The thing to understand is that… people are barely searching these days. The vast majority of people are fully dependent on The Algorithm to tell them what they want to see whether that is a youtube video or a reddit/facebook post or whatever. Google is for quick questions, not reading articles or getting educated on a topic. And… gemini is not horrible for those quick answers. And when it IS horrible, people don’t actually care. And the rest is SEO hell to whatever the first fandom wiki result is.
As someone who still very much DOES search for things on the regular? I have some concerns with the company (mostly they seem like bog standard tech bro “freedom of speech” libertarians) but damned if I don’t love Kagi. Feels like the internet I grew up with combined with the ability to prioritize or block websites (see: first fandom wiki result) and a halfway decent LLM for those “quick question” searches.
I’m actually surprised people still heavily use Google search.
Not for some tech snob snark reason, but because it’s unusable.
I only ever go back to Google if I’m really desperate, and I can’t recall the last time it ever delivered me a result I considered useful.
It’s all SEO AI spam, and those are the web results Google returns only after all of its own AI and shopping bloat.
Completely useless.
IMO Google has better image search than DDG, so I still use it as a fallback
The thing to understand is that… people are barely searching these days. The vast majority of people are fully dependent on The Algorithm to tell them what they want to see whether that is a youtube video or a reddit/facebook post or whatever. Google is for quick questions, not reading articles or getting educated on a topic. And… gemini is not horrible for those quick answers. And when it IS horrible, people don’t actually care. And the rest is SEO hell to whatever the first fandom wiki result is.
As someone who still very much DOES search for things on the regular? I have some concerns with the company (mostly they seem like bog standard tech bro “freedom of speech” libertarians) but damned if I don’t love Kagi. Feels like the internet I grew up with combined with the ability to prioritize or block websites (see: first fandom wiki result) and a halfway decent LLM for those “quick question” searches.
What do you use instead?
Also not the person you are replying to, but I pay to use Kagi so that I am the customer and not the product.
Is there a tier without AI? Seem the pricing is used to pay AI model instead of search
The pricing was the same before they introduced the Ai.
Not the person you’re replying to, but you could try DuckDuckGo
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I mostly use DDG, but sometimes searx.
Startpage returns similarly dubious results as Google, but with the built-in proxy functionality and no clutter, so it’s also in the rotation.
Duck is powered by bing and does not block all microsoft trackers with whom they have a partnership.
Bookmark trusted websites and sources and accept that almost all alternative search engines use google/bing, are compromised.
If you are particularly paranoid run your own searxng instance on a anonymously owned server.
Well, what do you use then. Give us your recommendations
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