Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!"
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam.
For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi? I don't use Pinterest, and never really encounter it on a daily basis, but some of my friends really like the site. Tbf, they might use stackoverflow more, but seeing Hacker News on the top 5 doesn't seem to reflect the average web user's usage...
I used pinterest and still hate(d) when it popped up on search.
Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center
Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.
I only recently discovered pinterest as a useful site, but only because a friend convinced me to create an account. It only becomes usable with an account and it even makes fun, but most people are probably like I was and don’t want to create an account and are annoyed of pinterest hijacking the „save image“ function, redirecting you when you don’t have an account and nagging you with a login wall. It really only becomes great if you give in (only took me 5 years or so).
There was a time where Google image search was dominated by Pinterest results but clinking through never took you to the photo. And most of the photos were rehosting of the original so you wouldn't get that either.
I wonder if it is also biased in the sense that it's only certain people who customise these things. And that it's only the most common ones. You would never see my favourite car forum listed here, but bumping it in search results is where I see value with the feature.
Of course they are biased. Just look at how NYTimes is both blocked and upvoted on Kagi. Some people like a source and others don’t, it’s that simple really.
It's telling that the top sites on that list accurately map to companies that have been the most "successful" at blitzing the incentive structures of the current internet economics model.
I don't understand why people hate Pinterest in image search results. If the image is relevant to my search then I don't care who's hosting it. Can somebody explain to me what the problem is here? https://0x0.st/HO57.webm
(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)
I don't like pinterest because the images have no metadata. If I see something I'm interested in--like a piece of furniture--I have no way of knowing how to get more info on it.
Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.
I wouldn't say that's the problem I've observed. around 2015 or so I remember consistent useful Quora answers from Quora. it was Yahoo answers but better because people could justify with qualifications. I actually had an account briefly
then I'm not exactly sure when, but definitely by 2018, every answer I ever see on Google is either incorrect, answering the wrong question, or in broken English. commonly all three at once
I don't recall ever seeing a product placement, although admittedly I stopped clicking a long time ago
my educated guess is that due to some likely seo-related concern they deleted/archived/unlisted their old good quality answers in favour of newer more seo-friendly answers
it may not even be their fault, it's possible that Google's algorithm just doesn't drag up older answers from their website, but given my experience with the decision-making in the brief time I was a user there (e.g. removing the ability to add a description to questions) I suspect not
if this was the main cause, the expected result would be lots of highly-upvoted bad answers, as opposed to lots of scarcely-upvoted bad answers that somehow rank highly in Google searches
Quora has plenty of potential for making consistent profit without whoring itself out, but consistent profit isn't enough in the post-Freedman world that we live in
I had to quit doing so, because I discovered that it didn't just exclude listed domains, but performed a totally different search. Locations or local results were largely missing, when I excluded some domains.
That's curious, please expand on this. Do you really mean it performed a search for different thing? If so - have you figured how it differed?
Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?
When I search for “pizza hut”, I get: the info panel that shows Wikipedia intro and company social media profiles on the right, locations results and integrated map view as the second result. When I search for “pizza hut -site:pinterest.com”, I get none of those. In addition, results are listed in a different order.
Due to linkrot, a lot of images that stood on independent websites, are now only available on Pinterest, which scraped and cached them before the original site went dark. Clicking through to the original links these days often leads to 404s.
This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation.
I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.
Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.
At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.
Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.
Counterpoint: That feature has very little utility to all but a tiny fraction of users. Those users can readily find other means (e.g. extensions) to achieve the same thing. In the interest of simplicity, it was the right call to remove this. I imagine it was pitched for its ability to gather feedback on search quality, but the type of people using the feature aren't representative.
> when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy
OMG. Why doesn't Google filter out the likes of geeksforgeeks for instance? How is it possible that it always come before the genuine SO answer?
Even without offering the possibility to filter out a domain (which they had, and later removed), how does the ranking algorithm not see those horrible, zero value clones??
I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.
My theory is that google went from ads in search results to ads on visited pages. By buying doubleclick etc they are suddenly incentivised to drive traffic to ad-supported websites.
Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.
We could test this. Take a few hundred search queries, strip the pages that display Google ads, and see if the remainder of the search result is better or worse.
We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"
With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.
It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.
I don't doubt it, but obviously something's going wrong between the human-generated training data and the SERP, else why are we getting utter crap back?
(Or, as I said, it's our idea of what constitutes a good result that's wrong).
But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?
Aha. Couldn't help but scratch my own itch. I wonder if DDG has a deal with Google where they get a cut of the ad profit if they are mentioned as a `ref` in the doubleclick ad request.
:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1>m=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F
&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do?
&hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4
Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.
I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.
To reproduce:
1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website
2. click on the link
3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.
Most other search engines train with a target of google or with some form of reward which is bootstrapped on google rankings. It makes Bing results implicitly have the same behavior as Google. DDG and others just use BingAPI so googles incentives pass on through.
That doesnt make much sense to me. Google's interests are not microsoft's or DDG's interests and to hold up Google as some sort of ground truth in what the optimal search results for a given query are is, as proven by Kagi, highly deluded and also quite subjective.
If true however, it does go to show that Google is really a monopolist in the search space as well... and to substantiate this claim would go a long way into proving that.
Adblockers are not a defense against this, as those results are genuine search results.
I run uBlock origin (of course), am extremely aware that geeksforgeeks exist and is utter shit, and yet I get fooled now and again, which makes me very angry at that website, Google, myself, and the world in general...
If I ran a seal-clubbing business I'd have to club seals to make money.
The whole argument is that those sites don't exist to provide a good service yet sadly need to show ads to keep the lights on.
I’m just wondering to whom those ads get shown… not arguing that anyone should turn off their adblocker and keep them running
They are working hard to trick people into clicking on their links, but won’t most people who click those links be running an ad blocker? Are unsophisticated web users searching for questions answered on stack overflow?
This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again.
Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
I never got why these even ever appear in Google search results (or any search results, really). It feels like it would be super trivial to identify sites that are scraped copies of other sites. Granted, without foreknowledge, the engine doesn't know which is the original. But at the very least this can be determined by a human once, and then the problem goes away forever for that particular site.
Funny that you mention this game. bg3.wiki, the community wiki had a lot of troubles with SEO. It got ignored or pushed down in the search results for a very long time, while the awful Fextralife wiki that includes a Twitch view botting iframe on every pages was always first.
At this point it's just safer to treat any content newer than about a year ago as highly suspect. Bots and fake content have been around for years, but things changed when ChatGPT and the copycats went live.
The blue ribbon chef was said to be the cream of the cream, so the restaurant owner was happy for him to have white card over the place. He arranged an outside the work of fatty liver, a main course of rooster of wine with eat all, and as the blow of mercy: burned cream; the full menu was a feat of strength! He made sure to wish the diners good appetite. However, when the owner visited from her foot on the ground she turned into a terrible child and demanded mouth amusers and crescents. She hated the decorative objects of art made of chewed paper.
(When we steal from French, we don't translate it to English, it becomes English).
It's googles fault. They are the ones who make this a viable business model. They pay the ads, and they pollute their search results with this garbage.
100% Google who are destroying this part of the internet.
How can the search engine not able to tell who the original is? Originals always exist earlier, not to mention SO.com domain rank is way higher than those spammed sites that existed for less years.
Is this after you've done a lot of blocking (or other customisation)? For me the top Kagi results are mostly similar to the Google ones, and when I scroll down a bit Kagi doesn't save me from articles with openings like
> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.
SO, MDM are the good results together with the blog Kagi gave in 5th place. In google you got the first two then a lot of spam and not the other good results.
That's still an example of better quality results that should be quantifiable, that's ranking. We have things like precision@n/NDCG@n/etc. where it should be straight forward to show a metric for some smaller n where Kagi beats Google since it doesn't show some set of irrelebant/low quality results interspersed.
