[HN Gopher] Kagi Changelog 2/13: Faster and more accurate instan...
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Kagi Changelog 2/13: Faster and more accurate instant answers and
Wikipedia page
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 316 points
Date : 2024-02-16 06:59 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kagi.com)
| nusl wrote:
| I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time.
| For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to
| before, often almost mirroring Google.
| mrmlz wrote:
| Damnit I was on the narrow path of convincing myself to start
| paying for Kagi. I've been using QWANT but the search results
| are a bit off tbh. And they've started doing full-screen ads to
| turn of my adblock (which well to be fair thats the way they
| earn their keep).
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| For me, it's not only the price you pay. Having a username
| attached to each your searches is the opposite of privacy, no
| matter how much you trust their legalese wording
| mrmlz wrote:
| Oh well I don't assume I'm in anyway "anonymous" no matter
| if I got a username/ipadress/cookie/deep-state-monitoring
| attached to my searches. Things I html-POST to the web is
| no longer private.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| That's another reason not to pay for privacy
| viraptor wrote:
| I go the opposite way. I trust a company that takes my
| money to pay its costs to keep my privacy. As opposed to a
| company who "doesn't know who I am". (Apart from unique
| fingerprint https://amiunique.org/ over many queries over
| many months)
| spiderice wrote:
| I thought modern browsers were supposed to resist finger
| printing? This website is slightly horrifying.
| kristofferR wrote:
| You thought wrong, fingerprinting is impossible to
| resist.
| hackideiomat wrote:
| Go look at MetaGer, they solved that issue
| tensor wrote:
| 99% of people are probably signed into a google account
| when they search google. If you want the sort of privacy
| you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly
| inconvenient tools.
|
| To maintain your level of privacy requires a drastically
| different lifestyle than most of us have or want.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| A fresh incognito window on any other search engine isn't
| going to be linked to an account.
|
| That is for me one of the downsides of Kagi.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| You can easily set your search engine in private windows
| to DuckDuckGo, MetaGer or whatever you prefer.
|
| Also, you probably are aware of this, but an incognito
| window won't magically stop trackers.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _To maintain your level of privacy_
|
| They didn't state anything about their desired level of
| privacy other than not wanting a username attached to
| every search. That's not equivalent to needing to use TOR
| for every search.
|
| > _99% of people are probably signed into a google
| account when they search google_
|
| What is the relevance of this statement? Obviously this
| wouldn't apply to the parent poster, it doesn't refute
| anything the parent said, and at least anecdotally it's
| not true at all.
|
| > _If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want,
| stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools._
|
| Privacy is a spectrum, not some binary choice between
| having a username (and often real name) attached to every
| search vs. using the dark web for every search. You can
| land somewhere in the middle, for example: "I don't want
| a username attached to every search".
|
| There is no technical reason Kagi needs usernames, but
| they choose to require them. For some people, that points
| to the company not being as privacy-friendly as other
| people seem to think/claim.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| I dont browse signed in to my Google account, which I
| barely use. But Google has an open account on each of us,
| even if we block their servers at the firewall level
| viraptor wrote:
| Check it out for your use case. (Have you used up the free
| searches?) I've not noticed any degradation for my searches.
| It's going to be different for everyone.
| mrmlz wrote:
| I used them when they first announced their service. Was a
| nice experience afaik. QWANT is more like internet on hard-
| mode.. They don't really give you what you're looking for
| but close enough.. But I've become more dissatisfied with
| the results of late.
|
| I'll mull the decision for a while but I'm probably going
| to give Kagi another try.
| nusl wrote:
| It could very well be different for everyone. Maybe I'm a
| generic bastard and Kagi doesn't think I'm very
| interesting, so my results are also generic.
| smcleod wrote:
| I haven't notice any degradation in quality with Kagi,
| haven't heard of it being a problem either?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| For what it's worth, whenever I've switched to DuckDuckGo,
| I've found myself adding a !g to nearly every search. Since
| I've switched to Kagi a few months ago, I've hardly ever had
| to go to another search engine. If you can spare it, I'd
| suggest you invest the 5$ for a small account and just test
| it out for a month.
| nusl wrote:
| It's worth giving a try. You get a good amount of free
| queries to evaluate the product first.
| al_borland wrote:
| I haven't had an issue. I recently started getting GPT results,
| in addition to the normal search results, and they have been
| very helpful for quick answers to questions.
| sph wrote:
| I am still a user because Google is worse than ever, but I wish
| Kagi would stop interpreting my queries and randomly decide to
| ignore or assign a random weights to my words.
|
| If I search for `foo bar baz`, I want pages with `foo`, `bar`
| and `baz`, please. No, verbatim doesn't cut it because it
| somehow is far too strict and even common queries return half a
| dozen results at most. Google started sucking in the 2010s when
| they decided they know better than me, and the more Kagi
| improves, the more they follow down Google's path of trying to
| be outsmart me, and falling short.
|
| I just want a 2003 Google experience. A computer is not smarter
| than me, stop trying to interpret and make assumptions.
|
| ---
|
| Aside, is it so hard to make a search engine with a query
| interface like any trigram-based SQL full-text engine? With
| quotes, AND, OR and -word. I still believe any AI-powered
| solution of the past 20 years to be a mockery of this gold
| standard of precision and simplicity, except maybe Google 1.0.
| __alexs wrote:
| > I just want a 2003 Google experience.
|
| Google in 2003 was good because the web wasn't quite so full
| of utter garbage. There must be 100x more content at least
| now.
| dspillett wrote:
| That is only going to get worse, with the direct copies of
| StackOverflow and other popular sites (which are easy
| enough for search engines to filter out because the body
| content is practically identical) that exist only to fool
| less careful clickers into getting their adverts & such,
| being joined by a multitude of LLM generated rewordings of
| the same which will be harder to automatically drop (or de-
| prioritise).
| nusl wrote:
| I've used browser addons to help with filtering the
| search spam too. I think uBlacklist? It has lists of
| sites that are often helpful
| eitland wrote:
| Everyone says this.
|
| But Kagi often being as good as Google used to be proves
| this isn't the only reason.
|
| Lately I have felt Kagi also sometimes stray down this
| "knows better than me what I want" path.
|
| I recommend using the forums to let them know. They
| actually read the forums and act on it.
|
| I've reported both ux improvements and search quality
| issues and more and they have always taken it seriously.
| mdekkers wrote:
| Can you be more specific? I exclusively use Kagi, and I am a
| heavy search user. I have not noticed anything like what you
| are mentioning.
