Google hasn't been "Google" for quite some time.
* I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo before that.
&udm=14Read the article.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
(What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them.
DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches?
Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)
Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.
Honestly, the answer is so often a little toy search like Marginalia or going straight to the website in question now, its frightening.
Their business practices are just the worst. But are the first 10 blue links they show you usually bad? (Like you know that one of those 10 should be the exact thing you want, so you decide to rely on another search engine instead, & the alternative search succeeds where Google failed)
But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites and gives me 0 or 1 result while Google gives me 5-10 results. Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.
And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.
I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine
If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close.
This one is also stupid:
> But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money?
> That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews.
UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free.
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Edit: getting downvoted
Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere.
From the article:
> many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot
This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people.
Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue.
Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them.
In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications.
I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??"
I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
If nobody goes to the websites, those websites no longer get traffic or revinue. In very short order there will be no more websites from which to scrape, and the AI will no longer have new data to summarize.
Where do you think this ends?
By eating the source of their results, pretty soon there wont be any sources that aren't crap.
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
It's an AI like Google's "AI mode", in that it also surfaces URLs. I have not found it to be a good search engine replacement.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
Let me correct.
Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.
We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search.
Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search.
Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now.
We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website.
A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach:
* copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB.
* privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these.
* spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one
* moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc..
* how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.
Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.
[1]: https://kagi.com
[2]: https://uruky.com
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
- Organize the world's information
- Don't be evil
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil :
> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"
That sounds like NY to me.
I would rather not.
ohyoutravel•1h ago
https://kagi.com/
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Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
plqbfbv•3m ago
Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.