bit cumbersome—you have to first open a private window and then any random page so you can see the extension button in the address bar, at which point you can tap it and then the Kagi icon to get to the session link field—but it appears to stick after that and the redirect works as expected (although you do get a brief flash of Google or whatever — they suggest changing it to DDG which looks a bit smoother). Agree that it feels hacky, but sometimes you just have to take what you can get.
  - deviantintegral 3y ago

nfriedly 3y ago

I find it amusing that reddit managed to make all of the lists! I personally still find it to be a useful source of information - I wonder if all of their recent drama with third-party apps has led to it earning a place on the negative lists, or if it was there all along.

malikNF 3y ago
I an part of the former. I do miss it. Glad to see there’s more people who are doing this. You shouldn’t be allowed to treat your community this way and get away with it.
developer93 3y ago
I think it might be more understandable if you could block individual subreddits, I found experience to vary greatly depending on your topic since the moderation isn't uniform.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

abtinf 3y ago

Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive. That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month, then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the limits. I will simply say that I cannot imagine going back to being a “user” of a “search provider” over being a paying Kagi customer. It is the single most critical service I worry about losing. If they octupled the price tomorrow, I would murmur an expletive under my breath, then thank god that they didn’t choose to go down the path of fucking me over by materially changing the business model to adtech, and continue paying them. I am actually not sure what at what price point I’d drop the service. I’d probably start looking at canceling less used subscriptions first. Another shitty Gal Gadot Netflix movie has negative marginal value for me. If you haven’t tried it for an extended time and used its core features, then you don’t get it and no one can explain it to you. “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.” Edit to add: this is search we are talking about. It is literally your entry point to the world’s entire body of knowledge and ultimately affects your decisions and actions both daily and over the long term. And nearly everyone is perfectly happy to let it be run by companies that make more money when they lead you astray to click bait, hot take, content farm, and AI generated sites. Garbage in, garbage out, both in software and the knowledge you depend on to live a thriving life.

berdon 3y ago
Yep. As a developer my life is infinitely better because of Kagi. The product is wonderful, the team is wonderful and responsive - it’s everything I want from a company I pay money to. I sound like a shill but I’m not. I’ve just been a happy user since their private beta and have had genuine, kind, and personable email back and forth with Vladimir.
metadaemon 3y ago
I feel the same way. I've been a very happy customer without any desire for going back to other search providers.
josephcsible 3y ago
> That it should be unlimited. Isn't that what their $25/mo plan gives you?

junon 3y ago

Hehehe, one of the top results for the example search topic is a repo of mine. This explains a lot. Maybe it's a sign to try Kagi after all.

arealaccount 3y ago

Tried out a few searches that I’ve recently struggled with on both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially if I can get a license through work. I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.

freediver 3y ago
> I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers. SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.
- internetter 3y ago
  Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Cool. I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For research I certainly search like a professional, but don't have the income stream to compensate.
  - ftaghn 3y ago
    > Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and their knowledge of it is why early google was good. https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-sergey-brin-larry-page-1998/ https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-... > Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998) > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side. > “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They know exactly what it is that they are doing.

qingcharles 3y ago

Half these sites are my guilty pleasures, pinterest.com, dailymail.co.uk, tiktok.com...

input_sh 3y ago
Is TikTok even search engine friendly? I don't remember ever ending up there by searching for something (that's not explicitly someone's TikTok account).
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Surprisingly very search engine friendly. It only uses the titles and tags, though, I think.
coolliquidcode 3y ago
pinterest has it's place. It's bad rep is because you have to be logged in to see anything.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  You definitely don't need to be logged in. I used it in other browser sessions sometimes and you just have to scroll down about half a page and click "Explore" and it works fine.

gcanyon 3y ago

I've been shouting for years how google should know by now, if there is a relevant wikipedia page, it should be at the top of the results -- not number 2 or 3, number 1. Every time. Likewise IMDB (not that I'm fond of the site, if there were an alternative I'd switch in a heartbeat) -- if I search for "bogart bacall" then the top six results should be IMDB and Wikipedia for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo. How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery.

reaperducer 3y ago
How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery. It has. Google knows exactly what it's doing. It's just that Google makes money from keeping you searching, not from giving you the right answer.
- Tenemo 3y ago
  Let’s dispel with this fiction that Google doesn’t know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're trying to change the internet.
  - cyberlurker 3y ago
    Is this a Rubio quote?
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Yeah, it's so good he said it twice.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  Yeah, I said they hadn't figured it out, but generally I agree with you that they know, they're just willing to ignore me for $0.003
DrRobinson 3y ago
Trakt.tv is a good alternative to IMDb btw

sklargh 3y ago

The interplay between Mayo Clinic being a trusted source and WebMD being hard blocked is fascinating.