| nusl wrote:
| I noticed that search queries required more thought and
| perusal to get desired results than normal. Kagi previously
| would give good enough results that I could figure it out
| without having to think about Kagi itself. More recently I
| noticed that I wasn't able to find answers like this anymore,
| and compared the query to Google. The results were pretty
| much identical. I kept using Kagi for another month but it
| persisted so I stopped my sub. I was an early adopted with
| Kagi and initially was very happy.
|
| Since Kagi became Google for my purposes, I started using
| Google again. I don't have much motivation to curate the
| customization features personally.
|
| I would imagine that it could depend on the general type of
| query. As a developer I definitely noticed a decline in
| quality.
|
| I'm quite privacy focused but for whatever reason don't care
| if Google knows that I want to know how to write a helm chart
| or eat pasta later
| freediver wrote:
| Can you report examples to kagifeedback.org so that we can
| take a look?
| Sakos wrote:
| Haven't experienced any decline in search quality. Been using
| them for over a year now.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Kagi is partly powered by Google, so I can imagine specific
| searches resulting in results pretty similar to Googles, if
| none of their other source have any matches.
|
| I noticed something similar with Ecosia, they apparently
| switched to using both Bing and Google, and the results, while
| still pretty good seems a little worse. That's all anecdotal
| and may be completely random, but I think one issue could be
| that Google is getting worse.
| nusl wrote:
| I tried a few searches side-by-side and they were pretty much
| identical. I get that Kagi offers customization etc but
| that's not worth the money for me personally. I just went
| back to Google because the results were the same.
| SyneRyder wrote:
| I'm still using & paying for Kagi, but I have noticed a sudden
| drop in search results quality in the last month or two.
| Unfortunately I didn't take note of the specific searches, but
| I jumped over to Brave Search and everything I was looking for
| was right on the top, instead of down around page 2 of Kagi.
|
| There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi
| as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come
| across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably
| government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly
| compromised.
| nusl wrote:
| Okay. Seems our experiences are similar. The timeline is
| roughly within the last two months that I noticed the same.
| freediver wrote:
| That would be unusual. Did you turn on verbatim search option
| in kagi and forgot to turn it off?
| SyneRyder wrote:
| Nope, I don't think so? I'm going through my settings now,
| and I have Safe Search and Image Safe Search both enabled.
| Which makes it even more surprising that it was returning
| hacked government sites mentioning porn in the search
| snippet.
|
| (Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I
| would have always had Personalized turned on instead.
| Seeing those results would be the first time I even
| encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the
| domain until then. Since the domain is still in my
| blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in
| Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian
| government sites.)
|
| I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked
| results, it's only common at times when I'm really
| researching something and need to get to a second page of
| results.
|
| I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too.
| Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN,
| that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can
| block those domains from my own personal results.
| elxx wrote:
| Did you start to notice things getting worse around the new
| year when they added Brave to their search results? That was
| the turning point for me, I was a huge advocate but then
| quality went downhill and then a few weeks later they proudly
| announced that they had spent a third of their funding
| on...t-shirts. Between that and this huge push towards being
| just like Google and Bing with LLM hallucinated nonsense, I'm
| not sure what their aim is anymore.
| hackideiomat wrote:
| They do not take security and privacy seriously
| elaus wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I didn't find anything in the change log
| that made this obvious to me.
| hackideiomat wrote:
| Ha, exactly! They rarely fix bugs.
|
| E.g., XSS / HTML injection in summarizer or discuss document.
| Or their broken CSP which allows injecting forms to e.g.,
| change settings.
|
| They haven't fixed many reported issues in a while, and just
| to prove I'm not lying: https://kagi.com/discussdoc?url=https
| %3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2Fcha...
| tmikaeld wrote:
| While it doesn't look good, it doesn't inject or execute
| scripts.
|
| Still, would have liked an official take on this. I was
| about to re-signup but now I'll hold off on that.
| hackideiomat wrote:
| Oh yes because of the CSP. The CSP that allows forms that
| can change your settings... you could easily use the
| above bug to get some impact with an additional click on
| a form's submit button.
|
| Admittedly, no full XSS anymore, but still dangerous and
| shows their lack of understanding and caring about
| security.
|
| It's not the only place you can inject HTML and not every
| page has a CSP...
| tmikaeld wrote:
| I don't get why they allow injection of irrelevant url
| parameters in the first place, it's the first rule of any
| input - remove what's not used and sanitize what is.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Regarding privacy: an obvious point is that you need to log
| in to use the search engine, so each search is tied to a
| unique user. Given that payment is involved, each user can be
| tied to a real-world identity.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >so each search is tied to a unique user
|
| Is it? They say searches aren't tied to account:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-
| protection.html#e...
| mdekkers wrote:
| > They do not take security and privacy seriously
|
| Anything specific about the privacy angle?
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Which privacy ?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Still far better than all the alternatives, no?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| The alternatives don't demand your payment details.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| You can pay for Kagi using cryptocurrency if you want to
| pay anonymously.
|
| The alternatives demand your data and/or lets you pay an
| attention fee by showing you ads or irrelevant results.
| digging wrote:
| Like Google? Whose entire business model is pilfering that
| data without asking you? And who also asks you constantly
| to attach a phone number to your account, etc.?
| hackideiomat wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I do use kagi. but it's not nearly what I
| wish it'd be.
| eitland wrote:
| So which search engine do you recommend that takes privacy
| seriously and that actually works (i.e. doesn't block me and
| return correct results) in Norway?
| hackideiomat wrote:
| Maybe MetaGer if you can live with their quality
| eitland wrote:
| That was why I mentioned "return correct results".
|
| At the moment I am aware of two search engines available to
| me that doesn't try to drive me crazy by wasting my time on
| irrelevant results:
|
| - kagi.com
|
| - and search.marginalia.nu
|
| and the second one, while being honest and high quality,
| has a rather limited index.
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you
| code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose
| gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they
| also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don't know a single
| service that packs that many features for the that price
| nowadays.
| mhitza wrote:
| I hope they don't stray too far of course with other features.
| Been using Kagi continuously since August, and I've developed a
| pattern where I still jump to Google when I need to buy stuff,
| get latest news and find local (national, or EU) content.
|
| It's great for technical lookup, and answers, but for general
| search usage it's not there yet. I'd love to give actionable
| feedback on how they could improve, but can't figure out
| exactly what's missing on that department. It could just as
| well be a small crawled index.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| I switched to Kagi almost two years ago. I have an experience
| opposite to yours. I never ever use the google bang. I did in
| the beginning, when a query wouldn't give me results, only to
| get worse, more verbose, equally useless results from Google.
| Quickly learned that if Kagi can't answer a query, Google
| will fare no better (and will waste my time with junk).
|
| I'll note that to get local news, I do have to switch the
| region selector from "International" to "Portugal". Kagi
| doesn't have Google's behaviour of using my IP location.
