[HN Gopher] Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search ...
___________________________________________________________________
Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users
Author : tech234a
Score : 893 points
Date : 2023-08-04 21:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kagi.com)
| sa46 wrote:
| Does "at least 20 users" imply the list of blocked domains is all
| blocked domains with at least 20 users?
|
| If so, I would have expected a much longer tail.
| isatty wrote:
| I don't use Kagi but I really want the ability to pin Wikipedia
| to the top.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked.
|
| I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN,
| but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful
| reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a
| search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very
| simple question I must have asked, unlike something like
| Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.
| matsemann wrote:
| See https://www.w3fools.com/
|
| It's more a historical thing. Over a decade ago they were
| always on top, with often wrong/misleading/bad
| practice/insecure/simplified stuff. And lots of people thought
| of them as some kinde official entity because of their name
| similarity with W3C / w3.org
|
| It's much better now, though. But for lots of old school
| frontenders the reputation stuck.
| Avamander wrote:
| It still heavily lacks in quality in some areas, while making
| it seem like it is well-written. I just recently started
| blocking it.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Somewhat the same issue as the hilariously named "experts
| exchange" site back in the day.
| zacmps wrote:
| It _was_ offensively bad and incorrect, and while I 've heard
| it has improved since I think a lot of people just remember how
| it used to be and don't use it.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| w3 schools was a good resource, but to me it often feels like
| fluff.
| jraph wrote:
| It has probably improved a lot. It seemed like garbage a few
| years ago. Today it feels trustworthy and useful. I don't know
| what changed.
|
| I still prefer MDN. I trust it to have up to date information.
| It was always very good and it has also improved, including the
| interactive examples.
| CrimsonChapulin wrote:
| They had functional but inaccurate articles (in terms of best
| practices and long term solutions). I avoided them for a time
| but I must admit they listened and amended their tutorials,
| which is more than a lot of websites can say.
| dvh wrote:
| I just remember them gluing strings in how to use MySQL in PHP
| article.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| I never knew W3Schools had such a bad reputation. I learned
| HTML from that site almost a decade ago and found it pretty
| helpful.
|
| I loved their Try it Online!
| 0x073 wrote:
| I knew many developers that used w3schools that thought it
| was official source because w3c, I know it's not completely
| the sites fault but they named the domain. That's one reason
| I dislike, additional the quality of w3schools is compared
| with mdn for beginners that are not interested into the
| details.
| int_19h wrote:
| Historically, at least, it had a lot of examples that
| technically did what they were supposed to do, but in ways
| that you really, really, really shouldn't be doing them.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I agree, I love w3schools.
|
| They provide real examples for real-world uses right on the
| page.
| [deleted]
| joshspankit wrote:
| I'll still click on w3schools but it's not bringing much to the
| table and usually I'll end up back at MDN anyway (big respect
| to the MDN teams).
|
| Given the choice I'd probably block w3schools just so I save
| those couple seconds a month when I click back and in to MDN.
| bunga-bunga wrote:
| > it's not offensively bad either
|
| In your opinion. W3fools only pulled an "it's ok now bro, don't
| sue us" update. Anytime I give it a go, I'm still presented
| with inaccurate and harmfully incomplete results.
|
| Want to learn from a "for dummies" website? Be my guest. But my
| hate is fully justified.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I barely see Pinterest in search results .
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| I find it overwhelms any kind of image search.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Thank god for MDN...Wish I had it when I was learning HTML.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > hate for w3schools
|
| w3 usually just gives me the answer i need to get shit done
| asap.
|
| mdn is a technical reference. useful. but irritating when you
| just need a quick explanation.
|
| w3schools = :/
|
| mdn = :O
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Use your fav llm for that
| junon wrote:
| Hehehe, one of the top results for the example search topic is a
| repo of mine. This explains a lot.
|
| Maybe it's a sign to try Kagi after all.
| tschumacher wrote:
| Anecdotally when searching for Python standard lib docs on
| Google, python.org is never at the top. I think this is because
| they have a single page titled "Built-in types" instead of
| dedicated pages titled e.g. "str.split".
|
| Above python.org I get links to w3schools.com, programiz.com,
| python-reference.readthedocs.io (some inofficial project
| abandoned 2015), geeksforgeeks.org, codegree.de and
| freecodecamp.org.
| aldanor wrote:
| If on macos, highly recommending Dash for all your programming
| docs needs for any language. Real gem and a time saver.
| arealaccount wrote:
| Tried out a few searches that I've recently struggled with on
| both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially
| if I can get a license through work.
|
| I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam
| if they hit a critical mass.
|
| Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all
| their ads, but can't seem to win over all of the "organic" blogs.
| freediver wrote:
| > I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO
| spam if they hit a critical mass.
|
| We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that
| use ads or trackers.
|
| SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization,
| which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating
| ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient
| method for prioritizing high-quality web results.
| internetter wrote:
| Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of
| free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means
| more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Cool.
|
| I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For
| research I certainly search like a professional, but don't
| have the income stream to compensate.
| ftaghn wrote:
| > Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse
| incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so
| upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do
| the opposite.
|
| Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and
| their knowledge of it is why early google was good.
|
| https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-
| motives-...
|
| > Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page,
| 1998)
|
| > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial
| search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising
| business model do not always correspond to providing
| quality search to users. For example, in our prototype
| search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is
| "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a
| study which explains in great detail the distractions and
| risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while
| driving. This search result came up first because of its
| high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an
| approximation of citation importance on the web. It is
| clear that a search engine which was taking money for
| showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying
| the page that our system returned to its paying
| advertisers. For this type of reason and historical
| experience with other media, we expect that advertising
| funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the
| advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
|
| > But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough
| mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive
| search engine that is transparent and in the academic
| realm.
|
| Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same
| understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side.
|
| > "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the
| needs of the consumers."
|
| They know exactly what it is that they are doing.
| prartichoke wrote:
| Pretty simple then. Just doing the exact opposite of what
| Google is doing. Makes sense
| kouru225 wrote:
| Why y'all blocking alternativeto.net?
| xlbuttplug2 wrote:
| Either they've filtered out porn sites or they have a long way to
| go in terms of adoption.
| slaw wrote:
| I think porn sites are already filtered by Google. Kagi doesn't
| have it's own search, it is just layer over Google search.
| RGBCube wrote:
| Not just Google, they use Bing and Yandex(?, might be
| something else) too, I think.
| JopV wrote:
| Kagi does have its own search index of niche sites, they even
| have an API for it. This is combined with Google results;
| they used to combine with Bing as well but stopped due to
| Microsoft charging too much money.
|
| Very different from DuckDuckGo and Startpage which are still
| just a Bing proxy and a Google proxy respectively.
| slaw wrote:
| You are correct. Kagi is more than a Google proxy.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| I wonder if the Kagi users approved of the publishing of this
| data, taken from what I assume are their personal settings in
| Kagi.
| freediver wrote:
| This, like many other Kagi features, came as a feature
| suggestion from the very Kagi users [1].
|
| And the way the list is done is that it aggregates data
| anonymously and posts only domains that were acted upon by at
| least 20 users to preserve privacy.
|
| [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/1098-a-page-for-a-list-of-
| sites-t...
| teddyh wrote:
| I don't think _every single_ Kagi user asked for this
| feature, so I still wonder how those users who did _not_ ask
| for the feature could approve of their private settings being
| used in this way.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| I might be tempted to use Kagi (especially for my family), but
| the thing I'm afraid of is the quality of search in non-English
| (specifically Polish) internet. Anybody knows how does that work?
| pzmarzly wrote:
| It has a quick region switcher like DDG (a must-have for me),
| and the results are way better than DDG. Give it a try!
|
| I just did a Google vs Kagi vs DDG test on "grzyby marynowane"
| (pickled mushrooms, usually pickled champignons, a common snack
| on Polish family gatherings).
|
| Google: Starts with recipes, then there is Allegro ("Polish
| Amazon") where you can buy jars of them, then Google page ends
| (10 results/page).
|
| Kagi: starts the same, but there is more (20?) results/page. It
| continues with some podcast episode about pickled mushrooms on
| Soundcloud, a Wikipedia page, some more recipes in Polish and
| English and finally a Pinterest page (:rage:).
|
| DuckDuckGo: first page is just recipes. I decided to give it a
| bigger chance, so I checked out a second page. There you have
| pretty unrelated articles like "where to pick wild mushrooms"
| and an Allegro link in between.
|
| However, as happy Kagi user I still have to note that they are
| using Apple Maps for maps/POI search. As you well know, they
| are quite useless to us compared to Google Maps, so I keep
| using !gm bang to get redirected. Bangs work almost like DDG,
| the only difference is that they must be at beginning or end of
| your search (DDG lets you put it in between words too).
| developer93 wrote:
| The first 100 searches are free, just need an email address
| that can be a throwaway to sign up, so you can check it for
| yourself with just a bit of time expended.
| ptrrrrrrppr wrote:
| I started using Kagi specifically because of more accurate
| results in Polish comparing to other search engine.
|
| A teraz jestem placacym uzytkownikiem, juz chyba z pol roku :)
| smodo wrote:
| It works well enough for me, can't say I've really looked back
| since I signed up.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I've been a customer for quite a while and never configured this
| feature. Shame on me. Thanks for bringing my attention to it.
| buggy6257 wrote:
| Looks like the summary here is "f** Pinterest". Soooo many stack
| overflow scraper sites too god I hate those.
| Arnavion wrote:
| For the SO clones: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-
| dev-filter
| TillE wrote:
| It's incredibly annoying to be searching for a thing, and get a
| result from Pinterest that's just a bookmark of that thing.
|
| As far as I know, this is more a failure of Google's
| inexplicable algorithm than Pinterest doing anything
| specifically bad.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I like Pinterest, it is a useful site. But it is basically a
| (image) search engine itself, so it's pages shouldn't be in
| Google results. Just like you don't want Bing or DDG image
| search results showing up in Google searches.
| munk-a wrote:
| Pinterest does a whole lot specifically bad - they tend to
| trap users with login prompts on entry and make it impossible
| to see the full image. If I'm searching for a meme to DM to
| someone or a photograph of a landmark Pintrest is something I
| avoid like the plague. It's essentially a black-hole for
| images - people pin them and then they are lost forever.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Pinterest could simply tell robots to 'noindex,follow' the
| page to help search engines understand there is no utility in
| it appearing for a search. But agree, perhaps it shouldn't
| rank first anyway.
|
| Guess it depends on whether it's UGC entirely or whether the
| CMS could note these kind of pages. Again, shouldn't be hard
| if it's just a simple link as the main content of the page.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Why would Pinterest do that? They've conquered image search
| SEO, and I expect most sites on the internet want to play
| as greedily as possible.
|
| Google are the ones who should be looking at the situation
| and asking if this is the state they really want.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| There's precedent that would make it in Pinterest's best
| interest. IIRC Google's "Panda" algo update basically
| wiped out search referrals to certain content farms
| overnight, can't recall specific examples but there were
| some at the time. They were labelled as low quality and
| subsequently faded into obscurity.
|
| //added EHow is an example of a site that was flagged
| moonshinefe wrote:
| I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall geeksforgeeks
| being ok a few years ago. But I've started avoiding it because it
| seems like there's multiple nag screens in a row whenever I make
| the mistake of clicking. Seems a lot of people agree.
|
| Is the issue here these sites aren't putting up the barriers to
| the crawlers, and are getting high ranking in all the results
| despite all the friction to normal users? It'd be nice if there
| were a way for a search engines to tell if paywalls / nag screens
| are a thing on sites and to demote them from the results
| accordingly.
|
| It seems like it wouldn't be hard for them to tell, but maybe
| they don't want to de-rank sites with these patterns. But really,
| from the consumers' perspective, who wants these sites in the
| results? I'm all for subscribing to something if I use it
| repeatedly, but that doesn't describe 90% of the sites I visit
| and I don't have the money for 1000 subscriptions.
|
| Maybe they could just have a filter to filter for free sites
| only. I don't know what the solution is, but having blocked
| domains while nice is just a band-aid.
| fosspowered wrote:
| One recommendation for Kagi is to also introduce region based
| pricing. I subscribed, but in my country, the base price is
| probably too much for most people (that said I doubt the
| mentality here would increase sales for you so it is not quite a
| no-brainer).
| kelvie wrote:
| I think they're pretty transparent with their pricing, so I'm
| not entirely sure they can afford region-based pricing until
| their own costs go down.
| freediver wrote:
| We get asked this a lot. The problem is that one search costs
| the same whether done from a desert in Africa or from San
| Francisco. And since we are not breakeven yet, there is nowhere
| to discount from.
|
| We mitigated some of the price anxiety by introducing the $5/mo
| plan, but we are still prioritizing sustainability over growth
| and will not let have a situation where we are on average
| losing money per customer (or otherwise eventually there will
| be no Kagi down the road).
