been using kagi for some weeks and so far I am satisfied. It has a subscription cost after 300 searches though. But I guess getting rid of advertisements and tracking has a price
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Yeah, I've read around their documentation and they have a pretty compelling reason why one should prefer search engines where you directly pay to the search provider instead of relying on third parties such as advertisers to pay for your search usage.
In the end, a subscription service ensures your incentives align, even if you need to pay for it.
Usually. Other times you end up with Netflix.
I save way more than I pay for Kagi because it doesn't give me sponsored results and other garbage trying to make me waste money.
It’s been worth it for my spouse and me. Happy to pay for a product rather than being the product.
That actually looks really amazing! I really want more services to actually compel users to pay to support them, and make it a good decision to do so. I think this is the best suggestion so far. Thanks mate!
Yes, I tried that and have now got to the susbscribe or move on phase.
Went back to DDG and results really are not in the same league as Kagi so I may just cough up.
The search results are good but the limited searches make me anxious for running out. If it grows enough to the point where they can sustain themselves by offering the unlimited tier for $3-5 I might switch but not with the current pricing.
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My problem with Kagi is that they're still running at a loss and they think AI will be their savior.
And their AI currently gives extremely wrong information but the devs think that's fine because the point of their AI is to be fast not accurate.
I liked it as a search engine but at this point I can't see it surviving. If they raised the prices to where they lost a lot of customers and still can't get to positive numbers they aren't going to fix it by having AI give you wrong answers.
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Kagi is really good
You need to pay for it but the free search allowance is enough for me.
By free search allowance, do you mean the one time trial of 100, the 300 per month if you're paying $5, or something else?
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Kagi is the only one that consistently gives me much better results than google. The fact that it's not riddled with ads on the first page was a big incentive for me to give them some cash. It actually improved my productivity at work a whole lot. This actually made me think how shitty google has become when I was preferring results given by an error prone AI compared to just searching for it. Now with Kagi, I can actually find the stuff I'm looking for and only use AI in case I can't find it there for some reason. Totally worth the monthly subscription for me.
I hit the threshold in a week, but it was because I got engaging results.
Ideal search engine for falling into unexpected rabbit holes. It's scratches the itch of really exploring the web.
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Marginalia Search perhabs.
Also these are worth mentioning:
- Mojeek have their own index. The results are occasionally a bit of a mess, but they are very open to input and have an account on Mastodon.
- Infotiger have their own index and the results are good.
- Alexandria which use the Common Crawl index.
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I love duck duck go but theres one key thing I've been missing (or don't know how to do) with google you can just throw -word or -"a phrase" and it will ommit any result with them
You have to blacklist the AI farm sites though
How do you that? They've been getting on my last nerve.
Firefox has uBlacklist, might be on Chrome too.
Thanks for the recommendation. Looks like it only works with Google text search, and I don't use Google search.
I use it with DuckDuckGo and startpage, it can be configured for a few search engines.
Oh wow! Ok! I'll see if it works for me, too. Thanks!
I'm running searxng on docker locally, and set that as my search engine on Firefox. It's been awesome! I will probably start a blog and post instructions... Adding the custom search engine into about:config was kinda difficult. Other web browsers should be easier.. (e.g. Vivaldi)
You can add search engines to Firefox in the address and search bar.
Go to the site you want to add, click the address bar for the drop down to show, then there will be an icon for that site with a green plus to add it.
If you use the search box it's even easier. If you're on the site the icon on the left will have the green plus symbol for it.
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There was a time before google's search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @bbbhltz@beehaw.org commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn't constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.
During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests.
I beg to differ, during that time I found most of my interesting content through AltaVista and its weird cousin HastaLaVista, and aggregators like Portal of Evil (though, bad example, I seem to recall PoE was pretty much the same time as google).
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The map https://www.searchenginemap.com/
You'll see a bunch of them are metasearch engines, and not crawlers
Mojeek, Kagi and variations of SearXNG are good bets. Kagi will allow curation. Mojeek lets you make "Focus" filters. Worth trying out.
Kagi has been working out pretty ok for me. Quality of searches is good. No ads, no promoted listings; it is fee based.
Happy paying customer here, it's great to see the innovations they're making and their interactions with the community.
I too am a happy customer. The ability to tweak individual site ranking especially makes searching the internet so useful again.
If you're a programmer, might I suggest the brave new world of ChatGPT enhanced search via Phind.com
Even if you're not, it's fantastic. It basically takes your input and processes it like ChatGPT but then is trained to run web searches to grab further information and uses that to progress its own internal monologue. The result is a natural language response with search engine like results down the side which are cited within the main response.
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Qwant
Try it. It has pretty good results even outside the US and is much more private.
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Have you tried https://duckduckgo.com/ . I've used them a very long time. I do not use Google search.
I tried it but unfortunately it's very similar to Google search just without the trackers, and sometimes the results are a bit worse (worth it for not having the trackers though)
This has been my experience as well with duckduckgo. I want to like it, and I do have it as my default search but I often end up searching Google after unsatisfactory results from duckduckgo.
Thanks for asking this question!
My process is:
- Search DDG
- If that's not satisfactory (it is IME about 80% of the time) prefix with !sp to search googles index proxied by start page
DDG just uses Google's search engine, minus all the trackers.
Where did you hear this? This isn't true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you're using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)
DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
Sorry, I must've mixed up Start Page and DDG and/or Google and Bing. Though wasn't aware that they did that much indexing of their own.
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I've been using qwant for a while now and I think it's nice
There's no such good search engine. I do all my using bangs (duckduckgo terminolgy) or whatever its called on brave and others but maily brave.The reason I use brave is that because they dont pull results from google and bing.
One of the problems I have with search engines when looking for tech solutions is that the results are incredibly out of date. I don't bother any more and just go straight to the product's own support forum. Where possible I add the forum's own search entry to Firefox's search box. At least I no longer get answers to a problem no one has had since 2018.
Maybe try stract, try out the different optics it has. My favorite is the discussions optic. Lots of lemmy/kbin results with that. Hacker news optic might be closer to what you're looking for.
I did Startpage, then self-hosted searx for a while, then switched back to Startpage, and recently subscribed to Kagi, which I very much enjoy. I do not mind paying a provider for search built with the user in mind rather than their advertisers.
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