Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

  • Wappen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    104·
    9 months ago

    What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.

    For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.

  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    104·
    9 months ago

    I tried Kagi (free 100 query plan) and got about the same results as google/DDG. It’s kind of nice but I couldn’t see subscribing. I hate subscriptions. If they sold access for a flat fee per query (let’s say $5 for 200 queries) I’d buy that, and use a dozen or so queries a month. The rest of the time I’d keep using DDG or occasionally resorting to Google.

    • Kraiden@kbin.run
      63·
      9 months ago

      so I’ve just giving it a quick test vs google with the query “open source chromecast alternative”

      the first result for both is a reddit post about NymphCast

      it’s the rest of the results that are interesting though.

      Google has a ycombinator news article about NymphCast and then decends into the usual “17 best chromecast alternatives in 2024” rubbish

      Kagi on the other hand lists the github for NymphCast, and then goes on to list others… mirrorCast, pyCaster, free Cast, an article on using a raspberry pi as a chromecast alternative.

      obviously this is only anecdotal, and very unscientific, but it’s got me interested for sure! Gonna bookmark it and see how it goes

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      9 months ago

      I love the idea of paying for a high quality service that I use, but Kagi was significantly worse than Google. I searched for local businesses, programming questions, and general knowledge stuff.

      I’ll try it again in a year or two and see if it works for me.

      • scrion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        9 months ago

        I switched to Kagi about 6 months back. It is overall better, but at least on par with Google, also as far as tech / programming - related questions go. Whenever I do not get a useful result from Kagi, it literally finds nothing - I then try Google for verification, which also lists absolutely no results. That happened approximately 4 times since I switched.

        Kagi is worse than Google for: reviews, memes, porn, as well as “descriptive” searches, i. e. when trying to describe the desired result using natural language, e. g. “video game character that swallows everything” (I made that up just now for Kirby).

        Kagi’s ability to use lenses and assign weights to sites can make a big difference.

        At first, they didn’t have anonymous payments and an unattractive pricing model, but that has been fixed for a while, otherwise I wouldn’t have switched.

        Overall, I am very satisfied and have absolutely zero plans of ever using Google again.

        • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          9·
          9 months ago

          I find Kagi results slightly better but the interface is so much nicer and site ranking is great. Mostly though whenever I try using Google it just feels scummy and more obvious than ever that they are trying to shove ad garbage down my brain. I really hope I never need to go back to that again. Agree that crypto payment option for Kagi is clutch, but wish they made that more front and center. Unless you look for it Kagi wants your name, address, and credit card number and all your searches are linked to that. That’s even scummier than Google.

          • darreninthenet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            6·
            9 months ago

            They claim that they don’t link/save your search history so although they have your details for payment, technically it’s not linked. If they aren’t lying…

            • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              I also don’t lie and will send you $10,000USD if you send me your credit card number, cell phone number and social. If I happen to accidentally leak your info a few thousand of my friends I will be sure to give you 10% off of a partially reputable ID protection watchdog service. If you trust random corporations that have almost no enforced security oversight, you really should trust this friendly internet stranger as much if not more.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      Yup, it’s way too expensive. If they bundled it with another service to provide more value, I might consider it. But from some back-of-the-napkin math, they’re charging way more than their competitors make from ads.

      I’d also be interested in a pay-per-search option. I’d be happy loading up $5 every so often if they other services didn’t find what I’m looking for.

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Then they wouldn’t have tiered plans. Anyway try a $12/year plan with a few queries per month. $60/y adds up a lot faster.

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        9 months ago

        They start at $5/month (https://kagi.com/pricing) and that misses some features. But, I thought they started at $10/month. It may have changed. Anyway, I hate subscriptions and would rather pay by the query. It’s something I’d use once in a while, so I don’t want to keep paying while it idles.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    78·
    9 months ago

    Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.

    It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    9 months ago

    Google has also gotten lazy and is prioritizing YouTube and Reddit results, instead of webcrawler results.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      9 months ago

      The reddit results are annoying because you can only see 2 related comments without logging in. I hate that shit. I look for stack overflow links

          • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            Especially after they got rid of the compact interface completely, which was a more stripped-down version of the old one, that didn’t have any of the CSS, or special effects.

            The last workaround stopped working as of a few days ago.

            Old Reddit may well be next on the block.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.caEnglish
    14·
    9 months ago

    Kagi uses Google’s search engine?? I didn’t know that, I thought they’d created their own search engine. If Google blocks Searx, why don’t they block Kagi?

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    I genuinely think Google’s success is its own undoing.

    If everybody had carried on making sites in the same way they did when Google came out, the results would still be good.

    Bit they didn’t. There’s gold in them thar hills, and now SEO and generated bullshit are a way to make money, while Google’s algorithms seem easy to game if you have the resources to do so.

    There’s like a hundred large companies doing this, and if you blocked all their sites in the Google results it’d give results similar to Kagi and other flavour of the month search engines.

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    I’m still very happy with the experience, especially the UX and customisation options, and they’re developing new features fast. Not always successfully at first, e.g. the recent integration of WolframAlpha isn’t entirely a step forward (mostly because they’re not displaying the extra context that WA shows that lets you know when it’s answering the wrong question).

    I think overall most people are very happy, as shown by the frequent recommendations on here (so much so that someone on Lemmy was telling everyone it must be astroturfing).

    • 0xD@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I’m convinced a lot of it is astroturfing. It’s just too perfect and consistent, with the perfect answers for everything and just the right amount of fear mongering.

    • Kraiden@kbin.run
      4·
      9 months ago

      I take your point, and agree when it comes to Google

      But here’s rabbit hole for anyone interested. That brand name being synonymous with the product thing is actually fairly regional.

      We just call them tissues here. I think you can get Kleenex brand here, but I don’t think anybody cares about the brand of tissue. There’s a particular kind that has some kind of aloe Vera extract which is all I’ll use if I’m sick, but I don’t even know what brand they are.

      On the flip side, we call marker pens Biros, and where I grew up we called them Khokis

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    I’ve used it for quite a while now, so I can safely say it’s not just the honeymoon effect. There are certain specific searches that I will prefer Google, for example if I know an exact string from a document that I’m looking for. Google still has a larger search base so if there’s information that can only be found in one or two places, Google is more likely to work. Image and video search on KAGI is still a little bit finicky. I might use Google, DDG, or Bing for those (Actually, DDG is just a front end for Bing in this regard). For everything else, when I’m looking for information or answers to questions, Kagi is the best there is.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I’ve recently started using Qwant since Mozilla has partnered with them and I’ve been pretty satisfied so far.

      What Google has over every other search engine is local results. There’s just no getting around how much useful data Google has on every business in the world.

  • Pringles@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    Been using kagi for several months now and can’t imagine going back. The only thing I still use google for is when I want to shop for a specific product after having used kagi to do my homework. I’m sure I can configure a filter for that, but haven’t gotten around to that yet.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I primarily use a couple locally hosted LLMs for searching for info now.

    Larger LLMs are trained on so much info that they get the answer right surprisingly often.

    Only thing they of course struggle with are recent events.

  • dep@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I thought Kagi shut down.

    I guess turns out no but if I’m going to pay for search it’s something like Perplexity.