14 ms·

Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant.

Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.

stavros 3y ago
Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it returns something than if it returns nothing.
- elaus 3y ago
  If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of reading through pages of irrelevant search results.
  - dewey 3y ago
    I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.
    - internetter 3y ago
      This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such
  - thuruv 3y ago
    Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.
  - deliriumchn 3y ago
    if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.
    - ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
      I won't, because I have to actually scroll through those results to realize that they couldn't find what I want. It's like asking for where the apples are and then being led to an aisle with bananas, melons and pears. I'd much rather just be told that they have no apples.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  Returning random unrelated garbage does not mean you have a higher chance of finding what you're looking for, it just means you're going to waste time sifting through useless noise.
  - Lutger 3y ago
    And that is time you don't spend on refining your query, so it makes you actually less effective at searching if you consider people do not have infinite time.
- ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
  Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query. There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't. Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't. With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies. But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress. On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that. Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress. Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for. Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.
  - 10729287 3y ago
    >Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  No data is better than bad data
- eitland 3y ago
  No. It is the single most important reason why I pay for Kagi. It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or features or something. But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is a bug and will be dealt with.) I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my search. Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality of the search results.
  - ajdude 3y ago
    So many times I'll often search something on Kagi, get no results, and tag on the "!g" at the end to see what would happen. Of course, I get a ton of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for. I love Kagi.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      We've reached a point where if an "alternative" search engine can't find something, then neither can Google.
      - freediver 3y ago
        Kagi uses results from almost every search engine in the world plus its own results. If you can not find something on Kagi, it is likely you will not be able to find it anywhere.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  A decent library returns nothing if you ask something absurd. A decent professor nudges you to the correct path if you're wrong on your reasoning. A decent search engine should do the same, be able to tell that you're doing something wrong, and do better if you want some answers. If we balk at AI when it hallucinates, we should balk at search engines when they hallucinate, too. Kagi does the correct thing, IMHO.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  You have a higher chance of finding something. I think you actually have a lower chance of finding what you want if it returns irrelevant results, because then you have to spend time manually evaluate and decide that the results are irrelevant before making another query.
- frereubu 3y ago
  You also have a higher chance of wasting a great deal of time combing through useless results when no clear answer exists for your query.
miyuru 3y ago
Do they charge for empty searches? If they charge for it, I agree at least something should be returned.
- vlz 3y ago
  Why? If it isn't relevant, you gain nothing. The information that nothing was found might even be better for you than "something".
- megamalloc 3y ago
  I strongly disagree on this. If a search with no results costs them about the same amount of compute as one with results, then satisfying that requirement would give them a commercial incentive to lie to you about whether they have any good results for you, and to waste your time scrolling through bad results. Your time doing so is almost certainly worth more than what the search itself cost you.
wofo 3y ago
As a recent paid user of Kagi, this is one of the things I love!
declaredapple 3y ago
> if you query is bad or too specific. Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway. > This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job! I have an account with a username that is spelled very similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the username! I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure
- rsoto 3y ago
  I feel like you're arguing against yourself.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    > I feel like you're arguing against yourself. Hacker News in a nutshell.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      the irony in this comment is delicious :-)
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row" and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"
    - declaredapple 3y ago
      What are you talking about? Have you ever worked with full text search? I'm saying I don't like high cutoffs of similarity scores. I have no idea what you're talking about. Very very few queries should have _literally zero results_. Surely you have at least a few words in common with something
  - 3y ago
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Google will still do this if you search a gnarly enough string. I do prefer the Kagi interface though.
chefandy 3y ago
I used to get no results all the time, and it was very useful! Unfortunately, that seems to be happening less frequently for me. In verbatim mode with personalized results off, I noticed Kagi not respecting quotes for phrases. Google will ignore my search parameters intended to reduce results for free, so... :-/
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  Noooooo, you’re breaking my heart.
- bluish29 3y ago
  If you have specific examples, I think kagi team would like to hear about, I would suggest that you open post them in support website [1] and I'm sure they will look into the details. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/
  - chefandy 3y ago
    Hopefully it's a bug!
- wpm 3y ago
  Yeah more and more Kagi seems to be trying to give me the same trash results Google did while ignoring parts of my search parameters. I have never asked for or even wanted "personalized" results, because on Kagi and everywhere else, personalized is shorthand for "very very poor guesses". It's very frustrating.
  - nobodywasishere 3y ago
    Turning personalization off just turns off custom redirects and any website ranking adjustments you've made. That's really the only personalization we have for results. disclaimer: I work for Kagi
    - perlclutcher 3y ago
tauntz 3y ago
> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific. Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not showing anything.

stavros 3y ago

Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it returns something than if it returns nothing.