atrudeau 3y ago

Similar alternative for Google Search: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidh... Even the defaults match this Kagi top list.

rosywoozlechan 3y ago
This third party browser extension looks like it hides UI contents whereas with Kagi your preferences are used in what is actually returned from the search engine and in what order. I don't think these things are all that similar.
- slaw 3y ago
  Kagi used Google behind. If results are the same, what is the difference for the end user?
  - jorams 3y ago
    Google is one of the sources for Kagi's results, but not the only one. The results are not the same.

jrflowers 3y ago

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?

Eisenstein 3y ago
I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  Doxing isn't doxing if it's part of a documentary.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Not sure what you are implying but doxing has a specific meaning.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose. I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
        3y ago

isatty 3y ago

I don’t use Kagi but I really want the ability to pin Wikipedia to the top.

tmnvix 3y ago

Interesting that nytimes.com is on both the 'block' and 'raise' lists.

ssd532 3y ago
Good to see diversity
duckmysick 3y ago
Possibly because of their paywall.

malikNF 3y ago

One of the main reasons I don’t mind paying for kagi is my absolute hate for pinterest.

slaw 3y ago
What keywords give you pinterest in result set? I use mostly Bing and I don't recall ever to see pinterest in any search results.

eviks 3y ago

Are there shared lists you can subscribe to (and extend) instead of having to waste a lot of time implementing your own from scratch?

ptrrrrrrppr 3y ago
Isn't this page a shared list? As Kagi user I can click a button next to every domain here to apply given setting
- eviks 3y ago
  no, thousands and thousands of clicks isn't what makes a list shared

rchaud 3y ago

Reminder that W3Schools is good now (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP) and has been good for several years. In the pre-Flexbox, pre-grid days, I used W3schools to build a framework-less mobile site as part of a JS bootcamp admissions test. The explanation on W3Schools about creating multiple floats with media queries was so clear, I stuck around.

emrah 3y ago

It's interesting to see some websites on both the block and raise/pin lists, such as reddit and nytimes

dotcoma 3y ago

People sure love Pinterest! ;)

GhostWhisperer 3y ago

this page is so galvanising – to see those domains on the top list of blocked domains pushed me to subscribe to kagi, nice hack marketing dep.

GhostWhisperer 3y ago
feedback: 1. make the homepage simpler, get rid of the dog and the moving clouds 2. this price won't fly on other geographies 3. don't make me 'add credits' to use the api, just accumulate some costs then bill me, once a week or even daily if that helps you sleep at night 4. you opted me into receiving product updates, don't do that, don't make me add you to my junk list, this was going so well, look what you're making me do, ohhhh

mbork_pl 3y ago

I might be tempted to use Kagi (especially for my family), but the thing I'm afraid of is the quality of search in non-English (specifically Polish) internet. Anybody knows how does that work?

developer93 3y ago
The first 100 searches are free, just need an email address that can be a throwaway to sign up, so you can check it for yourself with just a bit of time expended.
ptrrrrrrppr 3y ago
I started using Kagi specifically because of more accurate results in Polish comparing to other search engine. A teraz jestem płacącym użytkownikiem, już chyba z pół roku :)
pzmarzly 3y ago
It has a quick region switcher like DDG (a must-have for me), and the results are way better than DDG. Give it a try! I just did a Google vs Kagi vs DDG test on "grzyby marynowane" (pickled mushrooms, usually pickled champignons, a common snack on Polish family gatherings). Google: Starts with recipes, then there is Allegro ("Polish Amazon") where you can buy jars of them, then Google page ends (10 results/page). Kagi: starts the same, but there is more (20?) results/page. It continues with some podcast episode about pickled mushrooms on Soundcloud, a Wikipedia page, some more recipes in Polish and English and finally a Pinterest page (:rage:). DuckDuckGo: first page is just recipes. I decided to give it a bigger chance, so I checked out a second page. There you have pretty unrelated articles like "where to pick wild mushrooms" and an Allegro link in between. However, as happy Kagi user I still have to note that they are using Apple Maps for maps/POI search. As you well know, they are quite useless to us compared to Google Maps, so I keep using !gm bang to get redirected. Bangs work almost like DDG, the only difference is that they must be at beginning or end of your search (DDG lets you put it in between words too).
smodo 3y ago
It works well enough for me, can’t say I’ve really looked back since I signed up.

