And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
HN is the ONLY place I've seen Kagi recommended as useful. So much so I bought it for a year and had to move back to google. I was missing so many search results.
Maybe I didn't configure Kagi enough? But I don't want to configure a search engine.
This is interesting to me. I've done basically no configuring (except frequent use of a "site:reddit.com" lens) and it's been great. Now when I see Google or Bing results it's jarring how bad they seem.
For search I'm increasing just using Claude + web search tool, it's better than Google has been in years. I have my own local ollama-powered RAG setup as well which isn't as good but may serve alright if/when Anthropic starts with ad insertions.
I find doing more focused searches with bang patterns work well for me, I.E searching wikipedia, manpages, mdn etc directly. Sometimes coupled with LLM to more quickly understand the syntax because docs tend to be sparse with examples.
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
2 days ago I was making multiple searches looking for the websites of specific hotels and spa facilities, and none of them showed up in the first 4 pages of results, even when searching by exact name.
Out of desperation I switched back to Google, and, surprisingly, it was willing to give me what I was looking for on the first page. (But not as first result, of course..)
> DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
True, but DDG seems, at the very least, no more afflicted than other engines. If I'm supposed to pay for a search engine, I expect something better than DDG.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
I find it to be more reliably useful than the other non-Google alternatives I’ve tried. I find its “PDFs Only” filter to be awfully handy too. Proudly not a bot, but I freely admit that, because I pay for it and our incentives seem aligned, I’m biased toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
I share the same sentiment. I know many people praise Kagi, and I respect the effort behind it too. I tried it for three months and realized it was not for me. Google works just fine for my needs.
Haha… no bot here. Been using Kagi for years now. Not sure what you‘re searching for. My own tests, admittedly early, found no instances, where Google gave better results.
The most insidious aspect is that tech CEOs and influencers keep parroting how "AI" will bring global prosperity and empower the masses. When it's clear to anyone with an ounce of reason that the exact opposite is happening. The amount of hypocrisy and manipulation is sickening.
I feel like the search result of YouTube videos on Google search is much worse than the result on YouTube itself. It's strange because Google develop both Google and YouTube search. It's like reverse Reddit, where the website's search is so unusable you have to search on Google like "xxx reddit".
> And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
Which also reinforces already declining literacy rates.
9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all.
To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth.
edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.
I searched for that exact phrase out of curiosity because I haven’t used Google in years… and it’s even worse than you say.
I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..”
Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS.
It seems to differ extremely by account or region?
I have to say AI summaries work pretty well for me on Google and my overall subjective sense is the results have been getting better the past 1-2 years.
Here's what I get for your exact search and it looks pretty reasonable?
I knew you'd come back with a comment like this one. You never argue in good faith. No, I wasn't talking about AI generated videos because then I would have written a different comment. Bye now.
I sometimes wonder how much other browsers, countries, or languages play into the search results for a particular user.
Every time I read someone complaining about Google search results, I try to use another search engine for awhile, just to see if I'm missing something. Every time I do this, the alternatives are awful and I shake my head and go back to Google search.
> AI summaries are actually rather good, in the general case.
The google ones for me seem to be talking about something unrelated to what I'm looking for a significant percent of the time because it interprets it as a much more popular concept that looks like my query if you squint very hard. Other times it pulls up seo-spam tier answers that are plainly wrong.