| Which is good. Getting international results from Google is a
| struggle.
| mdhen wrote:
| Been using kagi for awhile, also in Portugal. Google
| shopping is the one thing that Kagi can't beat them at yet.
| If i'm looking to buy a product online not from amazon it's
| still the best option.
| anneessens wrote:
| I don't know what you're searching for, but I'm also from EU
| and I'm able to use Kagi for everything, including content
| from my own country. Sometimes I might have to change the
| country or language filter, but I've never had a situation
| where something was available on Google but wasn't available
| on Kagi. Nowadays, I'm only using Google for some quick
| answers, like showing the score of a football match or the
| population of a country. Kagi doesn't seem to support quick
| answers for these queries yet, although I have seen quick
| answers for weather, calculations and shipping and flight
| tracking. So I'm sure more quick answers will be added
| eventually.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Kagi has just also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so it is
| now much better at answering factual questions such as
| population of a country or timezone. Wofram Alpha has
| always been more accurate than Google on these questions.
|
| Showing the score of a football match, and doing online
| shopping, are the two remaining use cases I have for
| google. My usage of Google has now gone down. 95%. Kagi is
| simply better.
| anneessens wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha seems to work quite well from my small
| tests, even with recent events. However, I don't really
| like to read an answer that seems like it's a person
| talking, I would rather just see the data in a big size
| like on Google. That's just a nitpick though, it's
| definitely useful. Thanks for telling me.
| mhitza wrote:
| One example is that if I try to lookup a specific product
| I'd like to buy, I'm going to find more results on Google.
| Also (with the country filter enabled, Romania in my case),
| I still get results from US, Canada and other countries
| (which in practice is a hassle with delivery), but even if
| that weren't the issue, the pages are not in Romanian
| either to have a reason to show up in my results.
| anneessens wrote:
| It seems someone else in this thread has the same issue
| as you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39395823
|
| This seems to be recent, so I guess that's why I didn't
| experience it.
| Havoc wrote:
| Does the "code" part work for code completion in say vscode or
| is it just a chat interface?
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| The "code" assistant is just a chat interface configured for
| programming tasks powered by gpt4 (Ultimate plan) and gpt3.5
| for (Pro plan).
| Havoc wrote:
| I see. Thanks
| mistermann wrote:
| Is this a watered down version of GPT4 or something that they
| can offer it for cheaper, plus all their own features?
| freedomben wrote:
| It depends on the feature/product. They have custom models
| for some things (and honestly FastGPT and their summarizer
| gives pretty good results), but when it says it uses GPT4, it
| really does.
| hellcow wrote:
| I didn't realize they supported full conversations with my
| choice of model. They need to advertise this better! I just
| upgraded to ultimate and can cancel my ChatGPT subscription.
| Love that I can give more support to Kagi _and save money_ VS
| my pro plan+ChatGPT.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi assistant is technically still in beta, gathering
| feedback. We are not satisfied with the experince yet and are
| working on an overhaul, planning to officially launch it in
| March. This is why it is a bit 'hidden' from view, but yet
| available.
| moneywoes wrote:
| is it worth the subscription?
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't
| anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many
| results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent
| search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or
| too specific.
| stavros wrote:
| Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it
| returns something than if it returns nothing.
| elaus wrote:
| If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of
| reading through pages of irrelevant search results.
| dewey wrote:
| I can not remember a time where going to another page gave
| me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10
| it's probably not the right query.
| internetter wrote:
| This never happened to me until I started iOS
| development. Everything is built on top of layers and
| layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with "NS" for
| NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced,
| but sometimes you really are looking for something deep,
| so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding
| stuff written in 2010 and such
| thuruv wrote:
| Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back
| and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.
| deliriumchn wrote:
| if bad results are returned, you still can reword your
| query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or
| slightly related results instead of 0.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I won't, because I have to actually scroll through those
| results to realize that they couldn't find what I want.
| It's like asking for where the apples are and then being
| led to an aisle with bananas, melons and pears. I'd much
| rather just be told that they have no apples.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Returning random unrelated garbage does not mean you have a
| higher chance of finding what you're looking for, it just
| means you're going to waste time sifting through useless
| noise.
| Lutger wrote:
| And that is time you don't spend on refining your query, so
| it makes you actually less effective at searching if you
| consider people do not have infinite time.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query.
| There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever
| returning _nothing_ , and instead they will return things
| that they think are related to your query but really aren't.
|
| Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix
| but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of
| movies that they think are similar to the one you searched
| for. That is because their database actually knows about the
| movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related
| stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar
| theme, etc. But if I search for a _specific_ title, then none
| of this is what I want, and I don 't want to spend the extra
| 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they
| actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search
| experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement
| rather than user experience because a small minority will end
| up watching something from the garbage results while the
| majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra
| cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever
| returning nothing, and instead they will return things that
| they think are related to your query but really aren't.
|
| With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding
| similar movies.
|
| But one platform having particularly surprising ability to
| find "similar" things is AliExpress.
|
| On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of
| something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still
| sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking
| for and show similar products from other brands. And I've
| been wondering how they do that.
|
| Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they
| scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and
| models that have never been on AliExpress.
|
| Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries
| that people made in the past where someone for example
| included extra keywords about what they were looking for.
| Or those people first having searched for a brand name and
| model and then made subsequent searches for more generic
| descriptions of what they looked for.
|
| Or sellers could be including names of brands and models
| for products that are similar in the description or other
| input fields for metadata for their listings.
| 10729287 wrote:
| >Example: If you search for a specific movie title on
| Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a
| list of movies that they think are similar to the one you
| searched for.
|
| I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4
| of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to
| give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.
| jorvi wrote:
| > But if I search for a specific title, then none of this
| is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20
| seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they
| actually don't have what I want.
|
| This has never been the case. If it can't find your title,
| it'll display "titles similar to", right at the head part
| of your search. No 20 seconds of confirmation needed.
|
| I actually prefer Netflix' way because if I search for
| "Demolition Man" and they don't have it, it might be that
| I'm in the mood for any <2000s action schlok, and who says
| I already know about "Escape From New York"?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I just tried searching in browser and Netflix says
| nothing like "titles similar to".
|
| I searched for "Ted Lasso".
|
| It has grey text "More to explore:", white text "Ted
| Lasso" and then thumbnail list of different shows, and
| it's literally just thumbnails, you can't even Ctrl + F
| and you have to read all the titles in different colored
| and stylised fonts.
|
| It's as if it is intentionally built in such a way to
| make it hard to understand that it's really not there.
|
| https://imgur.com/vgohSVP
|
| Edit:
|
| And in TV it says nothing, just gives you the thumbnails
| and since it takes longer to type you must check after
| each character whether one of the thumbnails happens to
| be what you are searching for.
| OwseiWT wrote:
| I'm not home rn so I can't test it, but I'm quite sure
| that netflix says something like "we don't have X, these
| titles are similar" or smth like that. Maybe I just have
| an old version in my TV idk.
| freedomben wrote:
| I've seen both. Sometimes it says it doesn't have it,
| other times it just displays results like it does have it
| even though it doesn't. You might be onto something, it's
| probably the difference between the web interface and app
| interface (on various devices).
