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I desperately wanted Kagi to be my new search engine, but alas, no dice. At the end of my 100 search trial I wasn't even sure it was a practically better option

by jchw 3y ago

I desperately wanted Kagi to be my new search engine, but alas, no dice. At the end of my 100 search trial I wasn't even sure it was a practically better option than DDG. And believe me, I tried: I even coerced myself to stop adding !g and made it my browser's default search engine. Sometimes the results were good, and it reliably searched for what I asked it to, which is nice. OTOH though, it felt like it didn't have a deep index and, when I searched for things that were obscure but I knew existed, I sometimes found myself needing to try DDG and Google after. Unfortunately, before being concerned about carbon footprint, the product needs to come first. I have no idea how an actually good search engine can be profitable and sustainable without ads and tracking, but it doesn't do any good to have a lower carbon footprint than your competitor if you're dead in ten years. Surely eventually, something will happen. Someone will have a breakthrough moment. As of now, all that's happening in my view is that Google is getting so much worse that it just lowers the expectations for competitors. Maybe eventually it will get so bad that you may as well never use it, but that's not exactly a fantastic outcome. Is building a good search engine and index from scratch in 2023 simply infeasible? I know Google went through great pains to optimize their index and had a couple novel tricks for ranking results... but the internet is infinitely more massive in every dimension, despite the death of literally libraries of useful blogs, forums and topic-specific websites, and now it seems even Google, with their massive budget, is struggling to deal with SPAM on top of ruining the search experience in general. It's easy to just blame enshittification, because duh, but I wonder if more specifically, the Internet is literally just collapsing under the weight of its own growth and an increasingly weak signal to noise ratio.

jemmyw 3y ago
A lot of people seem happy with kagi, myself included. I haven't used g! for months now. I really like some of their tools like the panel of more obscure results.
jp10558 3y ago
I think it depends a lot on the user. I never found DuckDuckGo to have good results, I think because it's based on Bing, and that remains laughable to this day (I have recently had to use it a bit and holy hell it's shit). I am comparing to startpage, which is I guess a more anonymous Google. Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts. Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct. But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.
- jchw 3y ago
  I typically use search engines not to answer questions but to search for things, like for example, maybe I want to find an old Qt Quarterly because something on HN made me think about it, or I'm looking for really deep MSDN documents about Text Services Framework to research something about how IME works on Windows. My biggest issue with Kagi is that whatever indices it seems to pull from seem less deep than both Bing and Google. Now, I could be wrong and maybe it's actually bigger or it uses one of them for some of its results, but my experience was that I was able to get results on DDG when Kagi couldn't return any for a given query. Generally, I find that Google is a bigger index with a better ranking algorithm on top of it. However, DDG/Bing do generally seem to have an impressive index, and one of the biggest differentiators for most search engines that are not Google is that most search engines that are not Google will generally allow you to search for what you want to search for. I feel like with Google, it's very difficult to force it to always include all of the exact terms I'm specifying; it wants to search for something else. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's able to differentiate between two similar looking terms! With all of this said, Kagi definitely was nice in terms of the fact that it felt like it was doing a good job of searching for what I asked for and an alright job ranking them. I gave it my best shot. But, alas, I never got to the point where I felt comfortable not searching Google afterwards. Even as much as Google pisses me off, it feels like their index is just far and away the largest, and it's not even really close.

by jchw 3y ago

jemmyw 3y ago

A lot of people seem happy with kagi, myself included. I haven't used g! for months now. I really like some of their tools like the panel of more obscure results.

jp10558 3y ago

I think it depends a lot on the user. I never found DuckDuckGo to have good results, I think because it's based on Bing, and that remains laughable to this day (I have recently had to use it a bit and holy hell it's shit). I am comparing to startpage, which is I guess a more anonymous Google. Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts. Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct. But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.

jchw 3y ago
I typically use search engines not to answer questions but to search for things, like for example, maybe I want to find an old Qt Quarterly because something on HN made me think about it, or I'm looking for really deep MSDN documents about Text Services Framework to research something about how IME works on Windows. My biggest issue with Kagi is that whatever indices it seems to pull from seem less deep than both Bing and Google. Now, I could be wrong and maybe it's actually bigger or it uses one of them for some of its results, but my experience was that I was able to get results on DDG when Kagi couldn't return any for a given query. Generally, I find that Google is a bigger index with a better ranking algorithm on top of it. However, DDG/Bing do generally seem to have an impressive index, and one of the biggest differentiators for most search engines that are not Google is that most search engines that are not Google will generally allow you to search for what you want to search for. I feel like with Google, it's very difficult to force it to always include all of the exact terms I'm specifying; it wants to search for something else. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's able to differentiate between two similar looking terms! With all of this said, Kagi definitely was nice in terms of the fact that it felt like it was doing a good job of searching for what I asked for and an alright job ranking them. I gave it my best shot. But, alas, I never got to the point where I felt comfortable not searching Google afterwards. Even as much as Google pisses me off, it feels like their index is just far and away the largest, and it's not even really close.