• Zimmy@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?

    • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.

      If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.

      It’s clear that Google’s motivation is no longer to offer good results. It’s to maximise the time you’re on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.

      • wolo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Every good result they serve you could have been an ad, so they’re incentivised to replace as many with ads as possible.

    • darreninthenet@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google’s own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:

      https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

      Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as “old Google” IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn’t) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.

      So for me, unlike the other poster, I’d recommend it to everyone who’s finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.

      • ciaocibai@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        Pinterest links are the worst. I just don’t want that shit and images of random crap isn’t what I’m after.

      • loki@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I can’t find any information about their search engine crawler. Isn’t it standard for search engines to label their crawlers or something?

      • Majestic@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Brave words divorced from reality.

        Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.

        Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.

        🤡

        Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.

        If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.

        As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.

        Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.

        • bort@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Brave words divorced from reality. 🤡

          How would you estimate the likelyhood of kagi going the way you describe?

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Paying for a service ensures your incentives (mostly) align. Kagi’s incentive is to make a good search that makes you want to pay for it, google’s incentives are to gather your data to either sell or use themselves, and show you as many ads as possible.

    • Liam Galt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I thought it sounded pretty silly, too. I gave the free trial a shot and for technical searches it was the best I had seen by far. Being able to lower certain sites and raise other sites makes it much easier to filter through shitty results like blog posts and stuff. I pay for it now and it’s worth it to me just for the time savings on technical searches. It definitely is still pretty far behind for things like local business info and stuff, but as a general purpose search engine it’s been extremely good for me.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Or the most annoying thing, trying to research a topic with one word matching that of a recent news event. So you only ever see news sites.

    • glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.

      It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.

    • snowe@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.

      • ripcord@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I’m going to be paying for it for a while.

    • Paradox@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, it’s very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features