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| surprised not to see ehow, wikihow, etc
| freediver wrote:
| Could be because they do not surface in the results much to
| begin with.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I guess you're right. I haven't seen them in a while either.
| But for a while there they would be among the top results for
| all kinds of searches, and the content itself was always
| garbage.
|
| But I don't get pinterest very often lately either. Not never
| but not most of the time either.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Surprised to see kknews.cc here, probably the biggest content
| farm in Chinese by far
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I love that they also provide, in the same page, the option to
| update your own configuration. Easy pre-emptive blocking/boosting
| :)
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, that forward-thinking UI design immediately stuck me, and
| reminded me again why I am a loyal customer.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Most documentation sites along with the stackoverflow sites and
| the venerable wikipedia are among the top most boosted. Only if
| someone brought search to books, wouldn't that be wonderful?
| MrVandemar wrote:
| The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It
| obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.
|
| I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more
| diverse searching requirements, and if so, how they would be able
| to actually reach them.
| freediver wrote:
| > It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT
| professionals.
|
| I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on
| things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here).
|
| > I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more
| diverse searching requirements,
|
| Yes, we are :)
|
| > if so, how they would be able to actually reach them
|
| Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my
| family members on board a paid search product.
|
| I might add that "Kagi for Kids" is the first true attempt at
| having a search engine made specifically for kids, with a host
| of parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25
| years for some reason.
|
| We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but
| are tech-savvy) becoming members. This may be followed by non-
| tech savvy users in the future. I do see the first signs of the
| age of ad-supported, "free" search, coming to an end [2].
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan
|
| [2] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
| Semaphor wrote:
| > We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies
| (but are tech-savvy) becoming members.
|
| I've seen quite a few marketing people and researchers in
| (their discord channel) #introduce-yourself
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Hi. Would there be any chance of you releasing the index of
| how many trackers websites have publicly? I remember reading
| about that somewhere on your site, but you eventually took
| that offline.
| freediver wrote:
| Sure, we can make this a public API. We were already
| thinking about this but other things got in the way.
|
| Would you mind posting this as a feature suggestion on
| kagifeedback.org ? (this is how most ideas for Kagi come to
| life)
| eloisius wrote:
| The work you all are doing is incredible. Thank you, and I'll
| be a paying customer as long as you keep the show going. I'm
| notoriously stingy about paying subscriptions for tech
| services, but the money I pay for Kagi directly impacts my
| productivity. It feels like a distant nightmare when I think
| back about the days when I spent time sitting through
| blogspam results on Google :p
| user3939382 wrote:
| > parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25
| years for some reason.
|
| IE tried to setup a rating scheme for websites to adopt for
| this purpose but it never got any traction. Someone wrote an
| interesting post about it once but I can't find it.
| radicality wrote:
| Hi. Thanks for the great service!
|
| Any chance you would consider adding cryptocurrency payments
| as an option? You would load up the account with these
| prepaid credits, and then use whatever plan you want until
| the credits run out. This is how I pay for Mullvad and works
| well for me.
|
| I think would be nice as I see kagi is aiming to be privacy-
| forward. And it's nice knowing that such a payment is a one-
| off and won't forever keep renewing.
| freediver wrote:
| We have a discussion on our forum [1] about this. Input
| welcome!
|
| [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-
| payments-ala...
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| Yikes, that thread reflects so badly on Kagi to me. Over
| a year of people explaining why Monero is needed if you
| actually cared about user privacy, with no results. Weird
| claims that it is difficult to implement. Can only
| conclude that the company doesn't actually care about
| user privacy
| dehugger wrote:
| Or, more likely, they didn't want to take on the
| additional burden of transacting in funny money of
| dubious worth.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| Hope you enjoy linking all your search queries to your
| credit card, really. This attitude is unbelievable to me.
| nottorp wrote:
| And pray tell, how does one acquire this Monero that
| you're defending with religious fervor? By linking your
| credit card to some "currency" exchange that may or may
| not already be under investigation for fraud?
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| Even if it were a process as invasive and painful as
| getting a bank account, it would remain the only
| technology that enables users to get a search account
| privately (since Kagi says cash is not scalable for
| them). Given the level of snark and off-topicness, I
| presume you don't actually expect me to answer the
| question with dozens of different methods.
|
| This is a company that claims over and over that they are
| privacy-respecting, but are running a service that
| unnecessarily collects your real ID via credit card,
| otherwise you can't do searches. After seeing what
| happened to Google, I am shocked that people like you are
| so dismissive toward me for trying to hold them to
| account and caring about this issue. Yes I react with
| religious fervor at this issue - privacy. This is an age
| where companies are handing over information to convict
| people for seeking abortions even in the US.
|
| If you have another solution then please share it.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Given the level of snark and off-topicness, I presume
| you don't actually expect me to answer the question with
| dozens of different methods.
|
| Dozens of different methods to ... buy crypto? You can
| keep them.
|
| I would trust something like Kagi more than any crypto
| exchange to keep my privacy.
|
| You are right that it may not be a good idea to have all
| your searches tied to your identity, but mixing crypto
| into that won't help.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| I dont understand anything you wrote here
| barnabee wrote:
| If you use your credit card with an exchange to buy
| Monero, then use that Monero (from a non-custodial/self
| operated wallet) to pay for Kagi search (or Mullvad or
| anything else) you're not linking the ID tied to the
| credit card to your searches and other activity. That's
| the point.
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| Please don't waste time on this! You're all doing such
| good work and I'd much rather not see it wasted on
| indulging some techno-anarchist nerds
| Gareth321 wrote:
| There is a lot of value currently tied up in crypto
| around the world, with increasing difficulty in using it
| on products and services. Offering a way to use this
| value would open additional revenue streams for Kagi. The
| challenge is in conversion, as many banks do not support
| the practise, and laws are becoming tougher with regards
| to crypto payments.
| maccard wrote:
| That doesn't sound particularly valuable to me. If it's
| that valuable, why don't you convert it to USD and pay
| Kagi with that?
| lolinder wrote:
| This sounds an awful lot like you're saying "it's too
| hard for me and others to convert our crypto into cash,
| so I'd like Kagi to do it for me."
| omnimus wrote:
| So it would be useless to Kagi...
| jonReadingNews wrote:
| I was hesitant to configure my partner's devices (family
| plan) to set as default engine but eventually convinced them
| and they haven't even brought it up once since. I assume no
| news is good news! I would be less hesitant to recommend to
| other non-tech friends/family if it were easier to configure
| as default on Safari. Heck, I'd even entertain gifting
| subscriptions. The quality of results for me has been
| incredibly reliable. Enjoyable, even. And, I didn't even take
| the time to start configuring these kinds of rules. Love
| this. Great product. Wishing long, lasting success.
| freediver wrote:
| Thank you very much for the kind words.
|
| Unfortunately we can not influence the choices that Safari
| makes, but we did pull an effort to build an entire browser
| [1] to replace it because of that :)
|
| [1] https://browser.kagi.com
| DavideNL wrote:
| There's an alternative [1], so you can use any search
| engine. Although i always wonder about whether my privacy
| is at risk when using this app...
|
| [1] xSearch for Safari:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-
| safari/id157990206...
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Any progress on a Linux version?
| freediver wrote:
| We haven't begun work on the Linux version of the browser
| yet. We will need to significantly expand our team before
| undertaking the development of a browser for a new
| platform.
| mkbkn wrote:
| Please make a browser for Linux too. And please make it
| based on Firefox preferably.
|
| Thank you. Lots of love to Kagi, though I'm not a paying
| user yet but I do love what you folks are doing and want
| to f*ck Google.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why Firefox? What's wrong with the WebKit they're using
| already?
| latexr wrote:
| > And please make it based on Firefox preferably.
|
| The macOS browser is based on WebKit. If the team can't
| justify the Linux version yet, changing it to a whole
| different engine (and one which is notoriously hard to
| embed, by admission of Mozilla itself) is even less
| likely.
| int_19h wrote:
| One thing that I don't quite get about your family plans: why
| is the smaller plan ($14 for 1.5k queries) cheaper per query
| than the larger one ($20 for 2k queries)? Not that it's a big
| difference, but it feels off somehow.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Product prices are determined by the willingness for
| consumers to pay for them. Families (especially kids) have
| different priorities and search habits to IT professionals,
| for example, which appears to be a common persona for them.
| It is likely that they bet that the four extra users and
| child friendly options are what families care about, rather
| than a high number of searches. It's also likely that
| families simply don't need that many searches, and in
| limiting them to 2,000, they discourage abuse (six
| professionals purchasing one family plan).
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current
| demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT
| professionals.
|
| And specifically, American programmers and IT professionals.
| memefrog wrote:
| Specifically, American web programmers. MDN is the second-
| most-pinned website.
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| As a European IT professional and a Kagi subscriber, I get my
| information from and contribute my knowledge to the same
| sources as you do. I don't know why I would bother to look
| something up in my native language when there is much more
| information available in English, the lingua franca of the
| (Western) world. I don't even read Wikipedia in my own
| language, unless the subject is better covered.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I'm also European and subscribe to Kagi. One feature I
| really like is that I can specifically make a local search
| by adding a bang with the country, like !fr or !es.
| phreack wrote:
| I feel that programmers are the main audience that knows life
| can be better in software. A typical programmer might be so
| offended by Pinterest's awfulness that they'll look for any way
| to prevent it, knowing it can be done. Some might go for an
| extension like uBlacklist, others might be so furious that they
| want to pay money to stop this somehow.
|
| But seriously, I do think that unless you work with software,
| it's hard to even imagine alternatives to the big players could
| exist.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| It's gotta be better than the SEO garbage on Google
| qingcharles wrote:
| Half these sites are my guilty pleasures, pinterest.com,
| dailymail.co.uk, tiktok.com...
| coolliquidcode wrote:
| pinterest has it's place. It's bad rep is because you have to
| be logged in to see anything.
| input_sh wrote:
| Is TikTok even search engine friendly? I don't remember ever
| ending up there by searching for something (that's not
| explicitly someone's TikTok account).
| amelius wrote:
| Google: we need to have your personal information because that
| allows us to provide you with a better experience.
|
| Me: Ok, please block these domains: "pinterest.com,
| w3schools.com, ..."
|
| Google: Sorry, can't do that!
