- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- kagi@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- kagi@lemmy.ml
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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.
It’s not even comparable in quality. It’s like almost trolling to even suggest they are in the same league. If you don’t want to spend 10 dollars, fine, but maybe stop pretending that your instance is somehow the best quality search engine that exists… :)
Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I’ve balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.
Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they’re turning a neat profit off of you; and you’re refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.
Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.
How is it that Cory Doctorow hadn’t hear of Kagi until March of 2024? It’s been widely discussed in tech spaces for quite a while now!
Maybe it’s taken him this long to kick the tires and develop an opinion from daily use. There’s nothing wrong with that.
One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.
I can do everything Kagi does for free…using SearXNG.
So I only have to find one thing Kagi can do, that SearXNG can’t?
Then what?How do you duplicate this feature in SearXNG? https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalized-results.html
It’s basically the major thing keeping me with Kagi.
Isn’t that exactly what the “weight” in searXNG does?
weight
Where can I find that setting? I don’t see anything like that anywhere in the UI. If it’s in the config files and not in the UI, that isn’t particularly useful to me.
That seems like a crutch instead of a real feature. I hate even just thinking about having to manage that. What if you want info from sites you do not already know about? Seems like finding new things through search is basically dead anymore.
Websites I’ve never heard of come up very frequently. The feature I find highly useful involves a) hiding shitty disinformation websites as I encounter them, or blocking sites like pintrest, and b) elevating results from websites I like, like having letterboxd results rank higher than IMDB when I search for movies or whatEVER.
Being able to customize my own results to favour what I’m actually looking for is such a crutch.
Cory Doctorow is a smart guy, and has some great takes. But he also pays for Xitter Blue (or whatever they call it) so do with that info what you will.
Source? I find that doubtful considering his nick is “Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK”
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
No, I’m not having that! That’s rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this “weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista” but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.
Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.
I remember the competition on speed. And Google publishing the response time on the results page as a way to showcase it’s speed over the competitors.
I started using Kagi a few months before $10 became unlimited queries.
When I first switched I’d still, occasionally, swap back to google using bangs because I had to unlearn all the hacks I had to make Google turn up useful things. Now I can’t go back, Google is unsable without those hacks. Its barely usable with them.
Plus Kagi has a “fediverse forum” lens that lets me search Lemmy much more effectively than Lemmy’s search.
SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.
I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive, contrary to what most users seem to feel. I don’t know. When ddg and Google fail me, I will try Kagi and I think maybe only once or twice has it actually made finding what I’m looking for any easier.
I will mention though, you can do a lot of personalization on the results unlike other engines. So maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.
Well yeah, once your trusted sites are at the top, and all the shitty ones don’t even appear, it’s a very nice feeling to search for anything.
I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive
At their worst, they’re as bad as Google’s. For me however, this is a great improvement over using bing/Google proxies which would be the alternative.
maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.
That’s the killer feature IMHO.
