6 ms·

I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi g

by o_m 2mo ago

I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
optionalsquid 2mo ago
Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
- dmrivers 2mo ago
  I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
  - eloisius 2mo ago
    If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
  - vivzkestrel 2mo ago
    - start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
  - optionalsquid 2mo ago
    I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies. However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
    - JohnFen 2mo ago
      I didn't know that page existed, thanks! I was amused to see that my blocklist already includes most of the sites that appear there.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2mo ago
    Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it. Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
    - progval 2mo ago
      > Kagi of course reviews it They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
      - equinumerous 2mo ago
        I had the same experience. I don't know why they haven't invested more in this feature. Heck, if they classified every site in their index as "AI/not AI" using machine learning, and had a large allowlist of "known-good" sites, that would take care of most of the problem (I am aware of the drawbacks of text-only AI classification, but they could use other indicators, like the site's publication date, domain name, domain registry date, etc.). I think for right now, the "state-of-the-art" for non-AI search is going to entail maintaining large whitelists/blacklists of websites that are crowd-sources by users (e.g. what you can find in some GitHub repositories). I was hoping that's what SlopStop was going to be, but it is not nearly as effective as it needs to be.
    - Henchman21 2mo ago
      I was extremely pleased to login to my Kagi account and see that SlopStop was enabled by default. Thanks for the heads-up on this, and thanks to Kagi of course for enabling it.
    - sudobash1 2mo ago
      Discussed on HN back in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806
    - 2mo ago
vivzkestrel 2mo ago
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
- menno-sh 2mo ago
  I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
  - the_lucifer 2mo ago
    > although I heard there's a Linux version now? Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894. Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
- Larrikin 2mo ago
  What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
  - vivzkestrel 2mo ago
    i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    You're the product in Firefox, just a different kind than in chrome. Ad Nauseam is silly because ad companies know they are fake clicks and don't count them. Ads aren't the only thing you'd need to block from the internet.
    - Larrikin 2mo ago
      There is zero evidence Ad Nauseum does not work, but there are plenty of signals it does. Google banned it from the Chrome store and setting any threshold below one hundred percent click rate just uses random. Even if it is somehow detectable it's just Ublock origin and not every ad network is worth billions of dollars
sanderjd 2mo ago
But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.
- calessian 2mo ago
  Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.
  - sanderjd 2mo ago
    Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.
  - alex1138 2mo ago
    This is absolutely true and yet I know from experience the product forums for years were people screaming at Google for stripping away features And I know they removed the boolean + operator because of Google+
- Arkhaine_kupo 2mo ago
  > The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe. The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered. A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources. It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
cyanydeez 2mo ago
kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update. of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
ndiddy 2mo ago
The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.

by o_m 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

optionalsquid 2mo ago

Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use

dmrivers 2mo ago
I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
- eloisius 2mo ago
  If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago
  - start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
- optionalsquid 2mo ago
  I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies. However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
  - JohnFen 2mo ago
    I didn't know that page existed, thanks! I was amused to see that my blocklist already includes most of the sites that appear there.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2mo ago
  Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it. Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
  - progval 2mo ago
    > Kagi of course reviews it They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
    - equinumerous 2mo ago
      I had the same experience. I don't know why they haven't invested more in this feature. Heck, if they classified every site in their index as "AI/not AI" using machine learning, and had a large allowlist of "known-good" sites, that would take care of most of the problem (I am aware of the drawbacks of text-only AI classification, but they could use other indicators, like the site's publication date, domain name, domain registry date, etc.). I think for right now, the "state-of-the-art" for non-AI search is going to entail maintaining large whitelists/blacklists of websites that are crowd-sources by users (e.g. what you can find in some GitHub repositories). I was hoping that's what SlopStop was going to be, but it is not nearly as effective as it needs to be.
  - Henchman21 2mo ago
    I was extremely pleased to login to my Kagi account and see that SlopStop was enabled by default. Thanks for the heads-up on this, and thanks to Kagi of course for enabling it.
  - sudobash1 2mo ago
    Discussed on HN back in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806
  - 2mo ago

vivzkestrel 2mo ago

imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing

menno-sh 2mo ago
I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
- the_lucifer 2mo ago
  > although I heard there's a Linux version now? Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894. Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
Larrikin 2mo ago
What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago
  i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere
- inigyou 2mo ago
  You're the product in Firefox, just a different kind than in chrome. Ad Nauseam is silly because ad companies know they are fake clicks and don't count them. Ads aren't the only thing you'd need to block from the internet.
  - Larrikin 2mo ago
    There is zero evidence Ad Nauseum does not work, but there are plenty of signals it does. Google banned it from the Chrome store and setting any threshold below one hundred percent click rate just uses random. Even if it is somehow detectable it's just Ublock origin and not every ad network is worth billions of dollars

sanderjd 2mo ago

But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.

calessian 2mo ago
Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.
- sanderjd 2mo ago
  Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  This is absolutely true and yet I know from experience the product forums for years were people screaming at Google for stripping away features And I know they removed the boolean + operator because of Google+
Arkhaine_kupo 2mo ago
> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe. The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered. A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources. It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

cyanydeez 2mo ago

kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update. of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content

ndiddy 2mo ago

The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.