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Isn't instagram the same?
| arboles wrote:
| Umm, according to the latest data, user choice is far less
| competitive than algorithms at stabilizing engagement metrics.
| Users' behavior speaks louder than what they believe in their
| little heads.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Can't tell if sarcasm or not.
| zeusk wrote:
| He probably works on Google search or Pinterest.
|
| I want least engagement with the search engine; it's a fail
| if I'm spending time just looking at search page and not
| the results.
| teolandon wrote:
| The "in their little heads" gives it away.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| my little head sometimes has me patch and spin up old
| pc's which should be a fairly meaningless and pointless
| exercise if it wasn't for those marvelous algorithms.
| Each box represents a mental time capsule worth of
| youtube suggestions. It attempts to lure the viewer into
| popular shit everyone else is watching but if you
| carefully avoid those thumbs and click only on the things
| seeded initially it will gradually show more and more of
| it. Things like small minded peasants farming their
| little farm by hand in languages completely unknown to
| me. The next box is seeded with "full movie" with an
| algorithm trying to carve out my taste. I also have A box
| full of little prepper people.
|
| On my main pc it is 100% convinced I want to watch
| starcraft, technology, coding and fitness videos. Im not
| completely uninterested but the goal of the design seems
| to make my mind even smaller. It is constantly signaling
| that... how put it.... it thinks Im shallow as fuck.
|
| Then again on the other box it is convinced I want to see
| nothing but old people planting rice. Its probably not
| good for its world view. If it was conscious it would be
| a cruel thing to do.
|
| oh the thoughts going on in my small mind...
| [deleted]
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Or perhaps an amoral and unrestrained trillion-dollar
| paperclip-maximizer is, within certain paramaters, more
| effective at steering monkey-brains than said brains'
| resident consciousnesses are.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I've never been able to put into words my problem with the
| contrast between massive data aggregation and the degraded user
| experience of the web.
|
| This completely frames it for me.
|
| I was very hesitant to pay for a search engine at first, but
| Kagi has turned into the "stickiest" monthly subscription I
| have.
| zeusk wrote:
| Pinterest is absolutely the worst; most of the time the linked
| page doesn't even have what I was looking for.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| It has blown my mind for years the extent to which the Google
| Image Search team let Pinterest completely undermine the
| usefulness of their product, and they just kept on giving
| pinterest the top search result spots.
|
| It's honestly more useless than the pages with a list of 1000
| phone numbers that you get when you try to search for who an
| unknown number is.
|
| Does anyone even work on Google Image Search? Is it run by a
| bunch of undercover Pinterest employees who infiltrated the
| team and pushed out the Googlers?
| jart wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised by all the Pinterest hate because I
| don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked
| a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the
| dead. You just don't do it.
| otikik wrote:
| > It's like drinking from the dead
|
| I get that this must be something bad, but what does it
| mean, exactly? Drinking blood from a corpse?
| sp0rk wrote:
| >I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left
| clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking
| from the dead. You just don't do it.
|
| You just don't do it according to whom? I would consider
| viewing the fullsize image to be core functionality for
| an image search, and it used to work just fine on GIS up
| until a few years ago.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Could be a link between Pinterest and Google investors
| lxm wrote:
| Comedian Phil Wang has this joke about Netflix not recommending
| him his eponymous show the day it was released.
|
| "I am Phil Wang! There's nothing on Netflix more relevant to me
| than an hour of my own thoughts!"
|
| https://podtail.com/en/podcast/netflix-is-a-daily-joke/phil-...
| jsheard wrote:
| Sometimes they get it... though still with a 2% degree of
| uncertainty.
|
| https://twitter.com/missdianemorgan/status/16718830928004464.
| ..
| 12907835202 wrote:
| I've never quite understood the w3schools hate. It can be quite
| useful.
|
| My most used page is this one when I need to jog my memory:
| https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php
|
| It's much better than this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto...
|
| Or any of the other results on the first page
| andirk wrote:
| It often outranks MDN official docs which these days are very
| readable, in-depth, with examples, and a simple UI and the only
| time I click to inappropriately named W3Schools is by accident
| because it's the top result and I'm expecting MDN and then I
| click back and that's why I don't like it.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Nothing about that makes w3 a poor source. I get why you
| block it - so MDN is shown first. That's fair. Im just saying
| its not a fault of W3. Because I tend to agree with that guy.
| W3 really isnt bad. A bit simplistic, and MDN is better, but
| its not bad.
| junon wrote:
| W3 has a bad reputation because, at least a long while ago,
| it was rife with blatantly false or misleading information.
| rchaud wrote:
| There's literally working code demos for everything on
| the site that's front-end or client-side.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Cross-platform demos?
| int_19h wrote:
| Yes, and _historically_ those code demos were often wrong
| in many important ways (like not working in all browsers,
| or insecure). They are much better now but reputation is
| hard to recover.
| rchaud wrote:
| Wouldn't that have been the case everywhere before JS
| browser support standardized to ES 2015 and above?
| naillo wrote:
| That must have been like 12 years ago or more at least
| because in my career I don't have much memory of feeling
| betrayed by the information on their site.
| junon wrote:
| Yes some people have been doing web development for more
| than 12 years (:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools
| .co...
| raincole wrote:
| It's exactly 12 years ago. I started learning JavaScript
| in summer 2011 and I remember w3school was often
| misleading.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| That's why Kagi's personalization is so cool here. Kagi
| doesn't have to block it, and neither does the user. The
| user can just lower it, and raise MDN, because that's what
| they want in their search, and it helps them more.
| rascul wrote:
| > Nothing about that makes w3 a poor source.
|
| I'm sure you meant w3schools but w3.org is where a lot of
| the official documentation for web technologies is and not
| affiliated with w3schools.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Yeah the simplicity is what I prefer about W3schools. A lot
| of times I want a quick code example and don't really want
| to go in depth about how something works.
| thayne wrote:
| I have similar feelings about baeldung.com. It isn't that the
| content is inherently bad, but it is super annoying that when
| I search for a java class the first few results are from
| baeldung instead of the official javadocs.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| How wonderful to differ - I actually love bite sized,
| "tldr" or baeldung and almost always get what I need. (not
| to mention that quite often javadocs of many project are
| just empty or severely lacking... )
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I think the java official docs are rarely explanatory, they
| are just plain description with a lot of fluff and useless
| information
| deely3 wrote:
| Yeah. Search for class, open official docs, read very
| short description. And still have absolutely zero idea is
| where this class is used, and how it should be created,
| and what alternatives.
| zvolsky wrote:
| w3schools used to be one of the best resources ~15 years ago.
| Today I intuitively avoid it because
|
| 1. The ads make the fan on my laptop spin (I prefer to avoid
| ad-heavy websites over using adblock)
|
| 2. The 'Try it yourself' button is fake. It doesn't actually
| run the code and doesn't let you edit it.
|
| 3. It is not a good reference. To give an example, the last
| time I visited w3schools was upon searching "react ul li",
| which landed me on the page
| https://www.w3schools.com/react/react_lists.asp . Ironically,
| the reason why I was searching the term, was to find advice on
| setting the "key" prop in on list items. The w3schools example
| doesn't even mention the prop and produces errors. Compare that
| to the official reference which ranks much lower in Google
| search: https://react.dev/learn/rendering-lists#where-to-get-
| your-ke... .
| chocolatkey wrote:
| W3Schools was essential in helping me get to where I am today.
| Learning HTML and PHP through it was great, my favorite feature
| being their "Try It Yourself" button, which opens up a sandbox
| where you can play around with PHP, HTML, CSS, JS etc (note
| it's not just client-side languages like MDN does). For
| beginners, this kind of thing is essential, and this was before
| MDN was good. And even now, I compare MDN vs. a W3Schools page,
| and the overall design and content is more welcoming for
| beginners.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It used to be worse. But overall I agree with you. Its accurate
| albeit often a bit simplistic.
| lolinder wrote:
| From what I understand a lot of it is residual. W3schools has
| always been directed at beginners, but it also used to be wrong
| rather frequently.
|
| This site [0] used to be the hub for the hate and now has a
| message saying that w3schools has gotten better. If you're
| curious, they still have a link to the web archive that has all
| the mistakes documented.
|
| The most egregious of their mistakes to me:
|
| > [...] professional web developers often prefer HTML editors
| like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, instead of writing plain text.
|
| [0] https://www.w3fools.com/
| version_five wrote:
| As others have said, it's t least in part because of the
| beginner orientation. I'm not a web developer and I found it
| useful when looking up some html/css stuff for a project years
| ago. But for example in python I find it infuriating to see
| geeksforgeeks or whatever at the top of my search results. I
| want SO or documentation for most stuff and consider the rest
| spam.
|
| All that to say, I think beginner oriented well SEO'd content
| is going to be polarizing, which makes Kagi's approach great
| for everyone, if you want it it's there, if it annoys you,
| quickly block it
| drewtato wrote:
| I'm also a fan of the CSS selectors page, but it's an
| exception. Especially for JS stuff, MDN is usually better.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| I learned from w3schools in the early 2000s, and helped
| instruct my high school web design course with it.
|
| I wish I hadn't. There were many innacuracies, outdated advice,
| and over simplifications.
|
| I came up on a slew of weird and inconsistent sources, and that
| bit me when discussing things in college. I often felt over
| confident because of these type of sites.
|
| W3schools (used to at least) gave a very shallow intro to
| programming languages (PHP, ASP, etc), and I remember a
| professor basically laughing at me once because of that
| misinformation.
|
| So, maybe others had experiences like mine.
|
| EDIT
|
| They also had these weird "certifications" for technologies
| that were basically really dumbed down quizzes. They were made
| to make people feel special, I think. Dunno, I did them all,
| and I almost got laughed out of class.
| dixie_land wrote:
| my 2 cents:
|
| w3schools tend to oversimplify the concepts to the point of
| technical inaccuracy.
|
| and the tone of the articles read more like tutorials instead
| of reference manuals.
| ghayes wrote:
| Yeah MDN is the de-facto reference guide for web frameworks.
| W3schools feels like beginner tutorials. For me, I want "what
| happens if I pass undefined as the second arg to this
| function" and w3schools doesn't answer that. It's fine as a
| site, I suppose, it was insane when it outranked more
| complete websites. Off topic I see this more and more with
| Stackoverflow where semi-related questions outrank official
| docs.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| [dead]
| phyzome wrote:
| In the 2000s, it was very often egregiously wrong. People
| remember.
| malikNF wrote:
| Yep. W3schools is one of those sites that helped me begin my
| career. I still find it useful to look up something in a hurry.
| No idea why so many people hate it.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| w3 schools is on several of those lists, including "raise", so
| your opinion is shared by others.
| eviks wrote:
| Are there shared lists you can subscribe to (and extend) instead
| of having to waste a lot of time implementing your own from
| scratch?
| ptrrrrrrppr wrote:
| Isn't this page a shared list? As Kagi user I can click a
| button next to every domain here to apply given setting
| eviks wrote:
| no, thousands and thousands of clicks isn't what makes a list
| shared
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I wonder why brietbart and Washington post are filtered so much?
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| It has the "wrong" bias for most of the HN crowd:
| https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
|
| To be fair, it _is_ biased, but then so are most outlets one
| way or the other: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem with Breitbart isn't just bias, it's the amount
| of outright blatantly false claims.
|
| (This isn't to say that other major media outlets don't have
| problems with accuracy. But the magnitude is very different.)
| zo1 wrote:
| But like what? Genuinely curious for an example of
| "blatantly false claims"? As I'm on the "right" side of the
| spectrum, and these kinds of comments come from a criticism
| of "misinformation".
|
| Also, as an aside. What is a "false claim"? If it's a
| claim, they're asking you to believe it, which means they
| need to motivate it and provide details to back it up.
| Seems precisely where all the media generally is (including
| CNN/BBC/etc), pandering to peoples' bias without saying
| anything factually incorrect.
| aemreunal wrote:
| I'm sure you can guess why Breitbart is blocked so much...
| axblount wrote:
| For the Washington Post, it's probably because of the paywall.
| Havoc wrote:
| Interesting yes, but feels more like a measure of their very
| niche userbase than a reflection of the websites value.
|
| The average human out there is not boosting developer.mozilla.org
|
| Still...I'm thankful that they publish the stats. It's a useful
| mental reference point if nothing else
| gcanyon wrote:
| I've been shouting for years how google should know by now, if
| there is a relevant wikipedia page, it should be at the top of
| the results -- not number 2 or 3, number 1. Every time.
|
| Likewise IMDB (not that I'm fond of the site, if there were an
| alternative I'd switch in a heartbeat) -- if I search for "bogart
| bacall" then the top six results should be IMDB and Wikipedia for
| The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo.
|
| How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a
| mystery.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How google hasn 't figured that out in the past fifteen years
| is a mystery._
|
| It has. Google knows exactly what it's doing.
|
| It's just that Google makes money from keeping you searching,
| not from giving you the right answer.
| Tenemo wrote:
| Let's dispel with this fiction that Google doesn't know what
| they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're
| trying to change the internet.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Is this a Rubio quote?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Yeah, it's so good he said it twice.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm curious, if you're mostly looking for a wikipedia page, why
| aren't you using wikipedia's search feature?
| yCombLinks wrote:
| I always just new tab -> type. Navigating to wikipedia first
| is a drag.
| teddyh wrote:
| I suggest that you change your browser's default search
| engine to be Wikipedia.
| DrRobinson wrote:
| Trakt.tv is a good alternative to IMDb btw
| dfee wrote:
| Feature request: native iOS safari support. I have a redirect set
| up, an extension.
|
| But the ability to change it for real (ie without redirect) would
| be huge.
|
| (I believe this feature request is targeted at Apple!)
| baxuz wrote:
| I expected to see snyk up there.
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| How exactly does Kagi bill you for going over your monthly limit?
|
| Do they send you a bill at a later date, or are you meant to
| refill your balance before you can make more searches, or what?
|
| I assume they don't keep your credit card on file and charge you
| for each individual extra search.
| freediver wrote:
| It will ask you if you want to upgrade your plan or to enable
| pay per use with customizable limits in place.
|
| More info:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/billing.html#billing-set...
| enduku wrote:
| Kagi search is brilliant in this aspect. There used to be a
| similar service [0] not too long ago that blocked many spam sites
| from the search results.
|
| [0] http://millionshort.com/
| dotcoma wrote:
| People sure love Pinterest! ;)
| lolinder wrote:
| This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's
| what makes their results so much better than Google's: where
| Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi
| comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of
| that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains
| as you go!
| yosito wrote:
| This is the feature that I originally started using Kagi for,
| but I wouldn't say it's the best innovation. Their default
| search results are already dramatically better than Google's,
| and their AI tools which can summarize individual results or
| give you a quick answer for your question based on the first
| page of results are way more innovative. All of those features
| combined and their subscription-based business model make Kagi
| by far the most innovative player in search at the moment.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Also: incentives are aligned. Kagi gets money from its users,
| so it will do what's best for them. Google's incentives are
| more muddled, to put it mildly.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I have been using this with ublock for a long time. It actually
| makes me wonder if that is the reason I dont have the complains
| about google search that I read about here
|
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
| mnmalst wrote:
| Wasn't aware of these list, thanks for mentioning it. It's a
| nice addition to ublock origin.
| scarmig wrote:
| Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks,
| at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a
| "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago.
|
| If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious
| that it's a good idea for an established search engine
| targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a
| great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an
| initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea
| actually works well in practice: if 100k people _think_ that
| manual curation of search result domains is a high value
| feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done
| its job.
|
| [0] I wrote a more detailed comment on why a few months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800
| bambax wrote:
| From your original comment:
|
| > _Third, some people will probably block domains they
| shouldn 't have blocked, and then have a bad user
| experience in future searches as the sites with genuinely
| best results is blocked. And then you're only left with
| only bad options: ignoring the users' stated preferences
| which they'll hate, or serving bad results that they'll
| also hate._
|
| That's a real possibility, but it can be addressed by
| presenting a block that would say, for example "results
| from blocked domains" or some such.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > that's trying to establish an initial niche
|
| Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if
| it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an
| effort to monetise its popularity.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| A key point is that Kagi raised its prices already so it
| was sustainable. The reason most services get worse is
| because they are downright unprofitable and it is
| impossible to get them there without either making them
| drastically worse, or raising prices, which free sites
| can't do.
|
| Kagi has already put itself on a path where it doesn't
| have to make itself worse to cover its expenses, because
| it is already covering them.
| pokeymcsnatch wrote:
| It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'.
| Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd
| go under in a heartbeat.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| "Enshittification": God, I love this term. It so
| perfectly captures what happens to a product when
| revenues stall and product managers think of _anything_
| to drive new revs. See: Microsoft Windows or Microsoft
| Office.
|
| I was just about to finish this post and ask if anyone
| knows the history. I Googled that and was surprised by
| the answer from Wikionary:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
| ...[C]oined by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and
| science fiction author Cory Doctorow in 2022.
|
| God damn, "Dr." Doctorow again!
| rchaud wrote:
| Cable TV didn't use to have ads, until somebody figured
| out you could charge the customer _and_ have other
| streams of revenue as well.
|
| For Kagi, it's a matter of when, not if. Capitalism
| guarantees it.
| yakubin wrote:
| An even sadder example of it: Windows.
| esafak wrote:
| No, it does not. They are free to create adjacent
| products to boost revenue as long as they want without
| debasing existing ones.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is a good point. Did Kagi ever consider having a
| freemium tier that uses adverts to pay for the (search)
| content? I don't think it is a terrible idea if it helps
| Kagi to improve their paid search.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And the oxygen in the room you're in is free to
| concentrate in a single corner of it, making air in the
| rest of the room unbreathable.
|
| Both are technically possible, but so extremely unlikely,
| that you can rely on them not happening.
| yard2010 wrote:
| My ML prof in university used this as an example for
| something that could happen but is highly unlikely. Each
| particle of oxygen can be in either half of the room so
| it's like 1/2 to the power of the number of particles
| (avogardo?) chance that all the particles are in one half
| suffocating the ppl in the other half. He was such a
| great guy.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first
| place.
|
| Don't confuse an entire economic system with the unique
| problems caused by public ownership or investing (i.e.
| growth at all costs). Plenty of smaller organizations
| would be quite happy to operate with modest profits for
| their owners and never scale beyond that point.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first
| place.
|
| Precisely, which is why enshittification is a when, not
| an if. A paid search engine will never pick up enough
| users to survive at $10/mo. It will either be acquired or
| start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the
| books.
| freediver wrote:
| > start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the
| books
|
| Here is a personal guarantee that this will never happen
| with Kagi while I am in charge.
|
| There are too many ad-supported search engines and
| browsers out there. I would not waste 10 years of my life
| to make yet another one. If Kagi can not sustain iteself
| with memberships, it will be the end of it.
|
| The initial reason I started Kagi was to provide my kids
| with an opportunity to grow up in an ad-free experience
| of the web. In this interview [1] I talk more about my
| motivation.
|
| [1] https://dkb.io/post/DEPR_kagi-interview
| carlosjobim wrote:
| How nice then that you can use Kagi as it is right now,
| today. Then if your prediction comes true in the future
| you can stop using Kagi.
| version_five wrote:
| As long as they don't take outside investment that's not
| a certainly. People complain about the prices but it's
| charging the real cost that let's them be able to offer
| something good without mortgaging the future.
|
| I concede that if they got big enough, someone would come
| with enough money that they couldn't refuse, and buy them
| to try and "unlock vale" by racing to the bottom.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| See also, Whatsapp
| carlosjobim wrote:
| This is honestly probably the most tiresome argument that
| constantly pops up in every HN thread.
|
| Imagine if one of your friends come back from a holiday
| trip and tells you how fantastic the place they visited
| was. Is your response "Well, maybe that place ain't going
| to be so nice in a few years!"?
| nine_k wrote:
| I think you miss he point.
|
| The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting
| outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by
| the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state.
|
| The point is to remove certain well-known sites with
| information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for
| the _particular user_ , me. That information is technically
| not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.
|
| That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS
| trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be
| near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone
| else, priorities may be different, but _I know_ what to
| expect for the search queries I issue, and I 'd be glad if
| the search engine helped me.
|
| Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with
| information _I happen to seek_ , like reddit.com, so I'd
| like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer
| something else, or not give any boost at all.
|
| So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept
| it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I
| would skip and what would click :)
|
| Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10%
| of power users maybe disproportionately important: with
| more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more
| decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of
| Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of
| users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much
| goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of
| magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting
| it any more.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I think you miss he point.
|
| I don't think he did. He did say _" it 's not at all
| obvious that it's a good idea for an established search
| engine targeting the general public"_
|
| And looking at the data from the link, other than
| wikipedia and reddit, all the pinned domains are for
| developers or technical folk.
|
| So it looks to me that kagi is not popular to the general
| public. If it was, programming-related sites wouldn't so
| heavily top the popular list.
| jsnell wrote:
| > That information is technically not spam, but it's on a
| wrong level, badly presented, etc.
|
| I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the
| problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of
| them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the
| curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high
| quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that
| often!
|
| It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll
| need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre
| results from a boosted site from shadowing better results
| from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of
| boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify
| when the manual curation is one of your core selling
| points and used by a large proportion of the customers
| vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that
| basically none of the userbase interacts with.
|
| > Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the
| 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important
|
| I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of
| feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users.
| Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if
| those 0.1% _really_ want that feature it 's a great fit
| for a power user search engine.
|
| It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search
| engine should obviously have.
| dcow wrote:
| Pintrest is among the top blocked. It clearly doesn't
| have spam, but it commonly shows up because of it's vast
| array of user content. For people not interested in
| Pinterest content, this is a very useful feature.
|
| NYTimes is another good example, great content for
| subscribers, essentially useless spam in a search result
| for non-subscribers. The only person who can configure
| this is the user.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Can you shine light as to why w3schools.com is blocked
| and lowered so much, while most other sources of CS
| information are raised ?
|
| Is their information of such low quality ?
| LordShredda wrote:
| They used to have outright incorrect information a long
| time ago. They fixed the site and are much better, but
| it's aimed at a non technical audience in the end.
| catach wrote:
| > you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent
| mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing
| better results from unboosted sites
|
| That strikes me as a non-goal. As the search engine, you
| can't know what attributes a user is valuing when they
| boost, and so you can't know when it's appropriate to
| override that boost. "Better" is subjective, contextual,
| and comes in thousands of different flavors.
| viraptor wrote:
| > New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up
| all that often!
|
| But when they do, how are you going to know if all you
| see is the mediocre spam instead? No, I want to block the
| domains which are never going to be a good result. This
| may actually surface things I will want to boost.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Get back in line, citizen! You will _read_ the blogspam,
| and you will _like_ it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > The point is to remove certain well-known sites
|
| Like pinterest.
|
| Goddamn pinterest.
|
| Just the amount of times i've used "-pinterest" in search
| is staggering.
| jquery wrote:
| Totally get where you're coming from about removing
| certain domains from Google search. But let's take a step
| back for a sec and consider what this could look like in
| a different light. Imagine if Reddit got the axe - a site
| that, despite its redesign snafus and sometimes annoying
| mobile login walls, a lot of us here on HN still find
| pretty useful.
|
| Now, I'm not blind to the fact that Reddit's user
| demographic has a lot in common with us HN folks, while
| Pinterest... well, not so much. It leans towards a non-
| techy crowd, with more women users. But the way I see it,
| if Google keeps popping Pinterest up in search results,
| someone out there must be finding it helpful.
|
| Perhaps what this all boils down to is a bit of a
| demographic reality check, rather than a definitive
| statement on any one platform. And just to be clear, I'm
| not standing on a soapbox championing for Pinterest, but
| I reckon we could probably nudge Google to get a bit
| smarter with its algorithms.
|
| So, what if instead of giving domains the chop, we pushed
| for Google to up its game on the personalization front?
| Like, if I'm consistently booting Pinterest from my
| searches with "-pinterest", Google could take the hint
| and drop it down the ranks _for me_. Wouldn 't that make
| more sense than completely blacklisting sites that some
| folks might still want to use? In the end, we all win if
| Google gets better at tuning into our search habits,
| right?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I'm not saying we need a global chop/removal, I'd be
| happy if i had personalized filters for me (using my
| logged-in account + removal settings) to remove pinterest
| just for me. Same for Quora and ExpertSexChange or
| whatever that other technical site was.
|
| Same for youtube, a simple blacklist would make my search
| results much nicer, but youtube seems to push a few large
| media companies as hard as possible.
| dcow wrote:
| Kagi's filters are local per-user, not global across
| users.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Is w3schools still that bad? I know that it used to be
| awful in the past, but IIRC they managed to do a complete
| 180 in this regard. I'm not into webdev but I
| occasionally check how to use a particular feature on
| there and it always delivers a pretty good reference.
| [deleted]
| hobofan wrote:
| w3schools garnered a reputation for stating outright
| wrong facts. I think they rectified that part, but I
| think the way they break down information is still far
| inferior to MDN on basically every topic.
| mattmanser wrote:
| It is better than it was, but I'd still much prefer to
| see the mdn, it's much better.
| zarzavat wrote:
| I can see a certain kind of absolute beginner enjoying
| w3schools more than MDN, it's a little less intimidating.
|
| When you're first learning a subject you often want
| simple lies more than complicated truths.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is a well written post. I describes me perfectly and
| my knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. I usually start with
| w3schools, then if I need deeper info, I repeat the
| search with "mdn". That does the trick!
| lolinder wrote:
| And this is exactly why the custom domain block list is
| so useful. Blocking w3schools entirely would be unhelpful
| to beginners, but a lot of experts find their content to
| be less helpful than that on other websites and would
| rather not see them at all.
| sam1r wrote:
| Yes, but 99.9 percent of its users do not know these
| filters/features exist. Still don't.
|
| Google didn't prioritize it's visibility [intentioally] over
| the past 2 decades as well. Maybe it's time to do so.
|
| I can't imagine how tedious the process may be to make very
| small changes on the main google home page.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Yes, but 99.9 percent of its users do not know these
| filters/features exist. Still don't.
|
| The features you were referring to were removed a few years
| after they were launched.
