"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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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).

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.

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good or not, it's what people associate "searching" with - much as how Kleenex is just tissue paper but you dont really hear others asking for off brand tissues.

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.

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.

I thought Kagi shut down.

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

Fuck off with your ads for a paid search engine.