I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
Why have you not tried Kagi? If it’s important to you to have good search and you don’t like being spied on and having ads shoved down your throat, it’s worth paying a small fee for quality instead of paying with your privacy for crap results. It’s been a breath of fresh air. Searching is fun again. It also indexes Lemmy. Traditional Search has largely gone to crap, but I’m tired of everyone complaining that these mega companies offering ‘free’ services aren’t holding their end of the deal instead of supporting the people that are doing something about it. I’m not optimistic things like qwant or searx will be sustainable or deliver high quality results, but by all means donate to them with time or money if you believe in them.
Kagi isn’t free
The search problem is largely due to not being the actual customer.
Look at me. I’m the customer now.
If I use ublock or whoogle I may not be customer. But the customer wont get anything from me anyway.
And you won’t get good search results in exchange.
Same results as any other metasearch engine, like kagi.
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Neither is beer
If it’s free then you’re the product
And if you’re the product then there’s an interest to keep you on the site and show you ads which works best if the first result isn’t the correct one and you need to scroll or even go to page two
It’s literally the reason why Google got so much worse that they wanted to show more ads to users which wouldn’t work if the best result is always the first
If you think paying means you aren’t still the product, I have news for you.
I don’t need my search history tied directly to a means of payment, and not because I search for illicit stuff, but because I don’t need an advertising profile built on me that is absolutely tied to me now, because I paid for it.
If Kagi doesn’t turn out to be selling that info in a year or two, I’ll eat a bug.
Exactly. A paid search engine is a privacy nightmare, and you have zero guarantees that they don’t monetize you one way or another in addition to the subscription fee.
You want to compare the hard evidence on abuse between paid search engines and unpaid search engines? I’m happy to work through that data with you.
I pay anonymously through crypto accounts. It’s easy and I can open new Kagi accounts if I want. I’m saving a beetle for you.
I’m a shitty product because I block any ad that tries to display on my browser.
What? When was searching ever “fun”? And when was that even a desirable state? Statements like this contribute to the propensity to dismiss kagi fans as shills.
unnecessary antagonism aside, people have fun learning and satisfying their curiosity, and it’s more rewarding when there’s less bloat to slog through
There is no propensity to do this at all. It just you being a prick I think. You are clearly too young to remember when Google first came out. Harnessing the power of search is exciting! The internet may be getting shitier, but there is still fun to be had. Im sorry if you’ve never experienced that.
This x100. Obviously anyone who has fun using well crafted tools to explore a vast frontier of information is a shill. /s
Seriously!? You enjoyed surfing the web? Accessing the information superhighway, a completely novel and unprecedented advance in our ability to explore what is effectively the database of all human knowledge? Statements like this reinforce my incredibly niche but deeply held prejudice against “people” like you.
Kagi is the same as ddg 99% of the time.
Omg no. You have a diversified data set?
Because Kagi mostly just calls to google api and do a little filtering on the results, to remove ads, and maybe mix some results around with other search engine apis.
I can get the same results with whoogle, self hosted and not adding another “everything is a subscription” to my wallet.
No, that isn’t how it works by any stretch of the imagination. Kagi has its own search index.
Last time I checked they admitted just being a metasearch engine. That their own search index was unusable. Which would be reasonable as a reliable proper search index is incredibly expensive.
I just checked their website, I don’t find references to their only using their own search engine. In fact they seems to be switched development to AI tools (that I would bet that they are just chatgpt API wrappers).
They also stated having like 20.000 customers. With that money and based on California there’s no way they have the ability to do any core development besides API wrapping other commercial services.
Some people asked for source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Fron their own web:
They try to downplay it as their whole bussiness model is “we are not google search” though it’s pretty obvious that they don’t have the resources to create a functional search index of the whole web. Most of their results are filtered metasearch and that can be self host without paying a subscription.
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