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Sometimes I wonder how much better the internet would be hits on Google weren't directly tied to revenue from Google itself through its ad program. I am certain
by vouaobrasil 2y ago
Sometimes I wonder how much better the internet would be hits on Google weren't directly tied to revenue from Google itself through its ad program. I am certain Google has made the internet and the world a worse place to live.
- blowski 2y agoI imagine it would be a different flavour to what we have today, but the same intensity. Anything that so deeply penetrates daily life across the globe is going to bring enormous problems with it.
- eitland 2y agoAs a user of Kagi and search.marginalia.nu I can tell you: Quite a bit. So much that now that I have what "everyone" asked Google for for years - that is blacklists - I hardly use them. Why? Because with Kagi I get much better results out of the box. I am fairly sure Googlers will tell me there are multiple safeguards to prevent the inclusion of Google ads from affecting ranking, to which I just have to say that the results speak for themselves. Please note: I have only used Kagi for two years. I am only one user. But I am a user with 20 years of experience with Google and that got to count for something.
- abhijat 2y agoI switched to Kagi in June last year. I just realized I tried it initially because I wanted to try out blocking sites in search results, and I have only ever needed to block three domains.
- eitland 2y agoThats exactly what I am talking about. Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking ... but also: - more modern - more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot) - blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower) - with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes - no tracking
- nolist_policy 2y agoIs it only me or do these constant Kagi ads on HN sound fishy?
- ysavir 2y agoI wouldn't necessarily call them fishy, but I am very tired of them. They have a very evangelizing tone. But I think they're ultimately just people excited about the tool they're using and wanting to share it with others.
- drpossum 2y agoMaybe they're not ads but people who genuinely like the service?
- mannycalavera42 2y agokagi is the new crossfit
- epr 2y agoDid we not all evangelize Google in it's early days? Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.
- orangevelcro 2y agoI don't know...my spidey sense has been going off a bit. Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google. Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.
- eitland 2y agoGo check my history. Send me a mail and I'll send a photo of the fields and the wind breaks here that you can geolocate. I am definitely not a bot. I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).
- Nevolihs 2y agoI actually use pinning, blocking and raising/lowering the value of individual sites every day. I wish this is the direction search engines went in the first place and it's the direction I hope Kagi continues. I want a personalized search engine that's personalized by me, not by a company trying to profile me and make money off of my clicks.
- eitland 2y agoI am all for Kagi keeping that feature. If for nothing else then to rub it in the face of every googler who have argued that it was impossible. And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around. I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.
- the_snooze 2y agoWhen each user can personalize the results themselves, you make SEO completely impractical because they can no longer target a single monolithic algorithm controled by one entity. Websites would actually have to have organic appeal to users, who get the final say to hide away bad sites from the results page (looking at you, Quora, Pinterest, and Fandom).
- beeboobaa3 2y agoIs kagi good for finding things like old forum posts (not reddit)? I know some of those sites are still up but google seems to ignore them.
- stuffoverflow 2y agoIn my experience kagi is decent, definitely gives more forum results than google. I've found yandex to be the best at finding all kinds of forum /discussion sites.
- eitland 2y agoThere is a seperate "lens" (think like "images", "videos" and "news" in Google, only there are more and you can create your own) for "Small Web" which only includes what they describe as "Results that favor noncommercial domains and topics". (Other standard lenses include - Forums - Fediverse forums - Usenet/archive and I think 7 others.)
- nalinidash 2y agoTry search.marginalia.nu From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
- amelius 2y agoHow do you know that Kagi won't become as bad as Google at some point?
- breakfastduck 2y agoWe don't, but a model where a user pays for a service rather than being free and ad supported is significantly less likely to enact user unfriendly changes. If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
- glitchc 2y agoTell that to cable companies, sports broadcasts and now streaming services. The one incontrovertible fact of modern society is that ads eat everything else. No other revenue source compares.
- karma_pharmer 2y agoads eat everything else Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc. We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
- esperent 2y agoKagi is worth the money, but it isn't magic. It's about as good as Google was ~five years ago, before they made all the search operators stop work. There's also a whole bunch of things it's worse at that Google - especially local search and shopping. Plus I still get plenty of blogspam and AI generated crap from Kagi.
- mozman 2y agoThe search operators makes big difference in result quality, I also don’t like how Google now returns zero results for something obscure. In the past I could find something peripheral and eventually get to what I was looking for.
- orangevelcro 2y agoExactly! It's so frustrating because the results were usually useful enough to at least point me in the right direction or help me figure out what I was doing wrong to find what I wanted.
- karma_pharmer 2y agoKagi is simply reselling google search results.
- super256 2y agoThey do more than that: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- karma_pharmer 2y agoThen why does kagi have the same artificially-massive github boost that google does and no other engine (bing, duckduckgo) does? They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.
- eitland 2y agoBecause that is what most of us prefer? Or at least I thought so? But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.
- karma_pharmer 2y ago> Because that is what most of us prefer? If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it? The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.
- ptman 2y agoThey have many sources https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- karma_pharmer 2y ago
- scutrell 2y agoI was excited to try Kagi, but I couldn't justify the cost. I find DDG with the occasional Google search to function almost as well. I'll try Kagi again at some point, but it wasn't the panacea people here made it out to be
- packetlost 2y agoI dunno, the first thing I did was blacklist G**ksf*rG**ks from my search results (and others, of course) and I couldn't be happier.
- p3rls 2y agoKagi is the same garbage as google in my niche. Even worse, maybe. It looks like it's weighing backlinks and SEO garbage even higher. Well done. I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.