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| My LG tv with webOS also doesn't give any indication that
| the title does not exist.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| No data is better than bad data
| eitland wrote:
| No. It is the single most important reason why I pay for
| Kagi.
|
| It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or
| features or something.
|
| But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They
| seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results
| and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no
| irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is
| a bug and will be dealt with.)
|
| I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google
| or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my
| search.
|
| Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in
| Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is
| relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality
| of the search results.
| ajdude wrote:
| So many times I'll often search something on Kagi, get no
| results, and tag on the "!g" at the end to see what would
| happen. Of course, I get a ton of results that have nothing
| to do with what I was searching for. I love Kagi.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We've reached a point where if an "alternative" search
| engine can't find something, then neither can Google.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi uses results from almost every search engine in the
| world plus its own results. If you can not find something
| on Kagi, it is likely you will not be able to find it
| anywhere.
| bayindirh wrote:
| A decent library returns nothing if you ask something absurd.
| A decent professor nudges you to the correct path if you're
| wrong on your reasoning.
|
| A decent search engine should do the same, be able to tell
| that you're doing something wrong, and do better if you want
| some answers.
|
| If we balk at AI when it hallucinates, we should balk at
| search engines when they hallucinate, too.
|
| Kagi does the correct thing, IMHO.
| Zambyte wrote:
| You have a higher chance of finding _something_. I think you
| actually have a lower chance of finding what you want if it
| returns irrelevant results, because then you have to spend
| time manually evaluate and decide that the results are
| irrelevant before making another query.
| frereubu wrote:
| You also have a higher chance of wasting a great deal of time
| combing through useless results when no clear answer exists
| for your query.
| miyuru wrote:
| Do they charge for empty searches? If they charge for it, I
| agree at least something should be returned.
| vlz wrote:
| Why? If it isn't relevant, you gain nothing. The information
| that nothing was found might even be better for you than
| "something".
| megamalloc wrote:
| I strongly disagree on this. If a search with no results
| costs them about the same amount of compute as one with
| results, then satisfying that requirement would give them a
| commercial incentive to lie to you about whether they have
| any good results for you, and to waste your time scrolling
| through bad results. Your time doing so is almost certainly
| worth more than what the search itself cost you.
| wofo wrote:
| As a recent paid user of Kagi, this is one of the things I
| love!
| declaredapple wrote:
| > if you query is bad or too specific.
|
| Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query
| anyway.
|
| > This is what any decent search engine should do -- return
| nothing
|
| WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job!
|
| I have an account with a username that is spelled very
| similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the
| real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the
| username!
|
| I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I
| tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a
| multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure
| rsoto wrote:
| I feel like you're arguing against yourself.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I feel like you 're arguing against yourself._
|
| Hacker News in a nutshell.
| freedomben wrote:
| the irony in this comment is delicious :-)
| plagiarist wrote:
| It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the
| database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row"
| and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"
| declaredapple wrote:
| What are you talking about? Have you ever worked with
| full text search?
|
| I'm saying I don't like high cutoffs of similarity
| scores. I have no idea what you're talking about.
|
| Very very few queries should have _literally zero
| results_. Surely you have at least a few words in common
| with _something_
| declaredapple wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean.
|
| I'm saying if you have a query that returns a similarity
| score, I don't want only results with > 0.1. I want all the
| results returned
| mrweasel wrote:
| >> if you query is bad or too specific.
|
| > Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the
| query anyway.
|
| Google does this, and they suck at it, unless you just
| spelled a word wrong. Do a niche or very specific query, for
| which Google has no answer and it will, without fail, remove
| the most relevant keyword and give you a bunch of junk
| results.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| And actually, if you misspell a word, Kagi will suggest
| that alternative, too.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what
| I tell it to.
|
| Like search for things you did not search for...?
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| You are confusing search and text generation.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| > Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the
| query anyway.
|
| No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to. For a search
| engine that is to show me what it has about the query I
| input. If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It
| should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what
| it "think" I meant. Not its job.
| declaredapple wrote:
| > No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to.
|
| That's what I said. "then evaluate the query anyway." I
| should have added "original" to that statement
|
| > If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should
| not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it
| "think" I meant. Not its job.
|
| I'm saying I don't want similarity cutoffs. Most FTS
| methods involve a similarity score, I'm saying I don't want
| only results with > 0.1 similarity. I want all of them that
| were returned.
|
| I'm NOT saying it should somehow inject results that didn't
| originate from the original FTS query.
| kemotep wrote:
| Have you never copied and pasted an error code into Google
| and have it return zero or only 1 or 2 results?
|
| It's terrible but far better than getting 100's of irrelevant
| results because Google decided two words out of 10 in your
| query were the only ones that matter.
| declaredapple wrote:
| I actually have had this happen and it's infuriating.
|
| I've had queries of copy+pasted errors with zero results,
| but playing around with it a bit just to find a github
| result that was only like two words off.
|
| > it's terrible but far better than getting 100's of
| irrelevant results because
|
| Surely the similarity to the one on github would still have
| it ranked on the first page?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Google will still do this if you search a gnarly enough string.
| I do prefer the Kagi interface though.
| chefandy wrote:
| I used to get no results all the time, and it was very useful!
| Unfortunately, that seems to be happening less frequently for
| me. In verbatim mode with personalized results off, I noticed
| Kagi not respecting quotes for phrases. Google will ignore my
| search parameters intended to reduce results for free, so...
| :-/
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Noooooo, you're breaking my heart.
| bluish29 wrote:
| If you have specific examples, I think kagi team would like
| to hear about, I would suggest that you open post them in
| support website [1] and I'm sure they will look into the
| details.
|
| [1] https://kagifeedback.org/
| chefandy wrote:
| Hopefully it's a bug!
| wpm wrote:
| Yeah more and more Kagi seems to be trying to give me the
| same trash results Google did while ignoring parts of my
| search parameters.
|
| I have never asked for or even wanted "personalized" results,
| because on Kagi and everywhere else, personalized is
| shorthand for "very very poor guesses". It's very
| frustrating.
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| Turning personalization off just turns off custom redirects
| and any website ranking adjustments you've made. That's
| really the only personalization we have for results.
|
| disclaimer: I work for Kagi
| tauntz wrote:
| > This is what any decent search engine should do -- return
| nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.
|
| Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially
| sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself
| contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated
| results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not
| showing anything.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Great to see continued improvements. One area where I continue to
| use google is specific local information, like opening hours,
| commute timetables. Try these two searches in Google and Kagi to
| compare:
|
| "train from Galway to Dublin"
|
| "Ilac shopping centre opening hours"
|
| Kagi gives you a bunch of links that might be absolutely trash,
| if the service provider (eg: rail company) has a shitty website.
| Google gives you precisely what you're looking for, eg: a table
| of departure/arrival times for the next 5 trains, with a date
| picker. It can even handle the atrocious TFI (transport for
| ireland) car-crash, providing me with the precise info I need to
| get a bus from one part of Dublin to another. You can't even get
| that with the official TFI app, and they notoriously block access
| to their data API (breaking the only decent Play Store app for
| buses in the city)
|
| I'm not sure if this is because Google have a budget for curated
| content like this, or if they have some magic way to extract that
| data without making a balls of it.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| So funny these are almost the exact two usecases I mentioned in
| my comment.
| ambigious7777 wrote:
| I can't imagine the black magic they have to do to scrape that
| data.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > or if they have some magic way to extract that data without
| making a balls of it.
|
| They have a system where public transport operators can upload
| their routes in a specific and quite complicated file format.
| Google does not integrate any public transit unless the
| authorised organisation uploads the data to them.
| Einenlum wrote:
| Whether we like it and use it or not (I love it and use it), I
| think we can only be super impressed by the productivity of the
| Kagi team. Look at these dates. It's insane.
| xigoi wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is due to them using Crystal for the
| backend.
| 1equalsequals1 wrote:
| It's a general purpose programming language like any other
| mainstream language.
| xigoi wrote:
| Being a statically typed variant of Ruby, it's well suited
| for fast development without making a mess.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'm actually currently pretty annoyed with them, as it's been
| over 2 weeks of non-English searches being borderline-broken
| [0] with no feedback or ETA.
|
| [0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-english-results-given-too-
| mu...
| kristofferR wrote:
| You aren't using the correct language though, you are on
| International. Local language searches has improved vastly
| lately.
|
| Now I can just keep it on my local language, even while doing
| English searches. Previously I had to switch between national
| and international all the time, that was a pain.
| kioleanu wrote:
| Oh he's holding it wrong
| Semaphor wrote:
| Nope, my issue was the one further down with `!de`, it got
| merged into this one.
|
| > Now I can just keep it on my local language, even while
| doing English searches.
|
| That's exactly the issue. I search for a name, so it can't
| know what language it's in. But I want the German results,
| that's why I switched it to German.
|
| > Previously I had to switch between national and
| international all the time, that was a pain.
|
| That wasn't an issue at all for me, I use !de for German
| searches, and nothing for automatic international searches.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Yeah, seems like we have totally opposite opinions, I
| vastly prefer the way it is now where I don't have to use
| bangs/change settings all the time to get good results by
| default.
|
| My language, Norwegian, is also a much "smaller" one than
| German, so search results without any English are
| outright worse. Personally, even if I spoke German, I'd
| prefer to get Wikipedia on top for a search like "Olympus
| E-P2".
|
| It seems like they should implement a "verbatim language"
| search option, so both use cases can be satisfied.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'd rather have the German Wikipedia, though ...
|
| And never the US Amazon or eBay over the German version.
| kristofferR wrote:
| It doesn't have a German Wikipedia article, so that's an
| impossibility. Agree with the store links though, except
| perhaps one US Amazon link - when I buy expensive tech I
| usually check 1-star reviews to see if it has serious
| problem.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yeah, I forgot again that you want the automation. Kagi
| used to be about being explicit, and not guessing what
| you want. That is what I want back.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| With kagi, can't you block and/or de-rank specific
| domains? This obviously isn't a fully general solution,
| but if there are a small number of domains that A) come
| up frequently and B)you never want the english version
| (like ebay and amazon), then just block the english
| versions of those websites and promote the german
| versions.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that "this is already good
| enough so what are you complaining about", I'm merely
| suggesting something that might go most of the way to
| fixing it until Kagi eventually implements a better
| search. They are a small company and I'd imagine that
| non-english language (and especially multi-lingual)
| behavior is not going to be the top-most priority, as
| understandably frustrating as that is for the people who
| need it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| That's not useful at all. I normally want those pages,
| but not when I'm doing a German search.
|
| Kagi is not broken in general, 95% of the time it's still
| fine because almost all my searches are in English, so
| without !de in the German region. It's only the regional
| search that is not working properly anymore because they
| went further into "we know what you actually want to
| search for" territory. Not doing that was a huge part of
| what I loved about kagi.
|
| In addition, this worked fine all the time. I've been
| using Kagi since the earliest betas, they only broke it
| very recently.
| souvlakee wrote:
| Kagi is good, but they claim they're faster than others, but it
| depends. In my country, Cyprus (I know nobody cares), it's
| significantly slower than Google, so I decided to stick with a
| classic.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| Same in Poland. I suspect they're generally slower in Europe
| than US due to location of servers.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| At least according to status page [1] they have locations in
| Europe, US and Asia. Haven't noticed any speed issues in
| Finland.
|
| [1] https://status.kagi.com/
| SushiHippie wrote:
| They have deployed to multiple datacenters, your nearest one
| should be eu-west. You can see the datacenter where you
| connect to by opening the drawer on the right by clicking on
| the settings icon in the top right, and at the bottom is the
| datacenter location + the latency to it.
|
| Maybe you could open an issue in kagifeedback, as they listen
| to the feedback, and for example deployed to south america
| because someone complained
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/2347-creation-of-new-server-in-
| so...
|
| Region list:
|
| https://status.kagi.com/
| yowayb wrote:
| No speed issues in Turkiye for me
| freediver wrote:
| Can you report this to kagifeedback.org so we can dig deeper?
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a while. Unfortunately, its website on
| mobile is much lower quality than say DDG. One issue I find often
| is that when I want to edit a previously-entered query in the
| search box, sliding the text cursor is very hard - it often stops
| at search box boundary and doesn't scroll the text inside.
| Another is that sometimes the search results page freezes after I
| come back to it from a different tab. When I try to scroll, it
| refuses to scroll and only briefly shows some white space around
| the currently-viewed part. I blame all those on some JS that's
| too creative for its own good.
|
| Aside from that, I wish Safari had a setting to add custom search
| URLs, so that I can paste my Kagi auth token, instead of having
| to use xxSearch, which also has some annoyances. Obviously, this
| part is not Kagi's fault.
|
| I've stopped using Kagi on mobile and went back to DDG. It's
| still stellar on desktop though.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| They've got a new "blessed" method, which involves installing
| their custom Safari extension, which redirects. It works fairly
| well. Obviously not as good as Apple just not having a
| whitelist of search providers.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| I've used it, but it often failed to redirect my searches. It
| was hit-and-miss. xxSearch works better.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Obviously, this part is not Kagi's fault.
|
| It is totally their fault. They should release a Kagi App for
| iOS and be done with it. No normal person is going to mess with
| hacky extensions and permissions to pay for a search engine. If
| I can tell people to download the Kagi App and search from
| there, all of my friends and acquaintances would be able to use
| it and probably happy to pay.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They actually have the Orion Browser - though personally I
| found it a bit rough on the edges so I'm fine with stock
| Safari + the Kagi extension.
|
| I do agree that they should just release a Kagi app - or even
| better, just rename Orion to "Kagi browser" and have Kagi as
| a first-class citizen (with account login).
| digging wrote:
| I've switched from Firefox to Orion on my work Macbook and
| I agree it's a bit rough. But I've never used Safari as a
| daily driver so I can't tell if it's Safari's fault or
| Orion's fault. The biggest issue for me is the terribly raw
| bookmarking UX (cannot drag-and-drop from URL bar to
| bookmarks bar, cannot move items around within the
| bookmarks bar, etc.)
| gtirloni wrote:
| Kagi's domain block list is worth the subscription alone.
| 7839284023 wrote:
| If you just want a domain block list, you could use
| https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
| gtirloni wrote:
| Nice! It works pretty well and the subscription lists are a
| great feature. Thanks for suggesting it. I was able to import
| all the block rules from Kagi there. At least for blocking
| it's great but I also lower/raise results in Kagi so that's a
| bit harder for this extension.
|
| Still like Kagi better for the results (especially technical
| stuff), but I do still use Google for regional/news/shopping
| searches or things where Google Search behaves more like an
| assistant.
|
| I think this is an area where Kagi will have some trouble
| competing because of Google's data moat and the fact they
| have been honing non-web integrations for a long time. This
| long tail must be 90% of the job.
| altgans wrote:
| How does Kagi fare for scholarly use-cases? Ie. searching
| articles, papers, citations?
| bluish29 wrote:
| Do you mean Kagi search function or their LLM? If it is the
| former, I use it as a daily driver and I do a lot of scholarly
| work and I rarely felt the need to switch to something else.
| Maybe sometimes I go to google scholar itself (not google
| search) but this again wouldn't be different from using google
| search itself.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Kagi is good, I've been an unlimited subscriber for a while. Two
| low hanging fruit opportunities though:
|
| 1. Location based or aware searching - it keeps giving me the UK
| versions of storefronts or the identically-named steakhouse a
| thousand miles away and not the one I can walk to. Kind of lame,
| particularly giving me random countries' versions of sites. 2.
| The map -- maybe this is a setting, but the map always gives me
| nearly useless results. This is probably tied to geolocation or
| location aware results.
| wrboyce wrote:
| One of my main complaints (aside how bad the iOS extension is,
| but I guess Apple can shoulder most of the blame there) is that
| I often get US storefronts despite using the "United Kingdom
| (GB)" region. How odd! I even get amazon.com results, but never
| amazon.co.uk.
| brookst wrote:
| The iOS extension has a kludgey install, but it works
| perfectly for me. Did the weird stuff once, never had to
| think about it again , and all I get are Kagi results.
| wrboyce wrote:
| I've had to disable it since a recent update as it broke
| the "!g" bang which I still occasionally find useful. It
| seems to insist on intercepting Google searches even when I
| explicitly use Google. It also ruins the UX of the
| address/search bar somewhat (my search term becomes a Kagi
| URL so is less easily editable), but that is Apple's fault.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Switched to using duckduckgo as the proxy search engine
| you have to select, now it works fine for me.
| wrboyce wrote:
| Fantastic, thanks for the tip!
| graemep wrote:
| I have the same problem with Firefox desktop.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I constantly get links to the UK version of sites when I
| search for things from the US. It's very annoying, and
| sometimes sites are broken in a weird way where a cookie is
| set and I can't get to the US version without being
| redirected back to UK version.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but how is this "low hanging fruit"?
|
| Google is still extremely competitive in the maps/location
| space, and I've heard Apple Maps is very good these days.
| Secondly, these features are not trivial. Maps are much more
| interactive - giant teams or even orgs are managing these
| products at faang.
|
| On the other hand, having language-awareness is perhaps more
| important. Google frequently gives me results based on
| location, although I don't speak the language (well). Getting
| results in English is hard where I am, in the typical
| infantilizing fashion of megacorps (we think you want X, and
| we're not gonna offer you a setting).
|
| Edit: apparently Google added Spanish as a language
| automatically based on some searches, and then search results
| for say API docs came up in Spanish first instead, despite
| English being my "preferred language".
| ambigious7777 wrote:
| I think OP just wants to have map results based off
| geolocation, not a full-fledged map service.
| lintbrush wrote:
| I agree that maps, looking up locations etc is the one
| ingrained Google-user pattern that always leads me to a weird
| dead end and has me popping back over to google for JUST that
| query.
|
| I don't know if there's a toggle I just haven't found yet for
| just automatically using Google Maps for location based
| searches until their feature gets a little better.
|
| Beyond that, Kagi has been an incredible breath of fresh air.
| api wrote:
| Kagi has been my go to for some time now. For the past few months
| I rarely consult others.
|
| I'd say toward the end of 2023 we passed the inflection point
| where Google is now generally worse. In fact these days Google is
| often worse or at least no better than Bing and DuckDuckGo. Kagi
| is better than all of them.
|
| It seems like the Internet being winner take all is only part of
| the story. The reality is winner takes all, then turns to shit,
| then an unbundling occurs.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Another addition, those on Duobor Family plans can now upgrade
| individual accounts within the Family to Ultimate.
|
| I always wanted to try Ultimate but I was in a Duo account with
| my wife so it wasn't really possible. Now I can, and trying out
| all those LLMs is fun!
| freedomben wrote:
| > _In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply
| starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who,
| which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will
| automatically trigger Quick Answer:_
|
| This is the type of attention to detail that makes me a happy
| user. Killer feature for me, no more having to type !quick (and
| yes I set up quick bangs but always seem to forget).
|
| I have been really pleased with Kagi, though I do live in
| perpetual fear that they'll be acquired. Please no. And God help
| us if Apple acquires them, which seems like a risk given Kagi's
| great work on search and AI, two things Apple really wants. Don't
| do it Kagi!
| lolinder wrote:
| The founder has previously said that they're bootstrapped
| specifically so that they don't have to chase an exit to get a
| return for investors. Obviously that doesn't mean they won't
| change their minds at some point, but it does give a lot of
| comfort.
| berdon wrote:
| I also live in this fear and have specifically communicated it
| to Vlad in an email before. He gave the same response as one of
| your other responders - they have no intention of selling.
|
| Of course, that's the only answer any successful founder would
| give you...so I still live in fear :(
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi founder here. I wake up every morning loving my job, our
| member community, our mission and the change we make in the
| world. We are basicallly sustainable at this point and I am
| in awe of the opportunities in front of us as a user-centric
| company, bringing a friendly version of the internet to homes
| worldwide. Things are looking good, we have no plans to
| change any of that.
| lolinder wrote:
| Thank you for all of your work! I've been with Kagi since
| early in the beta and it's just been getting better and
| better!
|
| Just this morning I realized that when I look up a classic
| Disney movie Kagi turns up the classic and not the 2010s
| remake, where Google invariably turns up the newer one.
| Little user-centric things like that are why I love Kagi so
| much!
| mattbaker wrote:
| I've been using Kagi full time and I like it a _lot_. It's been
| worth the price.
|
| I expected to like lenses and favoring/blocking specific domains.
| What I didn't expect was how much their "Quick Answer" would
| change how I search.
|
| I've been "AI hesitant", in general the chance that an LLM will
| hallucinate makes these kinds of tools more trouble than they're
| worth for me personally. In Kagi's case, though, the individual
| facts it states in the quick answers have citations linking to
| the site it drew that information from.
|
| Here's what I've found:
|
| - it's been accurate most of the time, but not 100% (as expected)
|
| - citations are pretty accurate most of the time
|
| - every so often the citation links to a page that seemingly
| doesn't back the claim in the quick answer
|
| Unsurprisingly, I don't trust the AI generated quick answer in
| isolation, what it does do is let me scan a few paragraphs, find
| the one that answers my question most specifically, and visit the
| sites it links to as citations for that piece of the answer. This
| saves me the time of clicking through the top $N results and
| scanning each page to find the one that seems to answer my query
| most directly. It's like a layer on top of the page rank.
|
| I remember using Google the first time and being impressed how
| the top answers were so much more relevant than Yahoo, it was a
| huge time saver. Now I find myself wondering if the "quick
| answer" citations will prove to be a similar jump in accelerating
| my ability to find the right web page.
|
| It also makes me wonder if their own page rank algorithm could
| incorporate the quick answer output as an input to a site's rank?
| That would be an interesting experiment!
| freedomben wrote:
| Same experience with quick answer. I originally thought of it
| as a gimmick, but it's really changed the way I search now. The
| summaries are good, and the citations are amazing. I (nearly)
| always click through to the cited sites to decide how much I
| trust them, but the vast majority of the time the summary is
| spot on and extremely helpful.
|
| On a side note, as a software dev I was curious about how it
| would "answer" queries that weren't questions, so I've tried
| feeding it queries like "linux distro" or other things that are
| most certainly not questions. About half the time it does a
| pretty good job at answering! For the really hard ones, it
| seems to just morph it into "what is <query>?" so nothing real
| complicated, but I did find it interesting.
| joshuakogut wrote:
| What happens when it crawls some LLM generated text on a
| website, using that as a citation?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It gives you in-line citations so you can see which parts of
| the text might come from a subgrade source.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| It's really cool to see a search engine alternative. I wonder
| about the practicality in the wake of large language models? It
| would seem almost easier to build a model that acts as a search
| engine than to build a traditional search engine.
| aomix wrote:
| I really need to try Kagi out this weekend. Whenever I try to
| change search engines I hit the same wall in that ~20 years of
| Google has trained me to think in terms of their search algorithm
| when searching.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I switched full time from Google to Kagi last month and it's been
| an improvement, or at worst a neutral change. There was a
| frustrating period of adjustment as I had to learn what Kagi's
| limitations and quirks were. Google has them too but I've long
| since learned how to compensate for them. Now I know Kagi's.
|
| These integrations with other services and specific data are
| remarkably useful. Glad to see more! One weak spot of Kagi for me
| is their local / maps search. It's Apple Maps which is still not
| as good as Google Maps. But moreso Google Local has become a very
| strong product with a unique database. Nothing stopping me from
| using Google for local business info when I need it though.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I wish services like Kagi and others would make it easier to
| contribute to OSM so more people would update places
| information (like business names, opening hours, etc).
|
| It doesn't help to rely on Apple Maps when everyone can
| contribute to OSM directly. It's also easy to make it
| accessible enough (but not to much to avoid trolls) just to
| increase OSM contributors base.
|
| That's what Kagi does with their Wikipedia oneboxes and I
| regularly open the article to correct it when I notice an
| issue. I wish Kago (and others) would do that with places, so
| we can avoid opening the Maps tab to have quick place info.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Disagree. It is up to the businesses to send their up to date
| information to map providers, because it is in their direct
| interest that customers find them. If they're too lazy and
| cheap to do that, then it is their problem that they get
| fewer customers. They shouldn't rely on free labour and you
| shouldn't do this for free for them. If they don't know how
| to put their info on a map, then they should hire an agency
| that does.
|
| Imagine being a business owner and ignoring the very
| basics...
| thiht wrote:
| Business owners: "everyone uses Google Maps". That's it.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's it. And still they don't bother to take care of
| their properties on Google Maps. Most won't even bother
| to submit their stuff to Apple Maps.
|
| The thing is: Submitting your info costs nothing in money
| and almost none of your time, but brings enormous
| benefits in bringing in customers. So if the business
| owner is too lazy to do it, why should anybody else do
| it?
|
| If you submit correct info for your favourite local
| business to a map service, that might bring them
| thousands of new customers and the revenue from them.
| Then go to them and tell them you'd like a coffee since
| you put their info neatly into the maps. They'd probably
| spit in your face. Then turn around and pay thousands for
| Google Ads or for a local social media influencer to
| bring in 50 new customers.
|
| Business owners being dumb about their internet presence
| is why for example Booking.com is a hundred billion
| dollar company.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| As an aside, and I said this in a thread yesterday but, what I'm
| hearing about Kagi (I've not used it yet but I'm signing up today
| to try it out) and the contrast between the Sora and Gemini 1.5
| announcements make me genuinely concerned about the future of
| Google.
|
| Search is so much their golden goose and they've let it languish
| and now there are real dangers to that product from several
| flanks. They have Gmail after that but is that enough to keep the
| coffers full?