I get those in Google as well. But tbh, I don't care. If I'm looking for "current time in JavaScript", I don't care if the answer comes from stackoverflow or any of it's clones. It's not like I want to interact with that site somehow. I just want answers. If I want interaction, I obviously go to stackoverflow directly.
It might matter that I'm using Ad-blockers, so maybe if I didn't, those sites would feed me obnoxious popups and malware, but as it stands, I don't see any difference...
I just did exactly this search on Google. The first result was this -[0] which is exactly spot on. Not sure if it is because I use Brave browser which also blocks ads on websites.
The result on Google is indeed correct, but I was posting a trivial example that was supposed to show the variety of answers/sources not the accuracy of the top one. For that, they're fairly similar, although Kagi seems to prefer the higher signal-to-crap ratio.
Wow. I just loaded it and then turned off the adblocker and reloaded it. It's like you need another search engine just to find the content in the page hidden amongst all those ads.
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
Yes people are. And it’s the least technically literate people with “outdated” machines and bad connections that slug through the web like this. They don’t know what to trust and often fall prey to deceptive tactics.
My goodness, I thought you were exaggerating. I've been using ad blockers for so long, I forgot the web had this many ads. Or has it just gotten worse over time?
Well, I still remember times when 50% of google results weren’t ads.
Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.
I wonder if adblockers have contributed to this. In theory we users can reward non-horrible advertisers by whitelisting their ads, but in practice we tend to block as much as possible. The remaining ad-viewing audience will be partly composed of people who are ethically opposed to adblocking or are held back by a lack of tech knowledge, but it will also be relatively insensitive to ads (both in the sense of being able to put up with a lot, and in the sense of requiring a lot to attract their attention).
How can you be ethically opposed to something that ruins your experience? It’s obviously their choice, I just can’t imaging browsing without adblock, I’m ethically opposed to the pages filled with crap I guess.
Those who go through the effort to make good web content, and who pay the costs for a web server deserve to be paid. So ethically I should not block ads.
I block them anyway because ads also have an ethical contract with me that they have broken. They need to not take up too many resources on my computer, not make noise when the website otherwise has no noise content, not install malware, and be for legitimate products not scams. Probably more as well, but the above are things I regularly caught ads doing before I got an ad blocker.
If Chrome, Edge, Safari all came with uBlock by default, what percentage do you think would be "ethically opposed" enough to disable the extension? How many would turn it right back on?
I think it depends on the site. I remember early 00s where many download sites would have ads with a download button, or pop-ups that blasted sound like YOU JUST WON. Now I think that sorta thing has been normalized to even non shady sites. My primary use of ad blocker is so that I don't get random autoplaying videos.
And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit.
Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.
But with an extension I can have a personal garbage block list or hide/collapse website preview without removing the result completely that works on other search engines
Btw, can you hide text preview on Kagi instead of removing the domain completely (in case you're not certain the website is garbage and sometimes want to check the results, but just want them less visible)?
Maybe for you that is better, but I want word negation to work, and "verbose" to actually require words I specify to be on the page. Word stemming would be good as an option.
Sure, I'd like Booleans to work again, and intitle:.
That said, Google could probably make an inferred search interpretation work well if they wanted to return results that were good for the user rather than return results that optimise their ad revenue.
Why stop there? The best mind-reading search engine is one that doesn't even let me type queries, it tells me what I need to know before I even know I need to know it. The fact that all search engines still have query fields tells me they all still suck at reading my mind.
- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.
- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.
- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.
- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
I wasn't sure because this never bothered me so I did a little experiment by searching for
"does it warn about mispellings"
(Note the intentional misspelling above.)
And here is the result:
We haven’t found anything.
There are no results that match all your keywords exactly.
Check your spelling, try different keywords, or try without quotes:
does it warn about mispellings
Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.
When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
Thanks for checking! This result is too verbose (first two sentences mean the same, but also aren't needed since you already see no results), and then instead of the "check your spelling" it should just, you know, check my spelling :) and show an active link to the quoted query with typos corrected
And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok
Quotes are supposed to be for verbatim searches, so having the search engine "fix spelling" (in quotes because a lot of the time it's not a misspelling, just a specialized term or something like that) in them is kinda counterproductive and it's incredibly annoying when Google does that.
