Technology

Okay, but it doesn't know where I am. When I type 'dunkin', Google doesn't just know I want hours for a dunkin donuts, it knows which two or three stores I'm probably looking at hours for and it does it without me having to specify.

If I'm looking stuff up on my phone or just want a quick answer, I actually do want the context of all that data on me. I like that when I type the word 'glamour' it knows I'm probably thinking of the bard subclass, and that when I type 'Conan' it knows I probably mean Exiles, not O'Brien. I mean like, I know it doesn't know these things, but it fills in that gap much faster.

I do like the way their search is layed out for doing something more complex, though. It really is a better designed search engine, but I feel like a search engine is the one place I want data collection of some kind, literally because it benefits me.

I've wanted to test out Kagi for some time, but I don't really do a hell of a lot of deep-dive searches anymore. I mostly passively read a combination of RSS, stuff I see on Lemmy, and videos that I still watch on the old site while not logged in. And some YouTube stuff.

When I do search for something, it's typically something that I hear about in a podcast and I wanna know more and in the moment I just use my default (goog). I'm not thinking of Kagi cause I'm listening to something already and thinking about that.

10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.

I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn't quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it's just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn't enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.

Maybe I'll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.

Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3

Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.

I heard Neeva was amazing too, but it ultimately couldn't find enough people willing to pay for a search engine.

How is it that Cory Doctorow hadn't hear of Kagi until March of 2024? It's been widely discussed in tech spaces for quite a while now!