Which led to their CEO emailing me to try to get me on the phone with him so he could tell me how wrong I am, ending up on HackerNews as as result, and then having to still have the same conversations with people every single time another search engine does some AI bullshit to explain that no, Kagi is just as much AI bullshit, they just don't advertise it when you sign up.
They're all bad. That's the problem. They're all bad. Search is ruined. All of these alternative search engines are largely Google and Bing frontends, and Google and Bing are wastelands of SEO blogspam. There isn't an answer, because nobody else can afford to crawl the web at the size needed to have a useful search engine. The best they can do is try to make something useful out of Google and Bing's results, which are not fixable.
That's really the problem at the end of the day. Google broke search forever, both in the way they do their searches and in how their years of encouraging sites to try to game the algorithms led to the floodgates busting open the second it became easy to mass generate a bunch of fake websites with plausible sounding text on them.
I guess at the end of the day, I use DDG but I wish I didn't, it's still bullshit. I've used more or less all of the options out there, they're all bad. But at least DDG doesn't cost me $10+ a month with a CEO that wanted to harass me personally. That may not matter to anyone else but it definitely did to me lmao.
If Kagi works for people then go for it, but it's the same bullshit as everywhere else because nobody can afford to start over from scratch, and at any moment Google or Microsoft could decide they don't want this competition using their API anymore and they'd be dead. And no matter what you do you're going to get fake blog results all the time.
When I used Kagi (because I was in fact a Kagi customer, that's how I ended up in their discord and ended up going "god there's so many problems here"), there was one killer feature for me, and it was that you could block, uprank or downrank domains in the results. That's about it to me, otherwise the results were just as bad as anywhere else. Now I use crowdsources AI blacklists from github with uBlock and uBlacklist and then also use those to block stuff on my own. It's not as good as having it built into the search and it doesn't help me on mobile, but that's the best I've got. I used Neeva before Kagi, which closed down, it didn't allow blocking domains but it did do the up/down ranking of them in the results. I can't imagine Kagi will have a much better financial outcome than Neeva did. This stuff costs too much money without bringing a lot in, even if it's paid.
But all of this is still just bandaids. If I have to go through pages and pages of fake blogs when I search "gerbil safe foods" when the answer I want is in a 10 year old forum post, nobody wants to sit there clicking block over and over and over again.
Primarily though I wanted to warn people that if they want to move to Kagi explicitly because of the AI bullshit Google is going right now, Kagi has been doing the same AI bullshit this whole time and they truly believe it. Vlad wants to use LLMs to rewrite news articles to be "unbiased". Complete nightmare stuff to me.
Kagi's FastGPT is the software I use when I want to make a point about how LLMs are bad because for some reason they let unregistered users use it for free and at least then I cost them money by using it.
@lori i currently use https://www.mojeek.com/ first and kagi as a fallback. unfortunately, that means that i still pay them, but also i feel like i can not afford to not have a good search engine available, and it seems i still need time to adjust to mojeek.
@pixelpaperyarn they're weirdly proud of their sign up page not mentioning AI (technically it does mention one of their AI products exactly once in a small spot, but not the term "AI") even though to me that's like...not a great sign???? Because people join thinking it's AI free and then realize it's not??
@lori yeah, they use their summarizer as a selling point for the premium subscription, but don't explicitly call it AI, which is weird.
My spidey sense was tingling when a colleague used it to summarize a youtube video I shared. This person has gone all in on AI stuff, where I'm pretty staunchly anti-generative AI, so I should have known from that alone.
@pixelpaperyarn I've met too many people who signed up thinking they were escaping the AI hellscape only to realize afterwards they aren't, it's all the same shit
Heck I didn't even know about any of their AI stuff being there for the months I was subscribed, I dipped when they raised they price (they lowered them again later because so many people unsubscribed) but the price increase is what made me join their discord to see what they were saying about it and that's when I learned about all the AI stuff they were working on
I've been using it for months now. Google is in shambles over not having my search data. Also I can pay for it in BTC which is nice considering idfk what to spend btc on anyways.