If you get zero results, you'd probably see the mistake prettty fast, right?
I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.
And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine
The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI
> The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.
If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
Interesting to see reddit on the block list, I have issues with the way they’ve been operating but I do often find myself explicitly adding site:reddit.com to google searches, since it seems like one of few places online where there is still non-sponsored conversation about diverse topics. RIP old-school forums.
I'm doing the same thing, but specifically for reviews/recommendations. I can't remember the last time I had even an inkling of trust for a review published on a website. Reddit is basically the only source I have for potentially trustworthy opinions about products
IMO, this is no longer the case. Basically any new thread is getting astroturfed by marketing teams, and it seems like Reddit started doing SEO to promote newer threads, so the days of reliable reddit reviews seem to be over
Subreddits that are about buying things (/r/buyitforlife, /r/frugalmalefashion) are done. Same with any askreddit thread that's like "What's a product for under $x that changed your life" or something like that.
I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.
Definitely true. Marketing teams at multiple roles paid third parties to advertise on Reddit. Even tongue in cheek comments about incidents are marketing.
If you're not logged in to Reddit (and Facebook, etc), you often don't get the content that shows in the snippet of the SERP. Google don't always have a cached page now.
Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam).
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
They have. It's a lot better now than when they started out. They have incrementally been improving it. The reason why it gets pushed down is because a lot of people have a natural distate for the ads and the fact that it's a content farm. But if you have good ad blocking I don't see the harm in using it as long as you understand what it is.
They went from being bad compared to everything else to now feeling good compared to everything else.
Basically they stayed static and the rest of the internet worsened around them and our perspectives are now skewed.
What used to feel like a spammy content farm is actually not that bad now that we have seen real spammy content farms, like the SO clones that just take SO posts, rip out important css elements so it is harder to read, and slap as many ads as the ad networks allow them around it and then throw up exit intent banners and crypto-mining javascript.
Now just a normal content farm feels like a breath of fresh air when we deal with those garbage sites as alternatives.
Way back when they first started, they used to have content that was outright blatantly wrong and dangerous if followed. It's definitely much better in that respect now.
This is correct. They haven't been treading water. They have consciously tried hard to edit out the flagrantly incorrect content that used to be on the site.
I agree with you about w3schools; they've improved a lot since they first started out, and cleaned up a lot of problems. I think it's just fine to use for that purpose. A lot of technologists look down their noses at w3schools and vilify them just because they consider it a content farm.
In theory it does, but pretty much nobody uses it in this manner except for W3C, so that is the association for most people who recognize it in the first place.
I'm ... surprised and have mixed emotions that though msn.com is listed, no Yahoo domains make any of the blocked / raised / lowered / pinned lists. I'm reading that as a sign of total irrelevance.
I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow.
I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc
> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?
Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.
So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.
Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)
When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.
I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.
Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”
Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.
It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.
I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.
If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.
The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.
But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
Look at the numbers of the people playing lotto/scratch-offs. Look at where they are being sold. These are targeted at a specific group of people. You can try to whitewash it all you want, but it only makes you look naive. Especially that last sentence of yours. I'm really struggling to not get banned for commenting to this, but I'd suggest taking some rose tinted glasses off and taking a real look at this issue.
Not only have I never heard that definition used, I don't see how that definition makes any sense in context. The older, more commonly used meaning is clearly the one being used here.
Well that is why I asked. I have heard whitewashing used quite a few times in this way, though usually in the context of film or TV. I very well could have just missed it in the moment.
Again, this is why I asked how it was the race-based version of whitewashing rather than immediately going into a debate. I wanted to clarify my understanding and see if I missed anything before jumping down someone's throat, would have been nice to get the same courtesy here.
The poor people who buy a $5 ice-cream sundae every day are the ones addicted to food ... people are not making a freely reasoned choice to spend money gambling, poor people are in a vulnerable position and lottery runners exploit that with heavy advertising to ensure people are hooked on the idea they can improve things by spending money on what seems like hope.
> But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?
A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?
I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct.
Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).
So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
You can buy a lottery ticket for every single big jackpot for a year and lose less than your average options trader. The value is the feeling you get that you and your family might not have to work for the rest of your lives. That feeling is clearly and obviously worth a dollar a day.
At least with sports betting skill can make money. Just betting on the first place team to win over the last place team for example, it won't always win, but typically will. Of course bookies know this and so the payoff isn't enough to make a living on (if you can figure out the exception and bet only on the last place teams that win you can live well). Statistics are generally well studied in sports, but if you study how a team is coached you can find cases where they have a better than statistical chance to win a game they are expected to lose. Most people betting sports either always bet for their team, or bet on statistics, so if you can exploit something else.
I can see a potential problem here in that a sizeable win from a random bet is likely to encourage some people to keep making these bets in future, with inevitable consequences.
Even those who don’t think ads affect them are mistaken. And if you extirpate ads completely from your life the tax is your time and effort to do so. That’s one of the most toxic mantras, it even seems purposefully misguiding.
I mostly agree, but I've been blocking ads however ways I can for years now, and I'd say a few minutes of setup has saved me HOURS of dealing with ads at this point.
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
I know this is late but I did a PiHole for years as well. But then I needed another solution for being out of the house, and my housemate later complained they wanted to see Facebook ads…
And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).
It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.
I wish I'd been able to get the pihole to work as easily as it sounded. It looked cool. But it was incompatible with the router from the ISP I had at the time, and rather than also buy and setup a new router, I just packed it away. Now I have a new ISP with a different router, and I'm sure it's incompatible too.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like.
It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.
Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.
That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!
It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
Yet.
Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.
When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.
I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.
In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.
The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.
Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.
(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)
Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.
Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:
> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account
The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.
My biggest question - and the one that will drive me to subscribe right now is how "harmful" "misinformation" and "malinformation" is treated today, and how it will be in the future.
I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.
A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.
If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.
Or covid vaccines.
Or anything.
If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.
Yandex is pretty great for that. It's trash. Everything it spits out is trash. But sometimes you're looking for trash. If you're looking for some old offensive meme or whatever you can pretty easily find it in Yandex Image Search, for example.
I'm also curious about this, but if the claim that it's mostly a proxy for Google with some way to rerank results is true, then it wouldn't solve that problem.
“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.
Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?
No it's the actual word. "google it" allows for a liaison between the two words because "google" technically ends with an l sound (a consanant) and "it" begins with with a vowel - "googlit". It's also a soft sorta rolling consanant, which helps. In the case of "kagi it", "kagi" ends in an I and "it" begins in an I. That means you have to make a hard stop between the two words and pronounce clearly to differentiate between one I and the other otherwise you lose the words entirely. The two words fail to flow into each other in any way, making them feel less like a pair. Phrases that are easy and satisfying to say in the sense that they are actually just easy to get your mouth around are more likely to catch on. This is definitely something they should consider more carefully.
One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.
What happened to simply using the verb “search”? Or phrases like “look it up”? It shouldn’t really matter (typical conversation) which search engine a person is using.
I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.
I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website).
Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features.
I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue.
There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried.
Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.
The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google.
I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.
I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.
I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit.
And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
Google's been losing in blind comparisons for over a decade (experiments:
- Both have google branding -> competitor wins
- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins
- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins
Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.
Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.
Bing beats Google for certain queries - most notably when I invoke the AI chat.
And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.
Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.
Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.
Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.
The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.
I switched to Ecoasia when BG3 released and a search for “BG3 wiki” didn’t turn up the actual wiki site on Google. Maybe it’s because it’s on a .wiki subdomain (I’m only 90% sure that’s what it’s at since I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s on some “odd” subdomain), but Google returned a plethora of useless wiki sites that were frankly so terrible it hurt. I believe the Duck had largely the same issue, but Ecoasia didn’t.
Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.
When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched)
When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective.
I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.
Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
> But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google.
Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is.
It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.
I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?