xlbuttplug2 3y ago

Either they've filtered out porn sites or they have a long way to go in terms of adoption.

slaw 3y ago
I think porn sites are already filtered by Google. Kagi doesn't have it's own search, it is just layer over Google search.
- RGBCube 3y ago
  Not just Google, they use Bing and Yandex(?, might be something else) too, I think.
- JopV 3y ago
  Kagi does have its own search index of niche sites, they even have an API for it. This is combined with Google results; they used to combine with Bing as well but stopped due to Microsoft charging too much money. Very different from DuckDuckGo and Startpage which are still just a Bing proxy and a Google proxy respectively.
  - slaw 3y ago
    You are correct. Kagi is more than a Google proxy. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
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wanderingmind 3y ago

Although boosting cant be done, blocking can be achieved using ublockorigin and custom filters. Here is an awesome spam filter list that removes spam and copycat domains from google and ddg searches[1] [1]https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

anoncow 3y ago

The top websites that people like are Wikipedia, Stack overflow and Mozilla Developers

warpspin 3y ago

Starting to try kagi now after this. I knew the diverse browser add-ons for blocking results, but being able to lower instead of all-out block something seems nice. Just wished they made it easier to block/lower all the international versions of pinterest though, lol.

enduku 3y ago

Kagi search is brilliant in this aspect. There used to be a similar service [0] not too long ago that blocked many spam sites from the search results. [0] http://millionshort.com/ http://millionshort.com/

account-5 3y ago

As a beginner w3schools.com is likely my first port of call for something that it covers. Easy to navigate and use, and covers a wide range of things. I'm aware of its history but it's never steered me wrong. MDN I only use if I can't find the information elsewhere. I need ELI5, MDN is harder to understand when trying to grasp a subject, at least for me.

tschumacher 3y ago

Anecdotally when searching for Python standard lib docs on Google, python.org is never at the top. I think this is because they have a single page titled "Built-in types" instead of dedicated pages titled e.g. "str.split". Above python.org I get links to w3schools.com, programiz.com, python-reference.readthedocs.io (some inofficial project abandoned 2015), geeksforgeeks.org, codegree.de and freecodecamp.org.

aldanor 3y ago
If on macos, highly recommending Dash for all your programming docs needs for any language. Real gem and a time saver.

charlieyu1 3y ago

Surprised to see kknews.cc here, probably the biggest content farm in Chinese by far

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iamflimflam1 3y ago

You have to feel for anyone who works at pinterest - they just be getting that “are we the bad guys vibe” https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY

kouru225 3y ago

Why y’all blocking alternativeto.net?

moonshinefe 3y ago

I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall geeksforgeeks being ok a few years ago. But I've started avoiding it because it seems like there's multiple nag screens in a row whenever I make the mistake of clicking. Seems a lot of people agree. Is the issue here these sites aren't putting up the barriers to the crawlers, and are getting high ranking in all the results despite all the friction to normal users? It'd be nice if there were a way for a search engines to tell if paywalls / nag screens are a thing on sites and to demote them from the results accordingly. It seems like it wouldn't be hard for them to tell, but maybe they don't want to de-rank sites with these patterns. But really, from the consumers' perspective, who wants these sites in the results? I'm all for subscribing to something if I use it repeatedly, but that doesn't describe 90% of the sites I visit and I don't have the money for 1000 subscriptions. Maybe they could just have a filter to filter for free sites only. I don't know what the solution is, but having blocked domains while nice is just a band-aid.

baxuz 3y ago

I expected to see snyk up there.

naillo 3y ago

This kinda illustrates how dead easy it would be for google to improve their search engine. There's no way they couldn't figure out a similar list as this and just re-rank things to down prioritize these sites.

freediver 3y ago
One should note that Google is already constantly improving their search engine for their customers. It is just that they are not the same as their users.

danpalmer 3y ago

This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me wonder whether this is just the marketing so far, or a more fundamental limitation on the market that will actually draw value from Kagi. Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?

smallerfish 3y ago
It does. They have a lean team, and I believe are bootstrapped.
VHRanger 3y ago
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses
- danpalmer 3y ago
  If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher revenue per user compared to paying users.
freediver 3y ago
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? It depends on your definition of "works as business"? I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users. Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs. Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers. For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale. Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost. Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget. So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

mezobeli 3y ago

Great product from a great team! Pretty expensive for non-casual searching, I do a lots of searches in a day. Currently self-hosted SearchXNG does the trick but would love to start use Kagi for all. Would love if they manage to find ways to increase limits or reduce pricing. We can use uBlock for ads + ddg for results, but for masses and in general for healthier search engines I would be happy to use Kagi daily.