- eitland 2y agoWell, don't use it then. I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
- p3rls 2y agoI won't use it. I am pushing back on your belief that it has figured something out about anything, because to me it looks like Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse. I have total shit ranking #1 on Kagi and Google. On other pages I am struggling to break into the top 10 where I should be right under wikipedia in a just world. I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned. Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
- bitcharmer 2y ago> Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
- p3rls 2y ago> And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all. I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then
- benterix 2y agoIt's not black and white. There was a lot of junk that was forced on us and that was removed thanks to Google. But I agree the direct relationship is inherently corrupting.
- GTP 2y agoLarry Page and Sergei Brin even stated very clearly in their original paper that using ads as revenue source can impact the quality of results returned from the search engine.
- linsomniac 2y agoDid you experience the Internet before google? The idea of a world where Alta Vista won is truly chilling.
- washadjeffmad 2y agoI'd be okay with a world in which everyone else in search didn't lose, too.
- msk-lywenn 2y agoIn some way, didn't Google become Alta Vista?
- linsomniac 2y agoHow so? My memory of Alta Vista was so-so search results with a top page littered with garbage.
- solardev 2y agoExactly
- eitland 2y agoExactly like Google since 2011 +/- 2 years (the so-so search results part) and Google the last few years (the littered with garbage part)? I have used Google since probably 2001-2002 sometime and a number of other search engines before. It is rather obvious to me and I have writing and screenshots from around the time quality took a dive that supports it.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI think over time the story has become that AV and Yahoo were overtaken by Google because the latter had a cleaner design, which if you think about it for more than a moment doesn't really constitute much of a moat.
- greg_V 2y agoI mean... maybe, but not really. The first problem of the internet was that there wasn't that much content specifically. The first internet companies were the broadband providers who were developing content themselves, like AOL. Google and the ad ecosystem they acquired was basically the flywheel that spurred content creation at scale. Anyone could jump in, follow a few guidelines and earn a living by producing content on the internet. The Youtube acquisition and monetization followed the same pattern. Over time the market consolidated and got less and less competitive: less platforms with complete control of traffic and one-sided revenue sharing agreements. The guidelines so to speak on how content should look and feel like were algorithmically made stricter and stricter until everything looks, feels, sounds and reads the same. The problem right now is that the platforms are still tightening their grip, and it's all tied to the approach of using AI to replace the content creators on the platforms from Google to Spotify to Meta, and carving the spared money to shareholders. And while the web has been shitty for a few years now, we're now seeing a sudden drop in quality because the average user has no recourse or alternative, and neither does the average creator have the means of distribution and monetization (not just publishing, that's been solved) to even find, let alone meet the new kinds of demand. I'm certain that in a few years this will even out: new search engines, new aggregators and new feeds will emerge, but the content - money - network problem triangle remains as a fundamental problem of the internet.
- DarkNova6 2y agoYou mean the way Google worked originally? The founders were very careful in creating a barrier between ads and search. A barrier whose erosion has been well documented over the last 10 years.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoA barrier whose only purpose was to establish trust so that it could be later taken advantage of.
- DarkNova6 2y agoAs much of a cynic I typically am, there is a well established record of events which shows that this is not true. Google search was taken over by an ambitious clique of failed yahoo managers that successfully destroyed their former company for their own financial advantage then did the same at google. Acting as parasites on society at large.
- Workaccount2 2y agoThe fundamental problem with the Internet is that people don't want to pay for things on it. No matter what, whatever we ended up with was going to be shitty and exploitive.
- eitland 2y agoNow you have a chance. Kagi is there. I made my decision two years ago and I would probably do it even if it was just on par with Google, to support competition and to avoid supporting Google. But in hindsight it is just exeptionally much better. There is no going back unless Kagi does something monumentally stupid.
- jacob019 2y agoI'm a Kagi user too. I like your enthusiasm, but I can't say it's been all that life changing for me. DuckDuckGo is ok too, I still use it on some machines when I don't feel like logging in. GPT has been more life changing.
- eitland 2y agoDon't know what I am doing wrong but except the first few times I really didn't get good results with Kagi. It might be that I rely a lot on precise queries and doublequoted words and also cannot get myself to use the conversational style that at least Google seems to prefer now.
- L-four 2y agoIt's not that people don't want to pay it's that it's difficult to pay small sums. The web browsers could solve this problem but they make money from ads so it's not in there best interest.
- nradov 2y agoJakob Nielsen's article "The Case for Micropayments" from 1998 still seems relevant. Nothing has really changed in 26 years so I'm skeptical whether it could ever work, but in principle it would be great for users and website owners to have that option. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
- wslh 2y agoGoogle was really great and revolutionary, they helped zillions of small companies to thrive. It was another cycle. Then, now, it is like media before the 90s: you need to pay a lot of money to be in the center page of the newspaper. But, hopefully we are talking about LLMs now, seems like one of the answers to search engines in general. Beyond AI, I see LLMs as a good evolution from PageRank. A little bit general but lately I use the expression: "Complexity as Scam". Google always pointed to their "algorithms" and played with this term as if algorithms couldn't be adjusted to whatever you want to be. Initially the coined term was sound because it was based on a scientific paper and eventually it evolution but it seems like the PageRank original idea has detoured from being a "pure" graph algorithm. Another context where I use "Complexity as Scam" is Web3. It is like Matryoshka dolls where there is always one more step of complexity to probe a point, but it never ends.
- heresie-dabord 2y agoInstead of a semantic Web of knowledge, we got "grep the HTML... with ads".
- josefx 2y agoYou dropped the -v . Modern day Google seems fine tuned to return results that contain everything except for the words I searched for.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoThere is something truly strange about the idea than people "trust" a website operator and can rely on it to provide them with useful information when that same operator is well-known to be secretive, deceptive and dishonest in order to protect its own interests. It's like imagining that a fact witness who tells the truth on some occasions and lies on others is credible. https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak