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
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.
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.
Search.brave.com ain’t bad
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.
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.
Absolutely despise discord, fucking internet herpes.
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.
And it’s not only about user data, it would also expose the website to content spoofing in public wifi, which would for example allow the attacker to inject fishing content in the website.
SSL encrypts the data you’re sending but it also ensures that you’re communicating only with who you think you are. Without SSL you can’t be confident about any of that.
If a website has literally no login system, there’s nothing to phish.
There is honestly no reason to use SSL on a static website that has no login system and just displays some content.
IE a static blog or etc, where the only content on the website is just “look at this stuff, okay thank you!”
That’s still my point, for example you could inject your own login system “create an account to keep track of your favorite artists, or some new shiny feature”. For there you can get people’s personal information, potentially a password they use on other services.
An URL is something the general public will trust, if the content can be messed with you repurpose the website’s reputation. I took phishing as an example but even my not-so-creative and non-expert brain can think of other things : asking for donations, propaganda, advertising, censorship, …
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.
While I agree the issue you raise does make sense in some situations, it derivates from the initial concern : if you don’t want your domain listed in a DNS record you certainly don’t want it to be indexed by a search engine :p
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’m still very happy with the experience, especially the UX and customisation options, and they’re developing new features fast. Not always successfully at first, e.g. the recent integration of WolframAlpha isn’t entirely a step forward (mostly because they’re not displaying the extra context that WA shows that lets you know when it’s answering the wrong question).
I think overall most people are very happy, as shown by the frequent recommendations on here (so much so that someone on Lemmy was telling everyone it must be astroturfing).
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.
I’ve recently started using Qwant since Mozilla has partnered with them and I’ve been pretty satisfied so far.
What Google has over every other search engine is local results. There’s just no getting around how much useful data Google has on every business in the world.
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I primarily use a couple locally hosted LLMs for searching for info now.
Larger LLMs are trained on so much info that they get the answer right surprisingly often.
Only thing they of course struggle with are recent events.
Been using kagi for several months now and can’t imagine going back. The only thing I still use google for is when I want to shop for a specific product after having used kagi to do my homework. I’m sure I can configure a filter for that, but haven’t gotten around to that yet.
I thought Kagi shut down.
I guess turns out no but if I’m going to pay for search it’s something like Perplexity.
but if I’m going to pay for search it’s something like Perplexity.
Generative AI search engine Perplexity, which claims to be a Google competitor and recently snagged a $73.6 million Series B funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, is going to start selling ads, the company told ADWEEK…“Advertising was always part of how we’re going to build a great business,” said Shevelenko.
https://www.adweek.com/media/gen-ai-search-engine-perplexity-has-a-plan-to-sell-ads/
removed off with your ads for a paid search engine.
That’s Cory Doctorow, my guy. He’s not making an ad.
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