| codezero wrote:
| when google first came out it had nothing to do with that, it
| was that they offered as strong algorithmic ranking in the
| feed. Before that the search providers ran in a few ways (by
| my memory):
|
| 1. Sell the first few results but make it look organic (this
| all happened behind closed doors and I knew a few people who
| paid for such results)
|
| 2. Hierarchical/topic based collections of links (This is
| what Yahoo was famous for in the 90s if I remember correctly,
| I'll keep saying that because it was a long time ago!)
|
| The whole "google cares about you" was an outcropping of the
| organic flocking to google because of their reliable and
| algorithmic results that just seemed trustworthy, they
| capitalized on that and it honestly lasted a lot longer than
| I expected before they really started being evil.
| 7839284023 wrote:
| Use this: " uBlacklist is a Google Search filter for Chrome,
| Firefox and Safari. "
|
| https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
| alternatex wrote:
| Interestingly not supported on Firefox Android. It's the
| first time I come across an add-on that doesn't work on
| both.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Firefox on Android only supports a handful of curated
| add-ons. You can apparently create your own collections
| or install anything with Firefox Nightly but I've not
| done this.
| code-blooded wrote:
| You can do that with Firefox Beta too, which likely will
| give you better experience / stability. It's a shame you
| have to jump through so many hoops to get it working.
| nomat wrote:
| it works for duckduckgo as well.
| [deleted]
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| They did. And w3schools was in my list back then.
| scarmig wrote:
| And can't forget about expertsexchange.
| delfinom wrote:
| Even 2 decades later, you can never unsee it
| p1mrx wrote:
| It's only obvious when you format it that way.
|
| They primarily used "Experts Exchange" and
| http://www.experts-exchange.com/
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Yeah, now they use that, but back in the good old days of
| the internet, they did not.
| scarmig wrote:
| Nowadays that's the domain, but only after they did a
| migration from expertsexchange.com awhile back.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| and penisland
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| therapist.com
| rgoulter wrote:
| Artisanal
| kortilla wrote:
| This one is probably the worst because it can't be fixed
| by a hyphen
| Nextgrid wrote:
| People would use it to block all the spam sites that host
| copious amounts of (potentially Google's) Ads/Analytics, and
| since they might actually start finding what they're looking
| for this will reduce engagement on the search results page
| and with the sponsored links.
|
| This is bad for Google's bottom-line thus why such a feature
| was removed and will never be coming back.
| r00fus wrote:
| Ah, but then they acquired Doubleclick (or was it the other
| way around?) and a monopoly was formed.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| The feature definitely existed after the DC acquisition.
| r00fus wrote:
| It takes a while for mergers to result in solid
| directional change.
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| Yeah. Engineers hate when something isn't a technical feat.
| The best innovations are usually software people working with
| the right people from other disciplines to make a thought out
| CRUD app.
| eviks wrote:
| You can exclude garbage on google with a browser plugin (can't
| boost, though, and Safari)
| lolinder wrote:
| Yeah, boost and pin are just as important to me. Google
| inexplicably doesn't show Wikipedia on the first page much of
| the time anymore, and I can fix that with Pins in Kagi.
| belkinpower wrote:
| Yeah, this is _the_ reason I started using Kagi. The default
| results aren't significantly better than Google/Bing/DDG, but
| being able to block and boost domains is a killer feature.
| resolutebat wrote:
| I find the default searches already superior for the sole
| reason that they're not sold to the highest bidder.
| int_19h wrote:
| Indeed, the sheer amount of sponsored links on some Google
| searches is such that you have to scroll a full page down
| to get to actual results.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Does your browser ad block not get rid of those? I never
| see sponsored links in Google searches on my laptops
| lamontcg wrote:
| I was just about out of my free searches on Kagi before I
| ever realized it could do this. That feature converted me to
| a paying user (although I've got browser plugins to block
| domains from Google search, but boosting is something I can't
| do there).
| mhrmsn wrote:
| Definitely the best feature of Kagi! I sometimes wish there was
| some way to slightly adjust how this works. As I also have
| Wikipedia on raised priority, I'd still like some official
| product/company/etc. website to rank higher than the Wikipedia
| article of it. Also, a custom priority ranking among the raised
| importance domains would be nice.
| sklargh wrote:
| The interplay between Mayo Clinic being a trusted source and
| WebMD being hard blocked is fascinating.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Surprised to not see fandom.com on there. Just copy/paste plus
| SEO of actual wikis plus so many ads you can't read the content.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Unfortunately, fandom has a decent amount of original content
| in addition to the copy/paste stuff, so you'd miss out on quite
| a bit if you block them.
| mysterydip wrote:
| That's unfortunate, thanks for the info.
| jsheard wrote:
| The trick is to use https://breezewiki.com instead. There's
| an extension that redirects Fandom links to it automatically.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Kagi has another feature that can rewrite search results'
| URLs based on regexes:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html. I guess
| you could use that to make the redirect automatic?
| user3939382 wrote:
| I like Kagi but I'm willing to pay like 10-15$ for unlimited
| (actually unlimited) searches so I don't have the emotional
| overhead of counting and worrying about how much I'm searching.
|
| I don't like how they told people on older unlimited plans they'd
| be grandfathered in and then didn't honor that.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Simple, common sense features for any search engine that actually
| wants to help you find what you're looking for. Such a stark
| difference from what Google offers.
| account-5 wrote:
| As a beginner w3schools.com is likely my first port of call for
| something that it covers. Easy to navigate and use, and covers a
| wide range of things. I'm aware of its history but it's never
| steered me wrong.
|
| MDN I only use if I can't find the information elsewhere. I need
| ELI5, MDN is harder to understand when trying to grasp a subject,
| at least for me.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Kudos! But would it be too divulging that other competitors can
| offer presets to block the mentioned sites?
| loveparade wrote:
| I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year and didn't know
| about this feature! That's amazing, I can finally block all these
| spam sites completely.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| ublacklist works with many search engines. A little bit of very
| easy effort goes a LONG way to cleaning up your results.
|
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
|
| And here's two bonus things you need if you make use of youtube
|
| Sponsorblock. As it says on the tin, automatically skips sponsor
| sections.
|
| https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock
|
| Dearrow. An open source and crowdsourced tool replace youtubes
| stupid fucking clickbait title cards, and replaces many titles
| with better ones. You can contribute!
|
| https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow
| lukas099 wrote:
| Followed the Firefox link on DeArrow, and it leads to an "Oops!
| We can't find that page".
| [deleted]
| Given_47 wrote:
| Worked for me:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
| scode2 wrote:
| That is the listing for SponsorBlock, not DeArrow.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/122
| folmar wrote:
| In short: it was temporarily removed due to XSS
| vulnerability and the fixed version is in review.
| version_five wrote:
| I found the right wing media blocks interesting. I wondered if
| that was in response to getting search spammed by them or some
| "principal". Because I don't think I've ever seen Fox News or
| Breitbart in search results anyway.
|
| Same comment for CNN and wapo that I see are also there. Maybe
| I'd dont search current events enough, they all seem like odd
| things to block to me.
| coolliquidcode wrote:
| Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and
| nytimes. As well as Wapo and CNN. I guess people are choosing
| to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they
| don't know the billionaires that own the other media they think
| they are decent news sources.
|
| Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com
| and goodreads.com.
|
| I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book
| recommendations there.
| internetter wrote:
| > Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge
| and nytimes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
|
| Really?
|
| > I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash
| they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires
| that own the other media
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-
| office/2017/aug/28/the...
|
| And the NYT is publicly traded (The CEO has an estimated
| networth of only 10mil)
|
| Verge doesn't really do journalism that makes me worried
| about who owns it.
|
| > Other surprising trash to me is people want to see:
| rtings.com and goodreads.com.
|
| rtings does colour profiles of plenty of slightly less
| popular monitors that no one else does. It's been an
| invaluable resource for me.
|
| This comment is genuinely nonsensical. I'd think that it's
| obvious that rich owners tend to push a conservative economic
| spin to preserve their wealth.
|
| > I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good
| book recommendations there.
|
| Most people end up on goodreads from search to see the
| reviews people left for the book....
| atrudeau wrote:
| Similar alternative for Google Search:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidh...
|
| Even the defaults match this Kagi top list.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| This third party browser extension looks like it hides UI
| contents whereas with Kagi your preferences are used in what is
| actually returned from the search engine and in what order. I
| don't think these things are all that similar.
| slaw wrote:
| Kagi used Google behind. If results are the same, what is the
| difference for the end user?
| jorams wrote:
| Google is one of the sources for Kagi's results, but not
| the only one. The results are not the same.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| Although boosting cant be done, blocking can be achieved using
| ublockorigin and custom filters. Here is an awesome spam filter
| list that removes spam and copycat domains from google and ddg
| searches[1]
|
| [1]https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
| jeffbee wrote:
| So, kagi has a couple hundred actives?
| kccqzy wrote:
| While this comment has a snarky tone, I agree with it. We need
| active user numbers to determine how statistically relevant
| this might be.
| epgui wrote:
| To me, the results seem interesting regardless of whether
| they are representative of the population or not. There are
| questions you can answer without relying on that assumption.
|
| For example: "Can you imagine what your search results would
| look like if you had access to this tool?"
| freediver wrote:
| Mulitply that by the factor of ~50. Not all users use the
| feature or if they do, block same domains (our user base is
| very international).
|
| We plan to launch full stats (including number of members and
| queries/day) next week. "Domains" is meant to be just one of
| the tabs on this page that got pushed earlier to prod.
| [deleted]
| tmnvix wrote:
| Interesting that nytimes.com is on both the 'block' and 'raise'
| lists.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Possibly because of their paywall.
| ssd532 wrote:
| Good to see diversity
| naillo wrote:
| This kinda illustrates how dead _easy_ it would be for google to
| improve their search engine. There 's no way they couldn't figure
| out a similar list as this and just re-rank things to down
| prioritize these sites.
| freediver wrote:
| One should note that Google is already constantly improving
| their search engine for their customers. It is just that they
| are not the same as their users.
| abtinf wrote:
| The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple's exclusive
| control over the list of selectable default search providers in
| iOS Safari.
|
| It is infuriating and is the one thing that has caused me to
| seriously try other browsers on mobile. The problem is, they are
| all terrible in some small paper cutting ways (including Orion,
| though that has been rapidly improving).
| freediver wrote:
| Would you be kind to document the top 3 pet peeves you have
| with Orion iOS on OrionFeedback [1]. We are keen to improve.
|
| [1] https://orionfeedback.org
| S201 wrote:
| > The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple's exclusive
| control over the list of selectable default search providers in
| iOS Safari.
|
| Seems like a deficiency of Apple products to me. I know it's
| beating a dead horse, but this is what happens when people
| willingly buy into a closed system they have no control over.
| nottorp wrote:
| Funny thing is, people are buying Apple products because the
| alternative is Google, and why are you paying for Kagi,
| because you trust Google?
| o1y32 wrote:
| I don't trust Google, but it's practical. There are tons of
| ways you can control/limit privacy issues, like a
| combination of opting out of personalized ads, AdGuard, DNS
| level filtering, and not using any Google services other
| than necessary for Android. Many of these require little
| effort but go very far -- farther than the default
| experience from a new iPhone. In fact many of these things
| are unrelated to Android. With these in place I don't see
| using Android a problem by itself. (On the other hand, if
| you use an iPhone but have no adblocking or don't block
| tracking domains, and use Google services all the time, I
| don't see how it is better)
| S201 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I only buy Android phones that have
| unlockable bootloaders and I can root so that ultimately I
| have control over my own device.
|
| But yes, I agree on how letting Apple and Google assert a
| level of control unparalleled in the history of computing
| has been a massive step backwards for our industry and
| consumers in general.
| abtinf wrote:
| Yup. My guess is all the search providers in the list are
| paying Apple to be there. Kagi will never make the list.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I have the same hunch. Google pays Apple $20B annually to
| be the default search engine. Thankfully those of us in the
| EU will soon be able to choose any search engines we like
| once the DMA comes into effect.
| Joshua-M wrote:
| I use the app xSearch, which lets you use custom search
| engines with Safari. Once you turn on override mode inside of
| xSearch, it works perfect. I agree that it's unfortunate, but
| for the time being anyone who's going out of their way to pay
| for Kagi is someone who will go out of their way to install
| an app like xSearch. Hopefully we see some improvements from
| Apple with this
| chronicsonic wrote:
| I use XSearch to replace the default Safari search engine, it
| also supports bangs.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...
| justintoon wrote:
| I realize this is probably not the solution you want, but there
| is an official iOS Safari extension that will intercept all
| address bar searches and route them to Kagi. I don't remember
| how much it costs, and it doesn't seem to work super well with
| private browsing, but it's better than nothing and works well
| for what it is. Ymmv
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id16077...
