Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I tried Kagi (free 100 query plan) and got about the same results as google/DDG. It’s kind of nice but I couldn’t see subscribing. I hate subscriptions. If they sold access for a flat fee per query (let’s say $5 for 200 queries) I’d buy that, and use a dozen or so queries a month. The rest of the time I’d keep using DDG or occasionally resorting to Google.

    • Kraiden@kbin.run
      0·
      3 months ago

      so I’ve just giving it a quick test vs google with the query “open source chromecast alternative”

      the first result for both is a reddit post about NymphCast

      it’s the rest of the results that are interesting though.

      Google has a ycombinator news article about NymphCast and then decends into the usual “17 best chromecast alternatives in 2024” rubbish

      Kagi on the other hand lists the github for NymphCast, and then goes on to list others… mirrorCast, pyCaster, free Cast, an article on using a raspberry pi as a chromecast alternative.

      obviously this is only anecdotal, and very unscientific, but it’s got me interested for sure! Gonna bookmark it and see how it goes

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I love the idea of paying for a high quality service that I use, but Kagi was significantly worse than Google. I searched for local businesses, programming questions, and general knowledge stuff.

      I’ll try it again in a year or two and see if it works for me.

      • scrion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I switched to Kagi about 6 months back. It is overall better, but at least on par with Google, also as far as tech / programming - related questions go. Whenever I do not get a useful result from Kagi, it literally finds nothing - I then try Google for verification, which also lists absolutely no results. That happened approximately 4 times since I switched.

        Kagi is worse than Google for: reviews, memes, porn, as well as “descriptive” searches, i. e. when trying to describe the desired result using natural language, e. g. “video game character that swallows everything” (I made that up just now for Kirby).

        Kagi’s ability to use lenses and assign weights to sites can make a big difference.

        At first, they didn’t have anonymous payments and an unattractive pricing model, but that has been fixed for a while, otherwise I wouldn’t have switched.

        Overall, I am very satisfied and have absolutely zero plans of ever using Google again.

  • Wappen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.

    For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.