elaus 3y ago
If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of reading through pages of irrelevant search results.
- dewey 3y ago
  I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.
  - internetter 3y ago
    This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such
- thuruv 3y ago
  Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.
- deliriumchn 3y ago
  if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.
  - ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
    I won't, because I have to actually scroll through those results to realize that they couldn't find what I want. It's like asking for where the apples are and then being led to an aisle with bananas, melons and pears. I'd much rather just be told that they have no apples.
Etheryte 3y ago
Returning random unrelated garbage does not mean you have a higher chance of finding what you're looking for, it just means you're going to waste time sifting through useless noise.
- Lutger 3y ago
  And that is time you don't spend on refining your query, so it makes you actually less effective at searching if you consider people do not have infinite time.
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query. There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't. Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't. With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies. But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress. On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that. Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress. Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for. Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.
- 10729287 3y ago
  >Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.
noitpmeder 3y ago
No data is better than bad data
eitland 3y ago
No. It is the single most important reason why I pay for Kagi. It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or features or something. But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is a bug and will be dealt with.) I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my search. Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality of the search results.
- ajdude 3y ago
  So many times I'll often search something on Kagi, get no results, and tag on the "!g" at the end to see what would happen. Of course, I get a ton of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for. I love Kagi.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    We've reached a point where if an "alternative" search engine can't find something, then neither can Google.
    - freediver 3y ago
      Kagi uses results from almost every search engine in the world plus its own results. If you can not find something on Kagi, it is likely you will not be able to find it anywhere.
bayindirh 3y ago
A decent library returns nothing if you ask something absurd. A decent professor nudges you to the correct path if you're wrong on your reasoning. A decent search engine should do the same, be able to tell that you're doing something wrong, and do better if you want some answers. If we balk at AI when it hallucinates, we should balk at search engines when they hallucinate, too. Kagi does the correct thing, IMHO.
Zambyte 3y ago
You have a higher chance of finding something. I think you actually have a lower chance of finding what you want if it returns irrelevant results, because then you have to spend time manually evaluate and decide that the results are irrelevant before making another query.
frereubu 3y ago
You also have a higher chance of wasting a great deal of time combing through useless results when no clear answer exists for your query.

miyuru 3y ago

Do they charge for empty searches? If they charge for it, I agree at least something should be returned.

vlz 3y ago
Why? If it isn't relevant, you gain nothing. The information that nothing was found might even be better for you than "something".
megamalloc 3y ago
I strongly disagree on this. If a search with no results costs them about the same amount of compute as one with results, then satisfying that requirement would give them a commercial incentive to lie to you about whether they have any good results for you, and to waste your time scrolling through bad results. Your time doing so is almost certainly worth more than what the search itself cost you.

wofo 3y ago

As a recent paid user of Kagi, this is one of the things I love!

declaredapple 3y ago

> if you query is bad or too specific. Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway. > This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job! I have an account with a username that is spelled very similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the username! I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure

rsoto 3y ago
I feel like you're arguing against yourself.
- throwup238 3y ago
  > I feel like you're arguing against yourself. Hacker News in a nutshell.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    the irony in this comment is delicious :-)
- plagiarist 3y ago
  It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row" and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"
  - declaredapple 3y ago
    What are you talking about? Have you ever worked with full text search? I'm saying I don't like high cutoffs of similarity scores. I have no idea what you're talking about. Very very few queries should have _literally zero results_. Surely you have at least a few words in common with something
- 3y ago

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Google will still do this if you search a gnarly enough string. I do prefer the Kagi interface though.

chefandy 3y ago

I used to get no results all the time, and it was very useful! Unfortunately, that seems to be happening less frequently for me. In verbatim mode with personalized results off, I noticed Kagi not respecting quotes for phrases. Google will ignore my search parameters intended to reduce results for free, so... :-/

J_Shelby_J 3y ago
Noooooo, you’re breaking my heart.
bluish29 3y ago
If you have specific examples, I think kagi team would like to hear about, I would suggest that you open post them in support website [1] and I'm sure they will look into the details. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/
- chefandy 3y ago
  Hopefully it's a bug!
wpm 3y ago
Yeah more and more Kagi seems to be trying to give me the same trash results Google did while ignoring parts of my search parameters. I have never asked for or even wanted "personalized" results, because on Kagi and everywhere else, personalized is shorthand for "very very poor guesses". It's very frustrating.
- nobodywasishere 3y ago
  Turning personalization off just turns off custom redirects and any website ranking adjustments you've made. That's really the only personalization we have for results. disclaimer: I work for Kagi
  - perlclutcher 3y ago

tauntz 3y ago

> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific. Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not showing anything.