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| It actually works very well with private browsing. You just
| need to have the extension enabled for private browsing (in
| iOS 17 that's a separate switch) and tap on "get your session
| link" once in the extension menu in Safari. That way it knows
| about your subscription, even in private tabs.
| justintoon wrote:
| Yup, I just never took the time to set it up properly.
| abtinf wrote:
| I should give it another try. I believe the last time I tried
| it, I was frustrated because of the private browsing login
| issue. Maybe one day (probably not) Apple will allow setting
| a simple URL for custom search engines.
|
| Orion needs a lot of polish, but I am hopeful they will get
| there.
| justintoon wrote:
| I took a closer look and the iOS extension supports
| entering a "session link" which allows the Kagi redirect to
| work in private windows. Entering it is a bit cumbersome--
| you have to first open a private window and then any random
| page so you can see the extension button in the address
| bar, at which point you can tap it and then the Kagi icon
| to get to the session link field--but it appears to stick
| after that and the redirect works as expected (although you
| do get a brief flash of Google or whatever -- they suggest
| changing it to DDG which looks a bit smoother).
|
| Agree that it feels hacky, but sometimes you just have to
| take what you can get.
| deviantintegral wrote:
| You can generate a Kagi login link with a token and save
| that to your favourites. Then, click that link in the new
| private tab window before searching.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The Kagi Search app/extension linked above can persist
| your session link in its settings and thus works in
| private mode or after clearing all cookies.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I find it amusing that reddit managed to make _all_ of the lists!
|
| I personally still find it to be a useful source of information -
| I wonder if all of their recent drama with third-party apps has
| led to it earning a place on the negative lists, or if it was
| there all along.
| malikNF wrote:
| I an part of the former. I do miss it. Glad to see there's more
| people who are doing this. You shouldn't be allowed to treat
| your community this way and get away with it.
| developer93 wrote:
| I think it might be more understandable if you could block
| individual subreddits, I found experience to vary greatly
| depending on your topic since the moderation isn't uniform.
| rchaud wrote:
| Reminder that W3Schools is good now (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP) and has
| been good for several years. In the pre-Flexbox, pre-grid days, I
| used W3schools to build a framework-less mobile site as part of a
| JS bootcamp admissions test. The explanation on W3Schools about
| creating multiple floats with media queries was so clear, I stuck
| around.
| [deleted]
| kimi wrote:
| Serious hint to any Google engineers reading: just penalize those
| exact freaking sites, and you are half-way there in fixing your
| results issue. It's not AI-driven or anything, just a regexp will
| do.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. Either I'm on a
| desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on
| mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to
| funnel me into their app.
|
| It is a true shame that so much useful information gets trapped
| within their ecosystem.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > ... or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several
| attempts at them to funnel me into their app.
|
| It's not really less inconvenient in terms of time or screen
| taps in my experience, but changing the subdomain to "old" will
| at least skip the app prompts. The day that option dies is a
| day I put a new 0.0.0.0 entry in my hosts file.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It won't help the clunky mobile site much, but if you're on iOS
| there's a Safari plug in called "Sink It for Reddit" that hides
| the attempts to funnel you into their app.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| As siblings have pointed out, reddit is actually popular for
| raising.
|
| For me, what distinguishes it from a stereotypical "block this
| please" site like Pinterest is that, clunky as the UI may be,
| content on reddit is often relevant and well linked up with
| other pages on the Web.
|
| Compare that with Pinterest which I've taken to describe as
| "the universal sink of the Web" because it seems to get linked
| to from everywhere but then it's a dead end with zero non-
| repost content 100% of the time.
|
| Well actually, come to think of it, Pinterest hasn't figured
| much in my search results ever since I started using kagi a
| year or so back, and really it didn't get linked to very much
| from anywhere but the Google results page... Guess I'm getting
| my money's worth in one more way then I realized. :D
|
| Kagi is so worth the money!
| munk-a wrote:
| I certainly agree about Pinterest being where data goes to
| die - and for Reddit I agree that it has an extremely high
| quality of information, it's just held back by presentation.
| If I can find the information I'm looking for on a blog I'll
| usually prefer that but Reddit usually has a good deal of
| commentary on whatever the topic I'm looking for is.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| On reason that Reddit is valuable is that it often contains
| information that, as far as I can tell, literally doesn't
| exist anywhere else. This is _especially_ true for product
| category research. Other than Reddit posts, any product
| that is even _vaguely_ not mainstream, the only information
| other than Reddit will be obvious marketing blog spam that
| doesn 't actually help differentiate anything. Generally,
| I'll check wirecutter, and if Wirecutter doesn't have an
| article about it, then Reddit is the only other useful
| option. If it's the only option, the presentation doesn't
| really matter, although I disagree with you on how bad it
| is. I still quite like old.reddit on desktop. Although
| admittedly my mobile experience has been severely degraded
| since my old preferred app got killed.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Kagi has another feature that can rewrite search results' URLs
| based on regexes:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html.
|
| I successfully use it to automatically link to Old Reddit. I
| guess it can also be used to rewrite user-hostile websites'
| URLs such as YouTube/Twitter/etc to less hostile frontends such
| as Invidious or Nitter.
| _dain_ wrote:
| This is cool but imo it makes more sense to have URL
| redirection as a browser extension. That way _all_ twitter
| links resolve to nitter, not just ones from a search engine.
| I use this one https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
| unshavedyak wrote:
| .. holy. I never thought of that, now i'm adding that.
| Thanks!
| Dah00n wrote:
| This should be higher up. Now I'm definitely interested!
| lolinder wrote:
| A lot of people actually disagree with you--Reddit is number
| four on the Raise list and on the Pin list, and every few
| months there's a thread on HN talking about how the only way to
| get useful information out of Google is to add "reddit" at the
| end of the search.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| I think they were talking about the raise list, not the block
| or lower list
| OJFord wrote:
| Clearly not, they think it's clunky and desktop and too
| annoying on mobile, (I agree but put up with it often)
| they're not saying they want more of it.
| munk-a wrote:
| I was indeed talking about the lower list - simply because
| of the information presentation is so poor. The information
| itself is usually quite high quality.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list.
|
| It's on two lists.
|
| > Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky
| to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several
| attempts at them to funnel me into their app.
|
| I have the old-reddit extension on every device I use. It's my
| 3rd most essential extension, after uBlock Origin and Kill
| Sticky.
| barclay wrote:
| Following the API blocking earlier this year, my fear is that
| the half-life of old.reddit's existence is getting ever so
| small...
| munk-a wrote:
| I strongly suspect that if they kill it off at some point
| we'll have solutions like archive to work around being
| forced into their UI - even if those solutions are forced
| to scrap the information out of their web presentation
| rather than via API calls.
| infinityio wrote:
| Incidentally, Kagi has a URL rewrite feature that integrates
| this natively!
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I'm curious about the right-wing news sites appearing in the
| blocked list. I also want to actively avoid them, but they've
| never once appeared in google search results for me.
| bermudi wrote:
| What surprised me the most was the fact that people have enough
| disposable income to pay for search to make this viable
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| Search is one of the most critical pieces of technology for
| most people on the web. That, combined with the point another
| comment made that indicates the demographic of Kagi largely
| revolves around IT/SWE (who generally have more disposable
| income than other types of jobs), shows good reason why Kagi
| could survive long term
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| Pinterest is really unsurprising. Unbelievable Google doesn't
| spike them it's utterly useless as a search result.
| [deleted]
| syntaxing wrote:
| Can someone share some insight what "Pin" means? I get what
| block, lower, raise means but pin is a bit confusing to me
| freediver wrote:
| Pin means that if a result from that domain would appear
| anywhere in 50 or so relevant results that Kagi usually
| surfaces on the first page, it would be 'pinned' to the top of
| results.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it
| suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me
| wonder whether this is just the marketing so far, or a more
| fundamental limitation on the market that will actually draw
| value from Kagi. Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn't grow
| to millions of users?
| VHRanger wrote:
| > Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn't grow to millions
| of users?
|
| You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit
| economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses
| or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses
| danpalmer wrote:
| If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to
| pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not
| accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the
| advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher
| revenue per user compared to paying users.
| smallerfish wrote:
| It does. They have a lean team, and I believe are bootstrapped.
| freediver wrote:
| > Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn't grow to millions
| of users?
|
| It depends on your definition of "works as business"?
|
| I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has
| sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly
| the business model aligns incentives with those users.
|
| Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we
| use much of Google infrastructure and APIs.
|
| Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web,
| that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers.
|
| For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I
| think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become
| more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing,
| and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive
| scale.
|
| Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and
| therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped,
| ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when
| a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize
| that information they are being served does not always have
| their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost.
|
| Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a
| lot of people already care about what food they put into their
| body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that
| in the future a lot of people will care enough about what
| information they put into their brains to consider having a
| search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best
| interest being a part of their budget.
|
| So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to
| million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision
| making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above
| factors and they do not even account for the enhanced
| productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives
| in search.
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
| mezobeli wrote:
| Great product from a great team! Pretty expensive for non-casual
| searching, I do a lots of searches in a day. Currently self-
| hosted SearchXNG does the trick but would love to start use Kagi
| for all. Would love if they manage to find ways to increase
| limits or reduce pricing. We can use uBlock for ads + ddg for
| results, but for masses and in general for healthier search
| engines I would be happy to use Kagi daily.
| [deleted]
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that
| blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low
| quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions.
| const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com",
| "nytimes.com", "economist.com",
| "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com",
| "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com",
| "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com",
| "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com",
| "arstechnica.com", "independent.co.uk",
| "axios.com" ]
| Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
| .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain =>
| elem.href.includes(domain))) .map(elem =>
| elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
| .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling,
| elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling])
| .forEach(elem => elem.remove())
| abtinf wrote:
| Could this be modified to block comments from a list of
| usernames too? The last time I looked at HN's DOM made me sad.
|
| There are some prolific users who... while their comments are
| of normal quality, trigger a strong desire for me to respond.
| I'd rather simply not see their comments (and reply trees) at
| all.
| kreeben wrote:
| Personally, I never reply. I only lurk. Because every time I
| reply I get sucked into the social media nightmare that is
| waiting for a response to my reply. So I opt out of that by
| never, ever replying, no matter how big the urge is to reply.
| I never do it. Almost never. 99.99% of the time, I skip
| replying. I think you might lack a discipline.
| developer93 wrote:
| Dunno but at least on Glider client, you can block from the
| username menu.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| const boringPeople = [/* omitted */]
| Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.hnuser'))
| .filter(elem => boringPeople.some(person => elem.textContent
| === person)) .map(elem =>
| elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
| .forEach(elem => elem.remove())
|
| This worked to block the actual comment but not the whole
| thread.
| insin wrote:
| Comments Owl for Hacker News [1] adds a mute control to
| comments and user profiles which lets you do this.
|
| If you want to roll a quick version of your own, once you've
| identified rows containing comments you want to block, you
| need to hide all subsequent rows which have a higher indent.
| I see there's now an "indent" attribute in the DOM which
| would make this even easier.
|
| [1] https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-
| news#commen...
