I don’t get the impression that Kagi intends to compete with major search engines. It is clearly marketed toward privacy-focused, tech-minded individuals. You can take that one of two ways. Either you are frustrated with the erosion of search engine quality due to advertising, or you disagree with the predatory practices such as data mining that comes along with such advertising. In both cases, the only real way to signal to major search engines that you disagree with these practices is to stop using their services (including their APIs).
For example, I have been using DuckDuckGo for decades. At first, I had to compromise search result quality, but now it has enough users and support that results are on-par with the likes of Google.
I do not think that Kagi is bad or that people should not use it. It simply isn’t for me, because it does not actually address the reasons I do not use search engines like Google.
For example, I have been using DuckDuckGo for decades. At first, I had to compromise search result quality, but now it has enough users and support that results are on-par with the likes of Google.
Just to make sure, you know that DuckDuckGo pulls results from primarily Bing for the main links and images, mixing in their own DuckDuckGo crawler results in with it for the rest of the types (instant answers, wikipedia, etc)? https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ (end of second paragraph)
Not saying that’s bad, but just wanting to make sure you know that DuckDuckGo also uses other major search engine results in case you were unaware
Yeah it’s a shame. Seems like true independent indexes are a dying breed. The only one I know of is Mojeek, but I avoid them for political reasons (“Colin” responding in that thread is their CEO, spreading covid misinformation)
On the other hand, it doesn’t really matter so much anymore.
LLM is the new search. I can ask it the actual question I have and it will give me the answer. If it’s not exactly what I need I can ask it to specify further.
Contrast that with a search engine that just gives me a ton of bookmarks to sift through to see if they actually might answer my question or are just clickbait.
Of course there’s still some times when you need search, like when you need to find an actual website, or when you need a source reference. But really the need for me is greatly reduced now.
Be careful relying on LLMs for “searching”. I’m speaking from experience here - getting actually accurate results from the current generation of LLMs, even with RAG, is difficult. You might get accurate results most of the time (even 80% or more), but it can be difficult to identify the inaccurate results due to the confidence models present their output with when hallucinating.
Also, if your LLM isn’t doing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), then it isn’t actually a search and won’t find results more recent than the data it was trained off of.
I know. But I’m often not really looking for accuracy. I just need to know something for myself. Most of the stuff I look up is absolutely not critically important. It’s not like I’m trying to write a PhD dissertation or something.
I know it can be inaccurate but I can verify the results (and they usually are totally fine).
Why is that an issue?
I don’t get the impression that Kagi intends to compete with major search engines. It is clearly marketed toward privacy-focused, tech-minded individuals. You can take that one of two ways. Either you are frustrated with the erosion of search engine quality due to advertising, or you disagree with the predatory practices such as data mining that comes along with such advertising. In both cases, the only real way to signal to major search engines that you disagree with these practices is to stop using their services (including their APIs).
For example, I have been using DuckDuckGo for decades. At first, I had to compromise search result quality, but now it has enough users and support that results are on-par with the likes of Google.
I do not think that Kagi is bad or that people should not use it. It simply isn’t for me, because it does not actually address the reasons I do not use search engines like Google.
Just to make sure, you know that DuckDuckGo pulls results from primarily Bing for the main links and images, mixing in their own DuckDuckGo crawler results in with it for the rest of the types (instant answers, wikipedia, etc)? https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ (end of second paragraph)
Not saying that’s bad, but just wanting to make sure you know that DuckDuckGo also uses other major search engine results in case you were unaware
Yes, and I largely disagree with it :/
Yeah it’s a shame. Seems like true independent indexes are a dying breed. The only one I know of is Mojeek, but I avoid them for political reasons (“Colin” responding in that thread is their CEO, spreading covid misinformation)
On the other hand, it doesn’t really matter so much anymore.
LLM is the new search. I can ask it the actual question I have and it will give me the answer. If it’s not exactly what I need I can ask it to specify further.
Contrast that with a search engine that just gives me a ton of bookmarks to sift through to see if they actually might answer my question or are just clickbait.
Of course there’s still some times when you need search, like when you need to find an actual website, or when you need a source reference. But really the need for me is greatly reduced now.
Be careful relying on LLMs for “searching”. I’m speaking from experience here - getting actually accurate results from the current generation of LLMs, even with RAG, is difficult. You might get accurate results most of the time (even 80% or more), but it can be difficult to identify the inaccurate results due to the confidence models present their output with when hallucinating.
Also, if your LLM isn’t doing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), then it isn’t actually a search and won’t find results more recent than the data it was trained off of.
I know. But I’m often not really looking for accuracy. I just need to know something for myself. Most of the stuff I look up is absolutely not critically important. It’s not like I’m trying to write a PhD dissertation or something.
I know it can be inaccurate but I can verify the results (and they usually are totally fine).