Downvote me into oblivion but Kagi ain’t shit. It’s a glorified Google frontend. The author is right that the web is filled with AI generated articles and fake reviews and lists but Kagi is not immune to this enshittification.
I even tried the same query the author was bitching about.
Here is Kagi’s first two links for top 10 air purifiers. Notice how the first result is a BS website called top10.com and the second one is one of the “fake review” websites .
And here is Google’s. First result is Wirecutter, and this might be subjective but I trust Wirecutter reviews on most things.
Rest of the Google results are exactly what the author was mentioning. But Kagi was no different.
So $10/month to get the same shit? No thank you. I agree that Google turned to shit compared to what it was but it is still the best search engine out there. Now if the article was about privacy concerns then they would have a point. Which is what Kagi is all about anyway. So let’s stop the fucking act.
The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I’m not getting cruft.
SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.
My understanding is that a locally hosted SearXNG instance doesn’t really give you any privacy, unless you “dilute” your searches by letting others do searches from your instance too.
To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.
SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.
All the LLM-generated “top 10” listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven’t bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.
But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google’s index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.
What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn’t do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it’s very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.
Kagi is not “all about” privacy. It’s a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than “trusting” a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn’t put too much wight into this.
The index ain’t it either as it’s mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.
I wouldn’t use “air purifier” as a metric, since it was already a big public story that surely any search engine that’s even half paying attention would have made sure the results for are good. Probably some other consumer good is better for an un-preannounced test run.
(Also I’m not sure that searching “top 10 air purifier” and complaining that you got a top result of top10.com/air-purifiers and that’s not what you wanted makes a ton of sense. FWIW, I did try “air purifier” just out of curiosity and saw a very clear result that DDG had the best results, Google second, and Kagi third.)
I repeated it for “good wireless router” and saw different results; for them, the outcomes were fairly similar with Kagi somewhat better (returning Wirecutter as the top result, and an obselete Stack Exchange answer as the 2nd, which okay it’s not right but I get where you’re coming from sir), and Google and DDG as secondary (returning PCMag and CNet at the top and Wirecutter only further down below).
I searched both Cory Doctorow’s post and the linked 404media article in his post for “air purifier” and found nothing. What author are you referencing?
Dunno, I got entirely different results. Reddit, homeairguides, forbes, a bunch of listicles like consumerreports, wired, ny times, cnet and whatnot, and other websites.
Downvote me into oblivion but Kagi ain’t shit. It’s a glorified Google frontend. The author is right that the web is filled with AI generated articles and fake reviews and lists but Kagi is not immune to this enshittification.
I even tried the same query the author was bitching about. Here is Kagi’s first two links for top 10 air purifiers. Notice how the first result is a BS website called top10.com and the second one is one of the “fake review” websites .
And here is Google’s. First result is Wirecutter, and this might be subjective but I trust Wirecutter reviews on most things.
Rest of the Google results are exactly what the author was mentioning. But Kagi was no different.
So $10/month to get the same shit? No thank you. I agree that Google turned to shit compared to what it was but it is still the best search engine out there. Now if the article was about privacy concerns then they would have a point. Which is what Kagi is all about anyway. So let’s stop the fucking act.
I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
That is the way to go.
The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I’m not getting cruft.
SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.
TIL of this. Thanks.
My understanding is that a locally hosted SearXNG instance doesn’t really give you any privacy, unless you “dilute” your searches by letting others do searches from your instance too.
Route it through a vpn with gluetun and it does…
To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.
SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.
Your search results look very different to mine:
Did you disable Grouped Results?
All the LLM-generated “top 10” listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven’t bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.
But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google’s index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.
What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn’t do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it’s very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.
Kagi is not “all about” privacy. It’s a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than “trusting” a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn’t put too much wight into this.
The index ain’t it either as it’s mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.
I didn’t change any settings. fresh account
Is “Grouped Results” disabled in settings?
I wouldn’t use “air purifier” as a metric, since it was already a big public story that surely any search engine that’s even half paying attention would have made sure the results for are good. Probably some other consumer good is better for an un-preannounced test run.
(Also I’m not sure that searching “top 10 air purifier” and complaining that you got a top result of top10.com/air-purifiers and that’s not what you wanted makes a ton of sense. FWIW, I did try “air purifier” just out of curiosity and saw a very clear result that DDG had the best results, Google second, and Kagi third.)
I repeated it for “good wireless router” and saw different results; for them, the outcomes were fairly similar with Kagi somewhat better (returning Wirecutter as the top result, and an obselete Stack Exchange answer as the 2nd, which okay it’s not right but I get where you’re coming from sir), and Google and DDG as secondary (returning PCMag and CNet at the top and Wirecutter only further down below).
I searched both Cory Doctorow’s post and the linked 404media article in his post for “air purifier” and found nothing. What author are you referencing?
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Thanks.
Dunno, I got entirely different results. Reddit, homeairguides, forbes, a bunch of listicles like consumerreports, wired, ny times, cnet and whatnot, and other websites.