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Technology @beehaw.org

mozz @mbin.grits.dev

1y ago

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Technology @lemmy.world

Optional @lemmy.world

1y ago

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

pluralistic.net /2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/

Kagi search engine @lemmy.ml

Atemu @lemmy.ml

1y ago

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

pluralistic.net /2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/

125 comments

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.
  
  It's not even comparable in quality. It's like almost trolling to even suggest they are in the same league. If you don't want to spend 10 dollars, fine, but maybe stop pretending that your instance is somehow the best quality search engine that exists... :)
  
  That is the way to go.
  
  TIL of this. Thanks.
  
  My understanding is that a locally hosted SearXNG instance doesn't really give you any privacy, unless you "dilute" your searches by letting others do searches from your instance too.
- Your search results look very different to mine:
  Did you disable Grouped Results?
  All the LLM-generated "top 10" listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven't bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.
  But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google's index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
  The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.
  What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
  The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn't do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it's very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.
  Kagi is not "all about" privacy. It's a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than "trusting" a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn't put too much wight into this.
  The index ain't it either as it's mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
  What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.
  
  I didn't change any settings. fresh account
- 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?
  
  https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
- Dunno, I got entirely different results. Reddit, homeairguides, forbes, a bunch of listicles like consumerreports, wired, ny times, cnet and whatnot, and other websites.
I'm still steering clear from Kagi after how they handled criticism after they started including Brave's index
- That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
  I 100% agree with Vlad's response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they're criticising.
  I don't like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn't sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you're going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I'm going to have to laugh at you.
  The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.
  
  You can't really engage as a consumer without enabling shitty practices on some level, and that's particularly true of electronics.
  The phone you're using to access Beehaw? Assembled by child labor or wage slaves somewhere in Asia. Even if you assembled it yourself, the parts were manufactured unethically.
  It's not just Amazon or Nestle. You might as well criticize someone for breathing because unethical consumption, on some level, is inevitable, particularly so if you live in a capitalist country.
  I use Brave because its ad block feature works better than the others I've tried, plain and simple.
  But, by all means, people can still be as holier than thou as they like.
  
  To add, from what I understand at least, Kagi does build its own index for accessing smaller sites. To some extent, results are also served by a custom index, meaning some percentage of results do not come from [your disliked companies] and instead come directly from Kagi. It doesn't seem like a significant percentage of results come from that index, but it supposedly is still >0%.
  Personally I mostly use Kagi for the ability to put Reddit on the bottom of the results, MDN to the top, and otherwise prioritize sites in ways that I want but which I know are purely based on my own opinions. It works well for my usecase, and I don't have to scroll through a bunch of sponsored links before finding my search results. Also, the recent integration with Wolfram|Alpha has been convenient with a couple of searches, like one where I needed the prime factors of some numbers.
- I genuinely won't even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.
- Just curious, do you buy things from Amazon?
  I'm not trying at all to disagree with the idea of being ethical in how you send your dollars, but I'm curious how much is prioritized actual harm to suffering people in the real world when you do this.
  
  Just curious, do you buy things from Amazon?
  no I don't. and to answer your next whatabout question, I don't buy from brands owned by Nestle, either.
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.
  
  How do you duplicate this feature in SearXNG? https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalized-results.html
  It's basically the major thing keeping me with Kagi.
  
  So I only have to find one thing Kagi can do, that SearXNG can't?
  Then what?
  
  I have the big SearXNG portal bookmarked ( https://searx.space/ ) but I don't find that I ever reach for it that often. Not being able to cull lower quality sites is just a little bit of extra toil I'm happy to pay to go away.
- 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.
If kagi is just an aggregate of other search engines why not just use a searx instance instead? Its open source and customizable.
- Why not use a bicycle instead of a car? Because it's 10 miles to work.
  One search engine is a hobby project, the other ones competes with Google and gives better results and ability to filter them and prioritize them as you want.
- SearXNG
  I'd consider it if they had some of the features Kagi has like raising/lowering/pinning/excluding certain websites from results, but every time I try it it still feels very light on features.
- Because it's not just that.
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.
- On Kagi you type ‘Dunkin’ and then click ‘maps’
  I want to see a screenshot of your ‘glamour’ and ‘Conan’ searches working the way you’re describing
  
  Sounds like an extra step.
  Damn. If only you knew how to ask politely.
- Wow, it's been ages since I've used google without a layer of privacy in between and haven't realized how comfortable it would be with all its spying power enabled. But anyways, I find it scary that companies like google try to get so much information about you that they then sell to third parties. I'd rather have less comfortability if it means I have control over my own data. And I guess Kagi could be better in this regard if they value your privacy while still having some data on you.
  