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| ...BBC? Ars Technica? ...KQED and VOA? You're blocking
| discussion of some of the most reliably factual reporting on
| the planet.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _shrugs_ I don 't really feel the need to defend the contents
| of that list. If the resulting conversations suck, aren't
| relevant to me, and clog up the HN front page - in they go.
| alex_lav wrote:
| There's something uniquely social-media-y about a person
| posting a list of websites they don't enjoy the contents of
| or discussion around, and then posting that they've
| filtered them out in a way that only impacts them, and then
| that person getting questioned and challenged on their
| filtering.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of
| that list.
|
| You were quite willing to _promote_ the specific and
| lengthy list of disliked-sites to strangers.
|
| A sudden switch to fatigue and disinterest does not seem
| genuine to me.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| [flagged]
| gruez wrote:
| The parent poster said
|
| >... that seemed to promote low quality discussions
|
| My guess is that these domains are responsible for hot button
| topics that result in 300+ comment threads.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The point was they tended to have low quality discussion.
| Probably because it turned into partisan mud slinging.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Isn't VOA (and BBC for that matter) government owned &
| funded? That's enough right there for me to doubt their
| "reliably factual" reporting. It's hardly a political
| opinion- the owners of these services expect to get some
| return on their investment. Because they're not in it for the
| money (they can just create more money basically at will),
| then why are they in it? Likely to help craft a narrative
| that suits them.
| developer93 wrote:
| At least for the bbc, the government isn't directly
| involved in the editorial. They have to resort to
| appointing their friends director general & threatening to
| abolish the licence fee to try to get what they want.
| Dah00n wrote:
| VOA and BBC are not alike at all in my opinion. Many
| countries in Western/Northern Europe have government funded
| sites run like the BBC and they are mostly in the top of
| unbiased and free journalism. They also create a lot of
| high quality documentaries and crime thrillers.
|
| Nothing is perfect and of course there's a certain kind of
| culture on each of these workplaces that will mske it
| either more left or right up or down, but they aren't
| controlled by politicians, just like a hospital isn't told
| how to treat patients by politicians.
|
| I'd rank BBC News above all US news outlets (and I'll just
| add I'm neither from the US nor UK).
| evilduck wrote:
| > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
| sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some
| interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
| or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
| probably off-topic.
|
| The domains in question lead to guaranteed uninteresting and
| routine political bickering where each side is compelled to
| recite their talking points. It has nothing to do with the
| reporting and everything to do with how people comment on
| those topics. I'd be guilty of it too if I weren't busy
| flagging those posts.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Please tell me you're just memeing or being sarcastic.
| MBCook wrote:
| I'm mean they're not wrong that more general news topics
| (especially if touching on politics at all) tends to produce
| horrible discussions.
| jrflowers wrote:
| It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist
| solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the
| block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a
| way that's similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why
| would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with
| humanity?
| Jaygles wrote:
| It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant
| information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers
| can't help but return the world's most useless website in their
| web search.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers'
| incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a
| technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple
| "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()".
|
| The problem is that the company employing those engineers is
| acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time
| with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to
| "engagement" on the search results page and makes the
| sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even
| if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides
| Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact
| same business model.
| Jaygles wrote:
| Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a
| technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's
| search in order for it to be so high up in the block list
| rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical
| problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the
| entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm
| to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat
| and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things
| like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't
| scalable.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Do they share Google's incentives?
|
| No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak
| per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of
| most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block
| problematic domains.
|
| The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that
| people who use Pinterest might actually _want_ those
| results, so that 's not a good default.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its
| users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't
| either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out
| of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to
| explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure
| they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an
| explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially
| considering other engines correctly ignore such pages).
|
| The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw
| in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is
| actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is
| unwilling to implement an override because this spam
| contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the
| search results page).
| hairofadog wrote:
| The thing about Pinterest is that it seems to be offering
| something that it never delivers. A few years ago I was doing
| an image search and I was like, _fine, I'll sign up, I just
| want to see this image I'm looking for_ so I went through the
| whole process and they still wouldn't show me the image I
| wanted to see. Have you ever had one of those dreams where
| you're trying to run forward but you're not getting anywhere?
| That's Pinterest, at least in my experience.
| raphman wrote:
| Reminds me of the Warez sites around 1995 - 2000. Searching
| for "Photoshop 5 crack" or similar would lead you to a web
| site that would ask you to click on another link which
| would open a dozen popup windows. Many of those popups
| would also purport to have what you were looking for - just
| click on this link here (which opens a load of further
| popups). Teenage me spent too much time wading through
| these pages. To this day, I'm not sure whether any of these
| sites really had warez or whether they were just a huge
| clickbait mazes.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > I don't believe they have any malicious intent to
| explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search...
|
| And
|
| > The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's
| crawler...
|
| Don't seem to be statements that really make any consistent
| sense.
|
| It's like if you ordered soup and instead got a bowl of human
| shit, a thousand times, and then felt compelled to explain
| that nobody wants you to eat shit, it's just that bowls are a
| really convenient place to shit in.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Pages are primarily written for display & human
| consumption. Whatever was left of the "semantic HTML" went
| out the window when everyone switched to the JS SPA fad.
|
| As far as I know there is no "right" way to design a JS SPA
| overlay/loginwall in a way that search engines ignore it -
| it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or
| designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers
| (other engines seem to handle Pinterest just fine).
| Outright denying access to search engines could be wrong
| because logged-in Pinterest users may actually want those
| results, so that's not a good solution either.
|
| The fault is ultimately on Google for ignoring this high-
| profile issue for such a long time because it contributes
| to their bottom-line, even though a very simple, low-tech
| fix (easier than making the crawler recognize such
| loginwalls reliably) could be to just allow users to make
| their own decision as to whether to block the domain, like
| Kagi has done.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a
| spec or designing a page that misleads search engine
| crawlers
|
| And
|
| > The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in
| Google's crawler...
|
| I apparently misunderstood your phrasing of "exploit" to
| mean something intentional. You submit that Pinterest is
| _unintentionally exploiting_ a flaw in a way that both
| drives traffic to them and ruins search.
|
| I suppose in my shit soup analogy, the thing you'd
| explain is that there's shit in the bowl because the laws
| of physics coincidentally allow shit to rest in a bowl.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Apologies - I've edited my original comment to make it
| clearer that I meant "exploit" in a non-intentional way.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Is there a possibly extant universe wherein Pinterest is
| acting both intentionally and destructively to the
| detriment of everyone else?
|
| I'd like to add that Hanlon's razor is a fun bit of
| internet lore wherein we pretend humans do not act
| intentionally that's based on, uhhh...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's
| crawler
|
| Not sure it's still a flaw when it's so trivial to derank,
| Google could manage it on the barest of whims.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest
| doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and I'm
| sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they don't de-
| rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
|
| But yes, they could fix it. However if it keeps you
| searching maybe they don't want to.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest
| doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and
| I'm sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they
| don't de-rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
|
| I don't think argument takes exploit off the table. It
| just doesn't address it. Same thing for Pinterest's shady
| behavior.
| internetter wrote:
| > Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to
| its users
|
| Like me! I use it to get outfit & interior design
| inspiration. Haven't found nothing quite like it
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Doxing isn't doxing if it's part of a documentary.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Not sure what you are implying but doxing has a specific
| meaning.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I'm making an implication about the release of private
| details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as
| good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home
| is bad on social media, good in an expose.
|
| I think it's because we realize that outcome should not
| be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the
| benevolence of something.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that
| point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic
| privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
| jrflowers wrote:
| I don't think waronprivacy knows what expose means in
| this context. Rather than addressing the very obvious
| implication that you meant a description of how a
| publicly traded company creates policy they found
| opportunity to talk about posting pictures of people's
| homes online. I'm assuming they would've brought this up
| if you'd posted any other triggering key words like
| "newspaper" or "journalism"
| anoncow wrote:
| The top websites that people like are Wikipedia, Stack overflow
| and Mozilla Developers
| malikNF wrote:
| One of the main reasons I don't mind paying for kagi is my
| absolute hate for pinterest.
| slaw wrote:
| What keywords give you pinterest in result set? I use mostly
| Bing and I don't recall ever to see pinterest in any search
| results.
| warpspin wrote:
| Starting to try kagi now after this. I knew the diverse browser
| add-ons for blocking results, but being able to lower instead of
| all-out block something seems nice.
|
| Just wished they made it easier to block/lower all the
| international versions of pinterest though, lol.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Ok wow, seeing these lists might have just made a customer out of
| me. I've been vaguely aware of Kagi and know the general premise
| but this made it real.
| OJFord wrote:
| Similarly, I had no idea about this feature, but I now know I
| want it... I think I just need it to be cheaper, maybe $5
| unlimited (or enough for me, which I think is certainly higher
| than 300, probably higher than 1000, at least without behaviour
| change) and I'd be in
|
| I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new
| customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling &
| development/SRE that's expensive - so should (or at least
| could) come down as more people adopt it, driving further
| adoption from relative cheapskates like me?
|
| It seems great, but I use DDG 'bangs' (which are also a Kagi
| feature) loads of times a day, rather than going directly to
| websites - especially !w & !wikt, !arch & !aur & !archpackages
| only slightly less - I'd blow through the monthly limit in no
| time on that alone. (Which also seems a bit unfair, they're
| just redirects, not using index, there's an argument they
| shouldn't be included? I suppose if you're so motivated you can
| work around by using Firefox's feature for it instead of search
| engine anyway.)
|
| Edit: oh wait, I just found in the FAQ that 'bangs' actually
| _aren 't_ counted as searches. I may have to trial it, see how
| many searches I actually use how quickly. (And how reasonable
| the 1.5c overage seems in my usage.)
| slaughtr wrote:
| I was worried about the 1000 search limit, and it has so far
| (since beta) proven not to be a problem. I use Kagi for all
| my searches on all machines and my phone and average 800 or
| so a month. I haven't modified my behavior at all, and
| consider myself a heavy search engine user.
|
| I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as
| many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever, since
| the SEO spam would force me to do more term refinement. With
| far less of that (and a tiny tiny bit of settings tuning) I
| get better results much quicker. I'd test it but I have a job
| to do and can't swallow the idea of going back to how bad the
| other viable options really are.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as
| many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever
|
| FWIW, I counted searches I made with DDG (by parsing my FF
| history export) before joining the beta, and it was
| slightly over 1k, with Kagi my searches are in the 700-800
| range.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| That sounds appealing, but there are so many $10 and $15
| monthly warts on my balance that the burden of adding
| another (with even a minor overcharge fee) feels pretty
| high. I wish their lower tiers had double the current
| limits.
| joshspankit wrote:
| > I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as
| many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever
|
| This is a great point that should really be highlighted
| more in their marketing. It was obvious once I read it and
| shows two obvious benefits: 1. There is probably zero issue
| with fitting in to the 1000 searches per month. 2. It saves
| time for many of the searches we're already doing.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > 1. There is probably zero issue with fitting in to the
| 1000 searches per month.
|
| You are never limited to 1000 monthly searches, this is a
| great misunderstanding about Kagi. After passing your
| threshold, you are charged 1.5c per query.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I'm at the $10/mo level, and am totally happy to keep paying.
| I rely on search throughout the day for my job, and for my
| personal interests. $10/mo for an ad-free tunable search that
| provides good results is a completely worth it. And, I'm more
| than happy to vote with my money to support the web that I
| want to exist.
|
| Otoh (for contrast) I run adblock and sponsorblock on
| youtube, and if they start blocking traffic from people like
| me I'm going to cut back my YT viewership significantly (and
| maybe try harder to look for stuff on nebula instead, which I
| never browse). While I do get some educational value from YT,
| it's limited, and I guess I just fundamentally object to the
| ad-first business model.
| freeAgent wrote:
| You should install the Kagi browser extension and try out
| the Summarizer functionality on YouTube videos. I've found
| it pretty useful for videos that are needlessly filled with
| fluff.
| maccard wrote:
| Alternatively, you're only willing to pay roughly the cost of
| a coffee per month for something you deem as a killer feature
| for everyday use.
| OJFord wrote:
| I didn't say it was a 'killer feature', I said 'now I know
| I want it'. There are very many things I _want_ but not at
| the price they cost!
|
| I don't think coffee's a great analogy - it has far more
| utility for me, I don't buy it as a service, and it costs
| me roughly PS24 (what, $30ish) a month in beans.
|
| I'm not seriously suggesting it because I think comparing
| prices of different things to determine value very quickly
| gets silly, but a closer comparison might be Netflix: Kagi
| would cost me about as much per month for search as
| Netflix. Silly, as I said, but if I tried really strictly
| to pay for things according to relative value or utility to
| me, there's no way that would make sense.
|
| Part of the problem is asking me to switch from free I
| suppose - if DDG suddenly started charging me $5 I'd be
| more likely to pay Kagi $10 than I am today if that makes
| sense.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People always compare with Netflix, but that makes no
| sense at all to me. Is Kagi comparable to Netflix because
| they are both presented to you on a digital screen? I see
| nothing else that makes them comparable.
|
| Laundry detergent and breakfast cereal both come in a box
| in the supermarket, but it doesn't make the products
| comparable. A house and a car both have a door and you
| usually sit inside, but it doesn't make the products
| comparable.
|
| Netflix is a great bargain (for those who enjoy their
| offerings), and I think people are shooting themselves in
| the foot by dismissing other great services because
| they've somehow tricked themselves to thinking they
| should be compared to Netflix only because they're
| offered through a digital screen.
| jon_richards wrote:
| Defaulting to DuckDuckGo and using a bang for kagi when I
| don't immediately get what I want would be nice.
| Unfortunately there isn't one. I guess I could use an
| extension that lets me add personal ones.
| OJFord wrote:
| There's also a suggestion form:
| https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
|
| I can't remember what for but I'm pretty sure I've used it
| and gotten a pretty fast approval.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I subscribe to the cheapest plan, and only use Kagi for non-
| trivial searches. That's more than enough, I don't need a
| paid search engine when I just type a website's name instead
| of its url.
|
| I set it up with DDG/Google as default, and for Kagi I start
| with "k ".
| alex-chew wrote:
| DDG's bang shortcuts are awesome. Quick tip - !wt is a
| shorter equivalent to !wikt :)
| abtinf wrote:
| I'm a former DDG user and current paying Kagi customer. One
| critical difference I've noticed is that frequently used
| bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi.
|
| I think this is because over a very short period of usage, I
| applied block/lower/raise/pin to various domains, and now my
| search results are almost always _perfect_.
|
| That said, I understand the value of going directly to a
| site. On that front, Kagi makes it trivial to define new
| bangs.