In short, when asked to not collaborate with cryptocurrency-powered, homophobe-led company Brave, Kagi's CEO responded with things like "Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more."
This gives off "you can't say anything anymore" energy. :/
Honestly, the correct thing to blame for how "we do not have innovation any more" is the greedy sociopaths that the wealthy today are, and their marketing and bean counting minions.
Been using Kagi a few months as a paid customer and honestly? Its quality has degraded over that short time, as it leans a little harder all the time on its AI offerings. Finding useful results is no longer a sure thing. They've clearly put my subscription money towards things I don't care about at the expense of the things I do.
Still more effective than most of the big names, but by not enough to renew my subscription when that comes due. And who knows how much more awful actual search will get by then.
Angry Sun
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •like this
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Neil E. Hodges
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • •lori
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •lmao I wrote a whole lot of them
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Which led to their CEO emailing me to try to get me on the phone with him so he could tell me how wrong I am, ending up on HackerNews as as result, and then having to still have the same conversations with people every single time another search engine does some AI bullshit to explain that no, Kagi is just as much AI bullshit, they just don't advertise it when you sign up.
Cohost's Financials - A Retrospective
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Neil E. Hodges
in reply to lori • •lori
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •They're all bad. That's the problem. They're all bad. Search is ruined. All of these alternative search engines are largely Google and Bing frontends, and Google and Bing are wastelands of SEO blogspam. There isn't an answer, because nobody else can afford to crawl the web at the size needed to have a useful search engine. The best they can do is try to make something useful out of Google and Bing's results, which are not fixable.
That's really the problem at the end of the day. Google broke search forever, both in the way they do their searches and in how their years of encouraging sites to try to game the algorithms led to the floodgates busting open the second it became easy to mass generate a bunch of fake websites with plausible sounding text on them.
I guess at the end of the day, I use DDG but I wish I didn't, it's still bullshit. I've used more or less all of the options out there, they're all bad. But at least DDG doesn't cost me $10+ a month with a CEO that wanted to harass me personally. That may not matter to anyone else but it definitely did to me lmao.
lori
in reply to lori • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Neil E. Hodges
in reply to lori • •lori
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •Primarily though I wanted to warn people that if they want to move to Kagi explicitly because of the AI bullshit Google is going right now, Kagi has been doing the same AI bullshit this whole time and they truly believe it. Vlad wants to use LLMs to rewrite news articles to be "unbiased". Complete nightmare stuff to me.
Kagi's FastGPT is the software I use when I want to make a point about how LLMs are bad because for some reason they let unregistered users use it for free and at least then I cost them money by using it.
Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Nils Goroll 🕊️:varnishcache:
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •Mojeek
www.mojeek.comNeil E. Hodges likes this.
pixel
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to pixel • • •pixel
in reply to lori • • •@lori yeah, they use their summarizer as a selling point for the premium subscription, but don't explicitly call it AI, which is weird.
My spidey sense was tingling when a colleague used it to summarize a youtube video I shared. This person has gone all in on AI stuff, where I'm pretty staunchly anti-generative AI, so I should have known from that alone.
lori
in reply to pixel • • •@pixelpaperyarn I've met too many people who signed up thinking they were escaping the AI hellscape only to realize afterwards they aren't, it's all the same shit
Heck I didn't even know about any of their AI stuff being there for the months I was subscribed, I dipped when they raised they price (they lowered them again later because so many people unsubscribed) but the price increase is what made me join their discord to see what they were saying about it and that's when I learned about all the AI stuff they were working on
The Great Ape :transFlag: arc
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •like this
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Neil E. Hodges
Unknown parent • •This gives off "you can't say anything anymore" energy. :/
Neil E. Hodges
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • •Brandon Butler
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •Random Geek
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •Been using Kagi a few months as a paid customer and honestly? Its quality has degraded over that short time, as it leans a little harder all the time on its AI offerings. Finding useful results is no longer a sure thing. They've clearly put my subscription money towards things I don't care about at the expense of the things I do.
Still more effective than most of the big names, but by not enough to renew my subscription when that comes due. And who knows how much more awful actual search will get by then.
Neil E. Hodges likes this.