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.
I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
TIL of this. Thanks.
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.
Route it through a vpn with gluetun and it does…
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 don’t know. I find the underlying principle of kagi a bit problematic. For example, look at what they say in this piece here. I get that any search engine that is “free” but sponsored by ads is gonna be skewed towards the advertisers. But like kagi phrases their response, it sounds somewhat classist. If you can afford a good search engine, you deserve better search results. If you don’t, well, your bad. I mean, it’s OK if they finance themselves by being a paid service. But this should be only a necessary first step before finding other ways to finance themselves.
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.
10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.
I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn’t quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it’s just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn’t enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.
Maybe I’ll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.
Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3
Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.
This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.
LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you’re looking for when you’re wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.
As long as it has footnoting so I can see where each piece of information was sourced from, AI chat has its use cases. Without that I genuinely do not see the point at all. It’s like when people “ask Google” something and just blindly trust the highlighted “answer” as infallible truth. It’s just a really, really bad habit to develop and I wish more people understood this.
Not infallible truth. But very often it’s something that is just for personal use.
Some things I’ve asked it recently were like “Which torch is smaller out of these 5 models?”. Once I find which one I want it’s easy to verify. Or “what does this Spanish expression mean?” or “how do I do …”.
Not everyone uses it to try and write authoritative stuff. And Google is full of clickbaity “comparison sites” that are nothing but fake advertising.
All of those questions you asked it return authoritative answers which you take on face value, unless you spend extra time fact checking them yourself.
Yeah but accuracy isn’t a given with the other methods either. If I ask some randos on reddit I won’t get a perfect answer either. If I google specs or reviews online they are often biased, wrong (think the magical Chinese lumens of torches) or even literally fraudulent paid reviews too.
So yeah for me the LLM output is more than good enough with a bit of verification if necessary.
I don’t really understand why people are suddenly hung up about holding LLMs up to this lofty ideal of an unbiased super-truth. Where did that requirement come from all of a sudden? It’s not really realistic and not something we’ve ever had in the past.
I feel the same about self-driving systems. People get all hung up if they crash once in a while, expecting them to be 100% perfect in all situations. But ignoring the concept that they already might be a hell of a lot safer than human drivers. They fail in different situations generally but why do we suddenly demand perfection?
I’m sorry, but citing other examples of bad research practices does not magically make AI reliable. That is a whataboutism.
If kagi is just an aggregate of other search engines why not just use a searx instance instead? Its open source and customizable.
Why not use a bicycle instead of a car? Because it’s 10 miles to work.
One search engine is a hobby project, the other ones competes with Google and gives better results and ability to filter them and prioritize them as you want.
I started using Kagi a few months before $10 became unlimited queries.
When I first switched I’d still, occasionally, swap back to google using bangs because I had to unlearn all the hacks I had to make Google turn up useful things. Now I can’t go back, Google is unsable without those hacks. Its barely usable with them.
Plus Kagi has a “fediverse forum” lens that lets me search Lemmy much more effectively than Lemmy’s search.
SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.
How is it that Cory Doctorow hadn’t hear of Kagi until March of 2024? It’s been widely discussed in tech spaces for quite a while now!
Maybe it’s taken him this long to kick the tires and develop an opinion from daily use. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Sure but in the article he says that he hadn’t even heard of it until some friends mentioned it “last month”, which would have been March of 2024. Taking a few weeks to feel it out is one thing but to have not even know it existed until last month is wild.
We don’t know what Cory does all day. We know he has a family, I think he has a kid, that means that he has responsibilities that don’t involve blogging. For all we know, at the end of the day he curls up with a dead tree book and unplugs to relax. He might not be as online as his overall style might make him appear and we don’t know what all circles of people he runs with, so it’s entirely possible that he just heard about it.
I think he has a kid
She’d be about 16, so probably fairly independent by now, but not entirely so.
But he also has actual books to write, in addition to blog articles. I’d imagine he’s pretty busy
Exactly, We don’t know what he does all day and it’s creepy you have this weird imagination going through. Like seriously? He probably could be checking the balance that kagi sent him for this post.
Why are people so obsessed with internet personalities just because they say “nice” things you like? This is what every one of them does.
Parasocial relationships are weird.
He writes all day. He can’t have time to listen to anyone with his volume of output :D
Cory Doctorow is a smart guy, and has some great takes. But he also pays for Xitter Blue (or whatever they call it) so do with that info what you will.
What are you talking about, I don’t see any tick. Are you talking about the big text that says “NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK”?
Maybe I am missing something but it kinda looks like Lemmy is engaging once again in a favorite activity, finding reasons why someone is “problematic” whether true or not, because that’s more fun than just engaging in reasonable posting and commenting and letting people be worth listening to sometimes
That’s pretty much the entire Internet these days.
It’s honestly very perplexing to me
Like why did 5 people upvote just pure combative nonsense. What did they see in it that led them to say “yeah this resonates with me, fuck this guy for objectively false reasons! I support this message!”
It’s just confusing
I think it’s because people are taking their frustrations out on whatever seems to make people think something might be on the upswing. Even better, because you can’t necessarily see who upvoted nobody can call them on it.
It’s like the folks who go to see a movie and gush about how awesome it was when you’re sitting around shooting the shit, but the moment they get on the Net they trash it in as many ways as possible.
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One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.
I can do everything Kagi does for free…using SearXNG.
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.
Isn’t that exactly what the “weight” in searXNG does?
weight
Where can I find that setting? I don’t see anything like that anywhere in the UI. If it’s in the config files and not in the UI, that isn’t particularly useful to me.
It’s in the UI on the Engines tab. However, you can only see it there, you still have to use the config file to actually change it, sorry. That’s not hard at all though.
If you don’t see this option, perhaps you’re running an older version? I’m running the latest docker.
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.
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.