Tanjreeve 3y ago

Pinterest is really unsurprising. Unbelievable Google doesn't spike them it's utterly useless as a search result.

kimi 3y ago

Serious hint to any Google engineers reading: just penalize those exact freaking sites, and you are half-way there in fixing your results issue. It's not AI-driven or anything, just a regexp will do.

user3939382 3y ago

I like Kagi but I’m willing to pay like 10-15$ for unlimited (actually unlimited) searches so I don’t have the emotional overhead of counting and worrying about how much I’m searching. I don’t like how they told people on older unlimited plans they’d be grandfathered in and then didn’t honor that.

teddyh 3y ago

I wonder if the Kagi users approved of the publishing of this data, taken from what I assume are their personal settings in Kagi.

freediver 3y ago
This, like many other Kagi features, came as a feature suggestion from the very Kagi users [1]. And the way the list is done is that it aggregates data anonymously and posts only domains that were acted upon by at least 20 users to preserve privacy. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/1098-a-page-for-a-list-of-sites-that-are-blockedpreferred-by-lots-of-users https://kagifeedback.org/d/1098-a-page-for-a-list-of-sites-t...
- teddyh 3y ago
  I don’t think every single Kagi user asked for this feature, so I still wonder how those users who did not ask for the feature could approve of their private settings being used in this way.

madeofpalk 3y ago

I’m curious about the right-wing news sites appearing in the blocked list. I also want to actively avoid them, but they’ve never once appeared in google search results for me.

bermudi 3y ago

What surprised me the most was the fact that people have enough disposable income to pay for search to make this viable

andrewmunsell 3y ago
Search is one of the most critical pieces of technology for most people on the web. That, combined with the point another comment made that indicates the demographic of Kagi largely revolves around IT/SWE (who generally have more disposable income than other types of jobs), shows good reason why Kagi could survive long term

fosspowered 3y ago

One recommendation for Kagi is to also introduce region based pricing. I subscribed, but in my country, the base price is probably too much for most people (that said I doubt the mentality here would increase sales for you so it is not quite a no-brainer).

kelvie 3y ago
I think they're pretty transparent with their pricing, so I'm not entirely sure they can afford region-based pricing until their own costs go down.
freediver 3y ago
We get asked this a lot. The problem is that one search costs the same whether done from a desert in Africa or from San Francisco. And since we are not breakeven yet, there is nowhere to discount from. We mitigated some of the price anxiety by introducing the $5/mo plan, but we are still prioritizing sustainability over growth and will not let have a situation where we are on average losing money per customer (or otherwise eventually there will be no Kagi down the road).

BrotherBisquick 3y ago

How exactly does Kagi bill you for going over your monthly limit? Do they send you a bill at a later date, or are you meant to refill your balance before you can make more searches, or what? I assume they don't keep your credit card on file and charge you for each individual extra search.

freediver 3y ago
It will ask you if you want to upgrade your plan or to enable pay per use with customizable limits in place. More info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/billing.html#billing-settings-pay-per-use https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/billing.html#billing-set...

barrysteve 3y ago

This is a clear violation of Kagi's privacy policy. We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. Kagi's entire business is funded by its users and we have no intention to or interest in manipulating or monetizing user information in any way. How many months (or years) has it been since Kagi launched and they're already using User Data to advertize on HackerNews. Yawn. Not a dealbreaker for me, I am still a Kagi customer. But it's clear that written promises from CEOs are empty marketing fluff and not real commitments. As it always is, on the web.

noitpmeder 3y ago
I totally agree. I'm not sure how they can rationalize sharing this information with that privacy policy unless they let users opt into a "Kagi is allowed to use my private preferences to aggregate and share statistics." I totally see the appeal to share these statistics, but they are literally breaking their policy here.

ravenstine 3y ago

Funny, I was just wondering if Kagi would publish such statistics. Amazing! Hilarious as hell that Pinterest is at the top of the list. Kagi is great, btw. Get a subscription.

overnight5349 3y ago

The very first thing I did with Kagi was block Pinterest. Very satisfying to see that the top 6 most blocked domains are all Pinterest.