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Requires a log-in. That means that there's absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn't include a Monero option), you can't make that work.
Pass.
I'm still steering clear from Kagi after how they handled criticism after they started including Brave's index
I use Kagi, stract, and a self-hosted searx-ng instance. Kagi is so well polished that it's what I use most of the time, but I keep an eye on the other two and continually ask myself if I'm ready to drop Kagi to get away from financially supporting Google and Microsoft.
Cory Doctorow is a smart guy, and has some great takes. But he also pays for Xitter Blue (or whatever they call it) so do with that info what you will.
What are you talking about, I don't see any tick. Are you talking about the big text that says "NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK"?
Maybe I am missing something but it kinda looks like Lemmy is engaging once again in a favorite activity, finding reasons why someone is "problematic" whether true or not, because that's more fun than just engaging in reasonable posting and commenting and letting people be worth listening to sometimes
Source? I find that doubtful considering his nick is "Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK"
I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive, contrary to what most users seem to feel. I don’t know. When ddg and Google fail me, I will try Kagi and I think maybe only once or twice has it actually made finding what I’m looking for any easier.
I will mention though, you can do a lot of personalization on the results unlike other engines. So maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.
Downvote me into oblivion but Kagi ain't shit. It's a glorified Google frontend. The author is right that the web is filled with AI generated articles and fake reviews and lists but Kagi is not immune to this enshittification.
I even tried the same query the author was bitching about. Here is Kagi's first two links for top 10 air purifiers. Notice how the first result is a BS website called top10.com and the second one is one of the "fake review" websites .
And here is Google's. First result is Wirecutter, and this might be subjective but I trust Wirecutter reviews on most things.
Rest of the Google results are exactly what the author was mentioning. But Kagi was no different.
So $10/month to get the same shit? No thank you. I agree that Google turned to shit compared to what it was but it is still the best search engine out there. Now if the article was about privacy concerns then they would have a point. Which is what Kagi is all about anyway. So let's stop the fucking act.
I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
That is the way to go.
The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I'm not getting cruft.
SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.
I wouldn't use "air purifier" as a metric, since it was already a big public story that surely any search engine that's even half paying attention would have made sure the results for are good. Probably some other consumer good is better for an un-preannounced test run.
(Also I'm not sure that searching "top 10 air purifier" and complaining that you got a top result of top10.com/air-purifiers and that's not what you wanted makes a ton of sense. FWIW, I did try "air purifier" just out of curiosity and saw a very clear result that DDG had the best results, Google second, and Kagi third.)
I repeated it for "good wireless router" and saw different results; for them, the outcomes were fairly similar with Kagi somewhat better (returning Wirecutter as the top result, and an obselete Stack Exchange answer as the 2nd, which okay it's not right but I get where you're coming from sir), and Google and DDG as secondary (returning PCMag and CNet at the top and Wirecutter only further down below).
I searched both Cory Doctorow's post and the linked 404media article in his post for "air purifier" and found nothing. What author are you referencing?
I started using Kagi a few months before $10 became unlimited queries.
When I first switched I'd still, occasionally, swap back to google using bangs because I had to unlearn all the hacks I had to make Google turn up useful things. Now I can't go back, Google is unsable without those hacks. Its barely usable with them.
Plus Kagi has a "fediverse forum" lens that lets me search Lemmy much more effectively than Lemmy's search.
If kagi is just an aggregate of other search engines why not just use a searx instance instead? Its open source and customizable.
Because it's not just that.
Thanks for sharing this. Going to try it out. I honestly haven't had as much of an issue with Google search lately, but willing to try something new.
My issue with Kagi is that it relies on aggregate results from other search engine indices
So do DDG and a lot of other search engines. In addition to the time and cost of running a spider and maintaining a database (for little to no technological benefit these days), a lot of server admins will block crawlers that aren't googlebot or msnbot/bingbot.
It has its own index in addition to aggregating results.
Why is that an issue?
I don't get the impression that Kagi intends to compete with major search engines. It is clearly marketed toward privacy-focused, tech-minded individuals. You can take that one of two ways. Either you are frustrated with the erosion of search engine quality due to advertising, or you disagree with the predatory practices such as data mining that comes along with such advertising. In both cases, the only real way to signal to major search engines that you disagree with these practices is to stop using their services (including their APIs).
For example, I have been using DuckDuckGo for decades. At first, I had to compromise search result quality, but now it has enough users and support that results are on-par with the likes of Google.
I do not think that Kagi is bad or that people should not use it. It simply isn't for me, because it does not actually address the reasons I do not use search engines like Google.
I think it's not that complicated -- Kagi's search results are just far more useful. I think it's marketed at people who want good search results, not anything dealing with privacy (although, Kagi doesn't log your searches, so it's fully private for most everyday definitions) -- your viewpoint for you makes perfect sense to me and sure I respect it, but I don't think it's right to say that people are linking their credit cards to do a have-to-be-logged-in-first search on Kagi chiefly for reasons of privacy focus.
(I just tried the same experiment Doctorow tried, of searching for something that I'd been unable to find through Google, and Kagi did the same thing for me that it did for him (i.e. found it). That's actually not important enough for me to pay for Kagi, but "Google is shit now" is no fringe opinion and it's pretty easy to verify that Kagi does in practice work markedly better.)
One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.
I can do everything Kagi does for free...using SearXNG.
So I only have to find one thing Kagi can do, that SearXNG can't?
Then what?
I am fucking sick of monthly subs... Happily pay for kagi. It's really great at just getting you the results you need sorted right at the top.