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| I've used DDG for years before switching over to Kagi and I
| was accustomed to having to use the !s bang daily (and !g
| before I found out about !s). On Kagi I literally never use
| it, since it already incorporates Google search results and
| filters out a lot of crap.
|
| I've also defined some custom bangs to search private Jira
| and Confluence instances with some default filters applied,
| because the default search on those instances was driving
| me insane. It took me a long time to convince myself to pay
| $10 a month for a search engine, but I've never looked
| back.
|
| I'm currently experimenting with hostname rewrite rules.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > One critical difference I've noticed is that frequently
| used bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi.
|
| I use bangs all the time and wouldn't even use Kagi without
| them. It's so convenient when I know I want results from a
| specific page.
| _delirium wrote:
| > Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs
|
| Lately I've moved to doing this at the browser level
| instead of via a search engine. It's not a huge speed
| difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an
| extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to
| another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go
| directly. Firefox makes it easy to do:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-
| address...
| eloisius wrote:
| Same. I never hit the limits of my Kagi plan, but it
| motivated me to add Firefox @searches for things like
| PyPI, where I know exactly what I want.
| [deleted]
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| This matches my experience as well. Kagi has useful results
| much more often.
| elxx wrote:
| Kagi doesn't charge you for bangs. (Disclaimer: Happy paying
| Kagi user here, just FYI)
| eloisius wrote:
| Oh really? I just commented about how this misconception
| made me change my behavior. Wish that was more clear, or
| that I had higher reading comprehension.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| yeah since it's not actually doing a search and is just
| making a redirect based on the pattern it doesn't have a
| cost associated with it.
|
| more info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-
| started/faqs.html#how-are...
| freediver wrote:
| In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the
| user whenever we can.
|
| Redirecting a bang costs us basically nothing, so it does
| not count as a search.
|
| Also reloading the same search within a short time (~2
| minutes, for example coming back in browser after
| clicking through a search result) does not count as an
| additional search as we served cached results.
|
| Another tip: We have decent documentation (that is also
| open source and editable) and you can access it quickly
| from Kagi with the !help bang, for example
|
| !help how are searches counted
|
| will land you on
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-
| searche...
| joshspankit wrote:
| > In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the
| user whenever we can.
|
| This is great to hear but it doesn't really address the
| point you're replying to:
|
| > Wish that was more clear
|
| As someone who is just seriously noticing Kagi because of
| this HN post, I have no brand impression that tells me
| you're trying to pass on the savings (most companies
| don't) and the marketing material even makes me think
| you're targeting a premium price point with healthy
| margins.
| freediver wrote:
| Interesting observation. What specific changes would you
| suggest us to make?
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| You have to feel for anyone who works at pinterest - they just be
| getting that "are we the bad guys vibe"
|
| https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| this page is so galvanising - to see those domains on the top
| list of blocked domains pushed me to subscribe to kagi, nice hack
| marketing dep.
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| feedback:
|
| 1. make the homepage simpler, get rid of the dog and the moving
| clouds 2. this price won't fly on other geographies 3. don't
| make me 'add credits' to use the api, just accumulate some
| costs then bill me, once a week or even daily if that helps you
| sleep at night 4. you opted me into receiving product updates,
| don't do that, don't make me add you to my junk list, this was
| going so well, look what you're making me do, ohhhh
| abtinf wrote:
| Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive.
| That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month,
| then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the
| limits.
|
| I will simply say that I _cannot imagine_ going back to being a
| "user" of a "search provider" over being a paying Kagi customer.
| It is the single most critical service I worry about losing.
|
| If they octupled the price tomorrow, I would murmur an expletive
| under my breath, then thank god that they didn't choose to go
| down the path of fucking me over by materially changing the
| business model to adtech, and continue paying them.
|
| I am actually not sure what at what price point I'd drop the
| service. I'd probably start looking at canceling less used
| subscriptions first. Another shitty Gal Gadot Netflix movie has
| negative marginal value for me.
|
| If you haven't tried it for an extended time and used its core
| features, then you don't get it and no one can explain it to you.
| "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is."
|
| Edit to add: this is _search_ we are talking about. It is
| literally your entry point to the world's entire body of
| knowledge and ultimately affects your decisions and actions both
| daily and over the long term. And nearly everyone is perfectly
| happy to let it be run by companies that make more money when
| they lead you astray to click bait, hot take, content farm, and
| AI generated sites. Garbage in, garbage out, both in software and
| the knowledge you depend on to live a thriving life.
| slaw wrote:
| I don't see any people say Kagi is too expensive, where do you
| find them? I don't use Kagi as I found it useless. It is only
| UI for Google search. Yandex and Bing works better than Kagi.
| microflash wrote:
| I'd say it is expensive in countries where dollar conversion
| rates are very high due to inflation. I did ask about
| introducing different prices based on purchasing power parity
| in different geographies but got a very polite rebuff :)
| int_19h wrote:
| They claim that the prices are largely defined by the
| actual cost of the search, with fairly slim margins. In
| which case they literally _can 't_ do what you asked
| without becoming unprofitable.
| slaw wrote:
| So if buying search result from Google is too expensive,
| Kagi should use another provider, Brave search?
| 0x073 wrote:
| They spend 5% of their profit for donations. It's ok as a
| company for general, but for payment with this low rates
| of search results and the argument that they can't reduce
| the price because of the cost. I get mixed feelings.
| abtinf wrote:
| Kagi search results come from a variety of sources, including
| their own private index.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| I've become a paid Kagi subscriber because DDG (UI for Bing
| search, as you would call it) didn't cut it for me. One of
| the most annoying things was that it often ignored a crucial
| part of my search query and only delivered very generic
| results. What kind of searches do you do and in what
| language(s)?
| berdon wrote:
| Yep. As a developer my life is infinitely better because of
| Kagi. The product is wonderful, the team is wonderful and
| responsive - it's everything I want from a company I pay money
| to.
|
| I sound like a shill but I'm not. I've just been a happy user
| since their private beta and have had genuine, kind, and
| personable email back and forth with Vladimir.
| metadaemon wrote:
| I feel the same way. I've been a very happy customer without
| any desire for going back to other search providers.
| silisili wrote:
| Quite the glowing review... enough to get me interested.
|
| Do you have any specific examples or reasons you can share that
| might help force my hand?
|
| I'm definitely tired of Google search, but not sure I'm tired
| enough to take on another monthly sub just yet.
| [deleted]
| Dah00n wrote:
| Not all HN users are US tech employees though. How much US$25
| is differs a lot.
| suslik wrote:
| Very few people actually need unlimited searches. I search
| things compulsively - for example, while searching for
| something related to language A, my mind makes me search for
| the same thing in languages B and C, what happened to the
| last duke of Brunswick, and where can I download the latest
| bonobo genome.
|
| When Kagi transitioned from unlimited plan to 1200 searches
| (later increased to 1500) for early adopters, I was certain
| this would bankrupt me, but I decided to try it out. Turns
| out, most of the time I somehow don't even hit that limit.
| nottorp wrote:
| 2 Starbucks lattes i think?
|
| Elsewhere the lattes are much cheaper though.
|
| Common problem with a lot of SaaS offerings.
|
| I made a Kagi account when they had a free tier, thinking
| I'll test and then decide on paying or not. Then they dropped
| the free tier and with the # of trial searches limited, I'd
| need to make a conscious effort to use it to test instead of
| just trying it when DDG fails me, which was the initial plan.
| Somehow that's not very enticing.
|
| And I'm in the demographic that would indeed block pinterest
| and w3schools. It's just that my lattes aren't $12 each...
|
| Edit: Btw @freediver, you should turn this top blocked list
| into a public indepth report every 3 months or so. Just like
| Backblaze does that hard drive reliability thing. It would be
| great for your marketing.
| o1y32 wrote:
| Not everyone has the same spending habits. I (in the US)
| happen to know that none of my colleagues buy Starbucks or
| any other shop coffee on a regular basis. Although we are
| paid a decent (although not high) salary and can easily
| afford this without thinking, I don't see people eagerly
| spend $25/month on this.
|
| Not to mention $25 is very different in other countries.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Sidenote, i'm a very happy $5-10/m Kagi user. However i also
| happily pay $20-$30/m for ChatGPT or Phind. I hope one day Kagi
| consumes some of these shares too (to convert my $30 to Phind
| into $30 for Kagi).
|
| That might sound insane, i'd think so too, but FastGPT[1] is
| pretty damn good. It's not trying to be Phind, but still, quite
| surprising to me that it exists.
| freediver wrote:
| We are gradually rolling out more search assistant features,
| a large update is coming very soon.
|
| And you can already use many advanced AI features like the
| ability to summarize results directly in Kagi interface [1].
|
| This is also available as a stand-alone app for example here
| is the summary of this HN discussion [2].
|
| [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/summarize-page.html
|
| [2] https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?url=https://news.y
| com...
| unshavedyak wrote:
| [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
|
| Oops
| josephcsible wrote:
| > That it should be unlimited.
|
| Isn't that what their $25/mo plan gives you?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Yep. They're trying to drop the price as well--users on an
| annual Legacy Professional plan have been given unlimited
| searches again (which is the $10/mo pricing). Really hoping
| this is sustainable because Kagi is night-and-day for me
| compared to google and ddg.
| int_19h wrote:
| Is that a different thing from "early adopter
| professional"? Because that one still shows "$10/mo - 1,500
| searches included" for me on the billing page.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I believe it is currently only available to people whose
| $10/mo subscriptions had not renewed before the end of
| May.
| deepspace wrote:
| Funny story: Earlier this week, my Kagi results when to shit.
| If I made the slightest spelling mistake in a query, it would
| return nothing. Often it would just return nothing for a query
| where google would return millions of results.
|
| It got so bad that I started getting in the habit of typing 'g'
| in front of searches to go straight to google, but then I was
| hit with the usual google issues of SEO sites, spam sites and
| low-quality results.
|
| I wanted to cry in frustration because my wonderful Kagi
| experience was suddenly gone, and was furiously typing up a
| support ticket when I noticed that the "verbatim" choice was
| somehow permanently selected, after I tried it a few days ago.
|
| Lessons learned:
|
| 1. Kagi really is hugely superior to google as a daily search
| engine
|
| 2. "Verbatim" should not be a sticky choice, or at least Kagi
| should enclose "verbatim" results (or lack thereof) in a bright
| pink frame or something.
| freediver wrote:
| Noted.
|
| Small ask - please consider sharing any issues on
| KagiFeedback [1] so that we can track and act on it right
| away.
|
| [1] https://kagifeedback.org
| vluft wrote:
| yup. I pay $25/mo happily but would go up to at least $100
| without blinking. I do between 1k and 2.5k searches per mo, and
| also use the summarizer a bit. Compared to DDG (which I was
| using before), I haven't done a bang to fall back to google in
| months at least. DDG searches were better on some topics but on
| average slightly worse than google for me, Kagi is fairly
| consistently better and being able to block domains is
| fantastic.
| emrah wrote:
| It's interesting to see some websites on both the block and
| raise/pin lists, such as reddit and nytimes
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-05 23:01 UTC)