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.
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… :)
Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I’ve balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.
Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they’re turning a neat profit off of you; and you’re refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.
Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.
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.
To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.
SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.
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 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?
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.
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.
which is one of the reasons why I own a Fairphone.
and sure, you can’t avoid all bad choices, but everyone draws a line somewhere. and when a techbro makes a techbroy post about how eVErYThiNg iS pOLiTiCiZeD ThESe dAyS and how that’s supposedly stopping innovation, because people like me don’t want him to work with a guy with a history of opposing our rights, then I stop having confidence in him and cancel my subscription because I don’t want to support him financially anymore.
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.
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.
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.
That seems like a crutch instead of a real feature. I hate even just thinking about having to manage that. What if you want info from sites you do not already know about? Seems like finding new things through search is basically dead anymore.
So I only have to find one thing Kagi can do, that SearXNG can’t?
Then what?
SearXNG is probably at the very core of Kagi; with a bunch of extra code and UI on top of it. Bangs work as well as lenses, including external bangs. If you can dream of an engine; you can use it with SearXNG; creating an engine with it is documented well.
I promise any single thing Kagi can do that SearXNG can’t or won’t; won’t matter. SearXNG is superior to Kagi in every way by cost, and by being free, open source, and functionally all you need.
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.
You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you’ve not tried this, please do not write it off.
If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there’s several guides and videos out there that might help you if you’re inclined to learn.
If not; you’re also free to continue consuming as you do.
If kagi is just an aggregate of other search engines why not just use a searx instance instead? Its open source and customizable.
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
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.
Yeah, I get that. While “no ethical consumption under capitalism” shouldn’t be used to justify passivity, each individual person has their own limits to what they can reasonably achieve. Sometimes when I’m traveling and my anxiety peaks, I also eat dairy products/eggs because I cannot mentally afford to search for vegan alternatives. It’s so hard to always keep the balance between doing what you can and trying to stay sane.
I’ve been using startpage for years and don’t really miss the missing location features. But I hardly leave the house anyways.
