- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831
"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
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What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.
For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.
Absolutely despise discord, fucking internet herpes.
Yeah, Matrix is way better, but the search there is way too slow on busy channels.
Just post stuff on the open Internet…
I guess my point was that locking all that knowledge and troubleshooting behind chat interfaces, and obscuring it from search engines makes the internet worse
Agreed. But if it’s at least FOSS, it should be fairly easy to get the data out for searching.
I don’t understand this trend and i hate that it’s a thing. I also hate Discord.i shouldn’t have to go to a fucking chat room when a forum works better.
Exactly. I would be less mad if it was Matrix, but Matrix search is really slow and not likely to get better.
Forums make a ton of sense.
I really want to see more from the commune-os to make matrix communities more publically accessible or even selectivily. The AP bridge especially
I genuinely think Google’s success is its own undoing.
If everybody had carried on making sites in the same way they did when Google came out, the results would still be good.
Bit they didn’t. There’s gold in them thar hills, and now SEO and generated bullshit are a way to make money, while Google’s algorithms seem easy to game if you have the resources to do so.
There’s like a hundred large companies doing this, and if you blocked all their sites in the Google results it’d give results similar to Kagi and other flavour of the month search engines.
Fuck off with your ads for a paid search engine.
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”, of making a blog post that’s really an advert…? Really???
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”
wow, what a genius. he’s going to solve world hunger next. he’s totally not “milking” nerds who think that word is the best thing since sliced bread.
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.
It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.
It was not long after the SSL thing that it became actively garbage. that was what, 2018?
But yeah, it’s been bad since at least 2012.
What SSL thing?
Google stopped indexing all websites without SSL certificates in July 2018.
For example, darklyrics.com is a website I and many others grew up using as a resource to understanding lyrics. They’ve stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches. However, without an SSL, they do not show up in Google search results.
This is one of literally millions of examples. Some more reasonable than others, but it still was a massive blow to the efficacy of their search.
They’ve stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches.
Even if sites do not store user account data, such as passwords, ALL websites, and I mean ALL, handle user data, because merely accessing pages (urls) is user data.
Stubbornness is not a good reason not to setup SSL. Encryption should always be on, all the time, for everything.
Ssl doest hide the url you’re visiting
Yes it does. You can derive the domain from snooping DNS lookups but the URL is part of the encrypted get header.
Hmm I hate Google as much as the next guy and am actively trying to de-Google myself, but I’m not sure I can get behind the outrage here. Certificates are free and easy to obtain with LetsEncrypt, so there’s really no excuse for sites not to accept unencrypted traffic these days. I’m sure Google does lots of things to delist the small guys and promote their big payers, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Free certificates expose your subdomains. It’s not more secure if you don’t transact data in a meaningful way such as the example I provided.
I don’t mean to insinuate that the example I provided is the majority of cases, and in the majority of cases, I do support sites with SSLs being indexed higher than websites without them, but I think the interstitial this website is not secure with the requirement of the advanced click followed by The continue anywaysclick…
Idk
Especially in 2018. Like, when we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s very easy to agree. And I do agree. But in 2018, it was not this way. Anyone who was a web developer with a bunch of clients, such as myself, was all the sudden in a very interesting hot seat. Not only did I need to try to upsell my clients, but I needed to convince them that not doing so was quite literally at their peril. It was difficult. And certain cases, it was impossible.
If your subdomains being public is a security issue then I’d argue something else is wrong. Otherwise you’re using security through obscurity.
But I appreciate the insight and I see how this was a harder sell back when it happened. Thanks!
Not necessarily. Let’s say you’re a known contributor to a closed source project. You don’t want people knowing you have a locally hosted gitlab instance at gitlab.mydomain.com, for example.
I tried Kagi (free 100 query plan) and got about the same results as google/DDG. It’s kind of nice but I couldn’t see subscribing. I hate subscriptions. If they sold access for a flat fee per query (let’s say $5 for 200 queries) I’d buy that, and use a dozen or so queries a month. The rest of the time I’d keep using DDG or occasionally resorting to Google.
so I’ve just giving it a quick test vs google with the query “open source chromecast alternative”
the first result for both is a reddit post about NymphCast
it’s the rest of the results that are interesting though.