  Honestly, if I could get Kagi to slurp up all my Google data and use it without any extra clicks, I'd probably switch. I don't like having it sold to third parties, but it saves a ton of time when used for the actual reason they ought to have it in the first place.
  I also don't imagine that stopping using google would have a tremendous effect on the amount of data gathered on me at this point. Like, I've taken my personal projects off of google so they won't scrape the data, but half the internet is gathering metadata. It's not going to stop all the sites I visit from gathering it all together. Admittedly, uBlock might in cases where tracking is built into ads.
  But like, weighing it against making my ability to move through the world more functional, my spite for Google's information vacuum isn't so great that I can't just like, use the thing anyway. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I'm not really sure there's such a thing as a moral or ethical human society. There's already a lot of other shit I'm forced to tolerate out of necessity just to be a human being, and while I don't love something else being added to the pile, at least it's not like tortured animals or intentionally bombing children.
  To be clear, I would love an alternative and have actively sought one. Within the past 6 months I've tried both DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I stopped using both out of frustration with the need to constantly specify my location.
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.
- SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.
- Ok, you piqued me: Got a link to a guide on using Kagi for the fediverse?
  
  There's not much to it. Under settings in Kagi there's a tab for "Lenses." Make sure "Fediverse Forums" is turned on.
  Then, after you search, you can filter from a broad web search to any of your enabled lenses.
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.
- This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.
  LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you're looking for when you're wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.
- Self hosted searxng is where it's at. Seriously love it and have replaced my search engines on all my computers and phone.
  I use this along with Vivaldi browser that will let me switch engines quickly with "search shortcuts" for those few times I need local Google results.
  
  Yep I hosted it on my VPN server so I can reach it from all my devices. Love it. Learned about it here and I'm really happy I did.
  
  I'd love to do that, too. But I'm a bit overwhelmed with setting it up :/
- Stract.com also looks promising.
  
  stract has same issue mentioned above where search engines are actually the only time i want data on me to be easily accessible. not being able to search "food near me" is frustrating, and no privacy-centered google alternative i've been happy with has had that feature. im fine with my location and other relevant metadata on me getting used in a search, as long as that metadata is in a black box restricted to me that doesn't create a profile for advertising companies
  
  Promising, but not ready for primetime. I spent the last two days using it as my phone's default search after you mentioned it, and... well, I went back to Google, at least for now.
  
  I put in the name of my home town and the first 2 links were escort sites offering ladies in that town... Seriously.
  Not really impressed so far.
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!
- Maybe it's taken him this long to kick the tires and develop an opinion from daily use. There's nothing wrong with that.
  
  Sure but in the article he says that he hadn't even heard of it until some friends mentioned it "last month", which would have been March of 2024. Taking a few weeks to feel it out is one thing but to have not even know it existed until last month is wild.
- Most of the time they're either just googling a different skin or Bing in a different skin, which is why they are never any better.
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.
- I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive
  At their worst, they're as bad as Google's. For me however, this is a great improvement over using bing/Google proxies which would be the alternative.
  maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.
  That's the killer feature IMHO.
- Well yeah, once your trusted sites are at the top, and all the shitty ones don't even appear, it's a very nice feeling to search for anything.
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.
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
No, I'm not having that! That's rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this "weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista" but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.
Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.
- I remember the competition on speed. And Google publishing the response time on the results page as a way to showcase it's speed over the competitors.
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.
- Whether this is bad depends on your threat model. Additionally, you must also consider that other search engines are able to easily identify you without you explicitly identifying yourself. If you can't fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/, you certainly can't fool Google for instance. And that's even ignoring the immense identifying potential of user behaviour.
  Billing supports OpenNode AFAICT which I guess you could funnel your Moneros through but meh.
  Edit: Phrasing.
  
  When I open Tor browser on my desktop--not in Tails--that site doesn't even load. So either it is fooling it, or it requires javascript to run, which I have turned off by default in Tor.
  I'm going to leave it at that.
- It would be nice to have a Kagi crypto proxy you load with a few monies and can do searchers per session.
  I.e. no big deal until you close the browser.
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'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.
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.
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
  
  That's pretty much the entire Internet these days.
- Source? I find that doubtful considering his nick is "Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK"
  
  The way I read it on his blog, it seemed he was paying for it. It's entirely possible I misunderstood. I didn't know what his Xitter handle is, I haven't use that site in years.
I don't know. I find the underlying principle of kagi a bit problematic. For example, look at what they say in this piece here. I get that any search engine that is "free" but sponsored by ads is gonna be skewed towards the advertisers. But like kagi phrases their response, it sounds somewhat classist. If you can afford a good search engine, you deserve better search results. If you don't, well, your bad. I mean, it's OK if they finance themselves by being a paid service. But this should be only a necessary first step before finding other ways to finance themselves.
I heard Neeva was amazing too, but it ultimately couldn't find enough people willing to pay for a search engine.

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