Comment on Apple considered switching to DuckDuckGo from Google for Safari - Bloomberg News
Zimmy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?
It’s like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.
If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.
It’s clear that Google’s motivation is no longer to offer good results. It’s to maximise the time you’re on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.
Every good result they serve you could have been an ad, so they’re incentivised to replace as many with ads as possible.
Paying for a service ensures your incentives (mostly) align. Kagi’s incentive is to make a good search that makes you want to pay for it, google’s incentives are to gather your data to either sell or use themselves, and show you as many ads as possible.
I thought it sounded pretty silly, too. I gave the free trial a shot and for technical searches it was the best I had seen by far. Being able to lower certain sites and raise other sites makes it much easier to filter through shitty results like blog posts and stuff. I pay for it now and it’s worth it to me just for the time savings on technical searches. It definitely is still pretty far behind for things like local business info and stuff, but as a general purpose search engine it’s been extremely good for me.
Or the most annoying thing, trying to research a topic with one word matching that of a recent news event. So you only ever see news sites.
I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.
Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I'm going to be paying for it for a while.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.
It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.
My experience doesn’t go past the free trial, but yes, it is very good. It’s basically Google-level search quality, but without the removal of features and dropping quality that Google itself experiences in the last few years.
That said, it’s still just a regular old search engine. If you used Google 10 years ago, you have a pretty good idea what this feels like. It doesn’t really do anything new or revolutionary. It’s not a “wow, this is amazing” experience, it’s just a “well, this actually works” kind of thing.
Not something I’d pay $10/month for, but if you want to move away from Google without it feeling like a downgrade, it’s currently the only real alternative. Bing, DDG (which is just Bing with window dressing), Yandex, BraveSearch are all still quite a bit worse than Google.
Recently I get good result with Ecosia.
Yeah, it’s very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features
darreninthenet@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google’s own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:
pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fun…
Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as “old Google” IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn’t) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.
So for me, unlike the other poster, I’d recommend it to everyone who’s finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.
ciaocibai@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
Pinterest links are the worst. I just don’t want that shit and images of random crap isn’t what I’m after.