Kagi has multiple indexes of their own
And the AI stuff is all opt on from what I can tell. I’ve never gotten any AI thing except when I asked for it
Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.
Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.
Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.
In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.
TW: Self harm
Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it’s ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.
morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.
Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.
morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Running an index is quite a massive endeavor at the scale of Google. They’re a small team.
I think it makes sense considering there’s a competitive market of indexes already. They make small ones to cover some niches and use existing ones for the rest.
Keep in mind they also add their own reranking and stuff on top of Bing Google whatever
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.
Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.
targetx@programming.dev 2 days ago
Have you tried the small web lens? They run their own index specifically to help surface the content you mention is hard to find by default.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.