Google has a ycombinator news article about NymphCast and then decends into the usual “17 best chromecast alternatives in 2024” rubbish
Kagi on the other hand lists the github for NymphCast, and then goes on to list others… mirrorCast, pyCaster, free Cast, an article on using a raspberry pi as a chromecast alternative.
obviously this is only anecdotal, and very unscientific, but it’s got me interested for sure! Gonna bookmark it and see how it goes
Yup, it’s way too expensive. If they bundled it with another service to provide more value, I might consider it. But from some back-of-the-napkin math, they’re charging way more than their competitors make from ads.
I’d also be interested in a pay-per-search option. I’d be happy loading up $5 every so often if they other services didn’t find what I’m looking for.
Their business needs steady cashflows. You pay for the up time, not the queries.
Then they wouldn’t have tiered plans. Anyway try a $12/year plan with a few queries per month. $60/y adds up a lot faster.
I love the idea of paying for a high quality service that I use, but Kagi was significantly worse than Google. I searched for local businesses, programming questions, and general knowledge stuff.
I’ll try it again in a year or two and see if it works for me.
I switched to Kagi about 6 months back. It is overall better, but at least on par with Google, also as far as tech / programming - related questions go. Whenever I do not get a useful result from Kagi, it literally finds nothing - I then try Google for verification, which also lists absolutely no results. That happened approximately 4 times since I switched.
Kagi is worse than Google for: reviews, memes, porn, as well as “descriptive” searches, i. e. when trying to describe the desired result using natural language, e. g. “video game character that swallows everything” (I made that up just now for Kirby).
Kagi’s ability to use lenses and assign weights to sites can make a big difference.
At first, they didn’t have anonymous payments and an unattractive pricing model, but that has been fixed for a while, otherwise I wouldn’t have switched.
Overall, I am very satisfied and have absolutely zero plans of ever using Google again.
Search.brave.com ain’t bad
Too bad brave’s CEO is a giant bigoted piece of shit who I refuse to support.
Damnit. Okay, what’s the next best Chromium based browser? I love Firefox but I have to keep a Chromium browser on hand for the few sites FF just doesn’t handle properly.
If it works for you, and it’s only a secondary/failsafe browser, shouldn’t feel too guilty to use it.
I don’t use brave and I’m not aware of what’s the issue with the CEO, not sure if knowing that would change my protective
The founder/CEO actively donates to anti-LGBT organizations, including ones that support conversion therapy. The guy is an awful piece of shit, and any decent person should take whatever steps necessary to not support them.
Thankfully, that’s as simple as not using Brave.
I just use ungoogled chromium in those cases
What about Tor
You know he isn’t retrieving the results personally?
Pieces of shit exist in most companies.
No way, really?!?!
I try to not reward companies that hire CEOs who actively support the extermination of gay people
Brendan Eich was a founder. He wasn’t hired. Not sure if anyone can remove him.
How would you feel if a conservative organization mounted a campaign to boycott an entire company because the CEO is gay?
The Brave browser is not itself exterminating gay people, nor stopping them marrying.
Do you drink Fanta? Should we also still boycott Volkswagen and Hugo Boss?
If you apply your boycotting consistently you need to avoid an awful lot of things
(Note, I’m not defending Brendan Eich or his appalling views)
Get the actual fuck out of here with your both sides bullshit. Boycotting a company for being bigoted is not the same as boycotting a company because you yourself are a bigoted piece of shit.
E: sp
No-one is claiming whatever it is you are trying to say.
I’m saying neither the company nor product have done anything bigoted.
Boycotting any and every company that employs bigots is impossible.
Google has also gotten lazy and is prioritizing YouTube and Reddit results, instead of webcrawler results.
The reddit results are annoying because you can only see 2 related comments without logging in. I hate that shit. I look for stack overflow links
Change the URL to old.reddit.com.
I’ve used it for quite a while now, so I can safely say it’s not just the honeymoon effect. There are certain specific searches that I will prefer Google, for example if I know an exact string from a document that I’m looking for. Google still has a larger search base so if there’s information that can only be found in one or two places, Google is more likely to work. Image and video search on KAGI is still a little bit finicky. I might use Google, DDG, or Bing for those (Actually, DDG is just a front end for Bing in this regard). For everything else, when I’m looking for information or answers to questions, Kagi is the best there is.
