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Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the
by mongol 3y ago
Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!"
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
- prennert 3y agoyou can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.
- seventytwo 3y agoIt’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools. I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
- pierat 3y ago> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools. Yet. Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less. When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers. I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
- askvictor 3y agoNot just that, but it's not really on the radar of SEO. If they get big, SEO will probably lead to the same enshitification as happened to Google.
- freediver 3y agoI don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
- carlosjobim 3y agoSEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
- whs 3y agoI think if they want to sell to me and ads&trackers harm their SEO, it'd at least make the internet a little bit more private. That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.
- Gustomaximus 3y agoTrue for you, but there are billions of people out there and your attitude is a tiny minority for what they would lose elsewhere.
- dazc 3y agoBoss of wonderful search site seems to be unaware?
- eitland 3y agoUnlike Google who has incentives to promote the spam Kagi has incentives to fight the spam. Also Kagi lets me blacklist domains myself if I want stricter rules than Kagi already provide.
- askvictor 3y agoThe financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.
- freediver 3y agoKagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.
- selcuka 3y agoI trust you will not, but what about after you exit? Anyway, you or someone else will probably start a new search engine, and we will start again. It's best to enjoy it until that happens.
- pierat 3y agoI believe the founder, freediver. In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court. The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors. Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late. (I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)
- mewse 3y agoSince you're bringing up "capturing the data", it's worth pointing at Kagi's privacy policy, the very first point of which is this: > * Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account. https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy Additionally the search page itself displays this notice: > Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.
- selcuka 3y ago> I believe the founder, freediver. Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.
- dgb23 3y agoAll good things do come to an end. There’s no argument here. But I think we’re in a different situation when people are willing to pay monthly for search. There is also exactly 0 risk involved here for a consumer. If this product stops being worth your time and money, just stop using it? It’s not comparable to say, buying a service or product that you build on top of. No lock-in in that sense.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
- dylan604 3y agoIsn't that the same thing said about Lotto/scratch-offs/etc?
- oaktowner 3y agoA good friend once described the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math skills" and I don't think I've played since.
- bee_rider 3y agoI don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct. Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success). So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
- yunwal 3y agoI think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
- Falkon1313 3y ago
- crisp 3y agoI think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification. The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoThat's how Google was when I was a kid
- mypetocean 3y agoI've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website). Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features. I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue. There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
- root_axis 3y agoThe results are worse because the Internet is worse.
- dazc 3y agoExactly, the incentive to produce good quality content is no longer there.
- Falkon1313 3y agoOne of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried. Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all. The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information. I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
- esafak 3y agoYes, in many ways, such as the proportion of items on the first page of a query response that are relevant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(information_retrieval) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...
- svaha1728 3y agoIf you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
- robocat 3y ago#4 pinned is hacker news!!! So clearly big crossover between HN fans and kagi. 8,629 Members. Top Blocked (from most blocked): pinterest.com/.co.uk/.ca/.de/.fr/.com.au/.es facebook.com foxnews.com tiktok.com quora.com w3schools.com breitbart.com dailymail.co.uk appsloveworld.com instagram.com githubplus.com geeksforgeeks.org libhunt.com twitter.com msn.com healthline.com solveforum.com 9to5answer.com alternativeto.net giters.com wikihow.com nypost.com codegrepper.com issuehint.com cnn.com educba.com coder.social linkedin.com geekrepos.com kknews.cc bleepcoder.com amazon.com programcreek.com forbes.com newbedev.com drivereasy.com medium.com lightrun.com you.com reddit.com webmd.com blog.csdn.net nytimes.com washingtonpost.com
- shermozle 3y agoOh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
- HanClinto 3y agoI've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam). Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
- rg111 3y agoI read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google. I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching. I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc. I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
- mypetocean 3y agoYeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
- dcow 3y agoKagi has replaced DDG for me entirely. Now that you get unlimited searches, do you think it would for you, too?
- pierat 3y agoOh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit. And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
- hedora 3y agoThey used to have a US office, which got me wondering if they're obligated to sell private user information to the US gov't. Here's their current list of offices: https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)
- int_19h 3y agoThe interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
- konfusinomicon 3y agohotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
- dylan604 3y agoyou could always Ask Jeeves if you were looking for things too.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI used to prefer Dogpile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile
- Croftengea 3y agoLycos anyone? :)
- anotheraccount9 3y agoAskjeeves...
- claytongulick 3y agoSearch in Spitfire BBS or Galacticom anyone? :-)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- viraptor 3y agoIn my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam. For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh=M69XtTvQiEqY0N-zAmYw_A https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
- JoshuaEN 3y agoThis is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again. Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
- ipaddr 3y agoFeels like I'm paying to do someone elses job.
- stavros 3y agoWell, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free.
- hk__2 3y ago> Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free. You can do it with uBlacklist [1]. See also [2]. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... [2]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
- louthy 3y agoWhen I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched) Very happy customer here.
- distract8901 3y agoKagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is. It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now. I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
- dcow 3y agoI do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
- adamsb6 3y agoI'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow. I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
- jacobsenscott 3y agoMaybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
- palata 3y ago> But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
- lostlogin 3y agoCan I encourage you to try it? It took me a while to get good results with it, as I was so used to skipping the first 4-5 hits as those are always adverts. They aren’t with Kagi.
- eitland 3y agoYes. In four ways for me: - it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me. - there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird. - as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages. - built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
- eviks 3y agoDoes it warn you about typos in your "prhase that exists with a phrase " or just blanks out?
- benhurmarcel 3y agoIt does fix typos unless you put them in quotes. And tells you about it.
- ramenbytes 3y agoWhen I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
- niemal_dev 3y agoFrom the ~5 search queries I have done so far, it's not like "wow" but more like "yes".
- _kidlike 3y agoanother happy user here. yes it does!
- mrinterweb 3y agoI would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective. I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.