|
| I had so much hope in Google Workspace as competition to
| Microsoft 365 but even that is in trouble if you ask me. I've
| been helping a company migrate from Workspace to M365 and one of
| their reasons was because they couldn't get any support from
| Google. Also, Workspace is hard to use. Not that M365 is easy, or
| that their support is any good but, Google has clear perception
| problems here.
|
| I almost never hear of anyone talking about GCP anymore so I'm
| guessing they're losing mindshare in addition to market share.
|
| Dart and Flutter are wonderful projects but it seems to me that
| since there's no way to stick ads on them, Google is content to
| give that department a little money and let them do their thing.
| But, of course, when some of the aforementioned products start
| losing more money, great products like Dart and Flutter will
| certainly be cut.
|
| Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe Google's time has
| come and companies like Kagi can come in and fill the void Google
| seems hell-bent on leaving behind.
| williamstein wrote:
| "Even though Microsoft (with 23% of the market) and Google
| (with 10%) each gained just one percentage point of market
| share year-on-year, that's more than AWS can claim, which
| continued to hover around 32% market share.".
| https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/microsoft-and-googl...
| moneywoes wrote:
| How would you contrast the Gemini 1.5 and Sora announcements?
| digging wrote:
| Summarizing what I read in the threads the other day,
|
| Gemini 1.5 was "announced" and you can't use it or see what
| it really does, it's just "better". (Admittedly, the context
| length sounds incredible, but we can't really test it and
| hype only works when there are no alternatives.)
|
| Sora then dropped immediately afterward and was showing
| numerous really impressive demos and then taking user
| requests all day.
| kagiftw wrote:
| About a month ago I noticed I could no longer use Kagi search
| from Firefox 78 esr on an aging OSX 10.9.5 laptop I like to use
| due to a Javascript problem. GitHub's directory view also seemed
| to stop working on it about the same time with the same tell-tale
| Javascript error.
|
| The latest Firefox ESR I can run on my old laptop doesn't like
| ??= and some other newer JS syntax. I see this sort of problem in
| my own daily development and I know with tools like esbuild you
| can simply specify --target=firefox78 and end up JS that works
| fine on older yet perfectly working hardware.
|
| So what does this have to do with Kagi? Well after a bit of
| looking around I found https://kagifeedback.org and reported the
| issue [1]. A day or so later Vlad triaged it and it was fixed
| within the next few days.
|
| A month later the problem reappeared in another place[2], Vlad
| triaged it again and it was promptly fixed.
|
| Needless to say I'm very impressed with attention Vlad and people
| at Kagi give to problems and the effort they spend improving
| their product.
|
| Makes me want to learn Crystal :-)
|
| 1- https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-
| lon...
|
| 2- https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-
| esr-g...
| rtev wrote:
| Yahoo returns thousands of results for dorking queries where Kagi
| and Google return an identical list of 5-6 results. Pretty
| disappointing for me as a paying customer to learn that Kagi is
| basically a Google wrapper
| strogonoff wrote:
| What do I need from a search engine? Not an LLM chatbot, not any
| of the auxiliary "smart" stuff. I want customizable results, and
| to be able to jump into searching quickly and intuitively.
|
| (Decent results, sure, but that is subjective.)
|
| So, a big reason I was using DDG over Google, despite often
| subpar results, was bangs. Now I pay for Kagi, and guess what
| convinced me to subscribe? Bangs indicate caring about power
| users. How cool would it be if I could set Kagi as default search
| in any browser and get powerful shortcuts at my fingertips across
| all devices?
|
| Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added
| at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after
| (not before). If you don't do it just right, you'll just be on
| Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought.
|
| I'm sure I'm in a minority but I swear, if Kagi is not going to
| make bangs work properly soon, I'm not renewing. If you do
| emulate DDG, go all the way, otherwise it's just taunting your
| users...
|
| /rant
| berdon wrote:
| What? My !bangs work as a prefix to my query. I didn't even
| know you could append them and have that work.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| it seems the parent user either wants to put the bang in the
| middle of the query or does not want to put a space in.
|
| !yt cat videos (works)
|
| cat videos !yt (works)
|
| cat !yt videos (not working)
|
| cat videos!yt (not working)
|
| I always prefix but I did that on ddg too, because chromium's
| tab search thingy has trained me to do it.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| As another datapoint, bangs through Kagi have been working
| perfectly for me on every device in the way you would expect
| (set it as default, and use bang as normal).
| Leftium wrote:
| Kagi got me into using bangs, and now I'm developing a better,
| open-source implementation of bangs:
| https://bangtastic.vercel.app/
|
| Right now it just falls back on Kagi to execute the bangs, but
| in the future:
|
| - Bangs executed locally (when possible)
|
| - Local "custom bangs" configuration (create new bangs, update
| existing bangs)
|
| - Select fallback bang provider (queries with bangs: DDG, Kagi,
| Brave, etc)
|
| - Select search engine separately (queries without bangs:
| Google, Kagi, DDG, Yandex, etc)
|
| - Lots of other features, like executing multiple bangs at
| once.
|
| Also note DuckDuckGoog supports DDB bangs with Google search:
| https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/4260964
| styren wrote:
| I would love to use Kagi but it just isn't good enough for non-
| english usage. I might not be the target demographic but it's a
| real shame.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| What your language then? It works pretty well in French and
| when it fails, I can simply append "!fr" to force French-
| focused results.
|
| As far as I know, Google doesn't even have that feature and I
| like to be able to switch between international and local
| results.
| doakes wrote:
| I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but it was missing a couple
| things I use on Google. Maybe someone knows if there's a way to
| achieve the following:
|
| 1) Sports schedules and scores; i.e. searching "nba" or "nfl"
|
| 2) Local business hours; i.e. searching "walmart" gives the hours
| of my local Walmart
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Google has local business hours because businesses provide them
| with this information. Kagi needs to purchase this data from
| Google if they need it, because businesses will only play ball
| with Google and in rare cases with Apple.
|
| As for sports schedules and scores, I've seen this request a
| lot, but don't you have any dedicated website that you can
| bookmark for that?
| drewbitt wrote:
| I just do the google !g bang or !espn for sports. That said, if
| you look up an individual team Kagi will usually show their
| last games and results on the right
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I'm using Kagi since November, and they have improved _a lot_
| since then. Moving really fast!
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I wish the maps functionality was better. When I want to find
| directions to a place, or see how long it will take me, the
| easiest thing to do it "cmd+L cmd+V" or "highlight --> right-
| click --> search for ____", but with kagi set as my default
| search, the UX is terrible. The top results are often for zillow
| or similar, instead of a map, and when it shows a map, it's many
| clicks and slow loads to get directions.
| drewbitt wrote:
| Search with `!gm` to go to Google Maps.
| Sikul wrote:
| Thanks Kagi team. It's really cool to see a search engine change
| in positive ways!
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