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points by capital_guy 2 days ago | 0 comments

Haven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.

[–] krupan 2 days ago

A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!

[–] prism56 2 days ago

I did something similar, when the Kagi Translate changes were announced earlier in the year. I tried a local hosted AI assistant (via openrouter) along with DDG/Brave.

80% of the time the search results were perfectly fine, but that small amount of time would royally annoy me and my breaking point was this: https://i.redd.it/r4q6y3vl5vdh1.png

So I went back to Kagi and appreciate it a little more (they've also rolled back on Translate to some degree).

[–] hedora 2 days ago

I pay for kagi, but hardly ever use search any more.

Come to think of it, one of my boxes is not logged into kagi, and is mostly ai nonsense.

I guess I’ll keep paying them. :-)

[–] shaunpud 2 days ago

https://noai.duck.com

[–] jdiff 2 days ago

"Top results" was the complaint, this hides AI coming from Duck but not from Duck's results.

[–] bigstrat2003 2 days ago

Kagi is awesome, it's what Google used to be. I tried to switch to DDG, but I found that I had to use the !g option more often than not to get good results. With Kagi, I've never had to do that.

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

> I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google

I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.

[–] mcmcmc 2 days ago

Gemini summary is wrong way too often to be relied on, especially for anything niche

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

Very rare for me to use Google nowadays for something niche. For those cases, I would assume it requires multiple sources to get a definitive answer, so it goes to ChatGPT.

[–] mcmcmc 2 days ago

Ok but there’s still a high error rate, so why would you trust it with general queries? Especially if it’s something you aren’t already knowledgeable about

[–] fesoliveira 2 days ago

That is fair. I always ask for sources whenever it is something I am unfamiliar with instead of just trusting the response, that way I can go and double check and it ensures the agent at least read something on the topic

[–] InvertedRhodium 2 days ago

I've found the value of this approach has diminished over time - now I need to go and read the source and try to identify if it was generated by an LLM itself.

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

Why do you think there’s a high error rate for general queries nowadays?

[–] mcmcmc 2 days ago

Because of the high error rate on queries where I know the topic well enough to tell when the answer is way off base

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

Yeah fair. I guess I have a very different experience, as I mentioned above, I basically never use it for any niche/hard queries that depend on multiple sources or research. For all my common queries, it's reliable.

[–] devmor 2 days ago

Every time I get a Gemini summary it reminds me not to use google. It's almost always wrong about key data.

[–] holdupagain 2 days ago

It's a AI answer and a huge page of ads

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

Yeah, agreed. If Claude/ChatGPT would load and respond faster, i’d go for them. But Google’s speed is unmatched for quick queries.

[–] hedora 2 days ago

For me, it took 30-60 seconds to notice dark mode preferences on my browser, but popped up an ad saying that search is garbage without the app, and that I should install their malware on my phone.

When I dismissed the popup, it produced much better results than screenshots I’ve seen from logged in browsers.

I guess that’s an improvement?

[–] FrinkleFrankle 2 days ago

I use it much less than I did prior to LLM becoming useful. However, when I need to search, it just works. Their AI integration with their search is also great, but I couldn't justify it and ChatGPT subscription. I can't bring myself to cancel Kagi entirely, though. I still did 600 searches this month.

[–] 0c3ca83 2 days ago

Except the summary doesn't fucking work. It's consistently wrong.

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

As I mentioned above, if you’re making a niche query, maybe. If you’re making a very generic query “average temperature in Hong Kong in January”, it’s fine. You’re overestimating average complexity of a query.

[–] xp84 2 days ago

"Fine" may be "right 95% of the time" but I'll look like a jackass 5% of the time that I trust the Google AI Overview.

And I won't know which ones are the wrong ones, so I may as well trust it 0% of the time.

Most people I know use AI Overview now as their primary way of doing any sort of research or question-answering... and I urge them: If getting an LLM take is suitable for your purpose, at least ask free-tier ChatGPT, which is at least an order of magnitude less likely to vomit up false or confused information. Also, asking actual Gemini is another sane option that is far superior to AI Overview.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Does it really matter that much? Did it matter that everyone's parents pre-internet were wrong half of the time?

Most people are not asking google to build them a train signaling system but to look up some question on Wikipedia for which the answer does not matter that much

[–] hedora 2 days ago

If that’s the case, those people should just install a 7M param model on their phones and use that. It’s probably as accurate, but works offline.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago

Sure but that is harder than pressing a button or saying hey Google. It requires you to think, install a new app, make a UI, etc.

Think of the incentives and the path of absolute least resistance/thinking/energy use and you will arrive at the product people want.

[–] tokioyoyo 2 days ago

7M param doesn’t do web searches for you. Otherwise, yeah?

[–] fao_ 1 day ago

> Does it really matter that much?

Does truth matter in the post-truth world where disclaiming truthful news about you is as easy as calling it fake?

[–] ksh09 2 days ago

Interesting, I had terrible experience with ChatGPT as search not-so while back, found gemini quite useful for finding out the articles and brainstorming information.

[–] windexh8er 2 days ago

> And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.

What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.

[–] xp84 2 days ago

As opposed to Googling, which will

1. leverage the AI Overview model (with the IQ of a brain-damaged monkey),

2. run an ad auction and populate the first 6-10 items from that,

3. then do a perfunctory exercise of searching its spam-riddled index to round out a few results at the very bottom of the page.

Yeah, that guy asking ChatGPT is a monster.

[–] hedora 2 days ago

You forgot to mention all the well-documented ad auction fraud that came out during the anti-trust trial (they defraud advertisers and sites and do some shady stuff to users —- on every impression).

[–] hexagonsuns 2 days ago

DuckDuckGo has never had good search results.

[–] autoexec 2 days ago

It's mostly Bing

[–] hedora 2 days ago

It’s been statistically indistinguishable or better than Google for at least a decade.

Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.

[–] eudamoniac 1 day ago

I tried to switch to DDG multiple times within the last decade and it was very clearly worse than Google even as Google declined. There would be zero relevant results on page 1, I switch to Google, plenty of relevant results. This happened every single day.

[–] hedora 1 day ago

I have literally never had that experience with any of the following search engines:

- DDG

- Kagi

- Bing (10+ years ago)

- Yahoo (I'm getting old...)

I searched by typing lists of keywords into the search box in the past. Maybe you're one of those people that types sentences, or relies heavily on synonym matching? (Which finally works now, but only if you turn on LLM mode -- even then, Google shipped that months or years after kagi, and the reviews are scathing vs. the performance I get out of the Kagi AI search.)

[–] 2PqboPPmKegvanx 1 day ago

>Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs)

[Citation Needed]

[–] cosmicgadget 2 days ago

My workflow (return on success):

1. DDG

2. Google

3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand

4. This is information the world was not meant to know

[–] iamnothere 2 days ago

Brave Search is actually better than DDG these days. Kagi is supreme though

(Also Marginalia for deep search)

[–] ksh09 2 days ago

First time I heard about Marginalia, I'll check it out.

[–] OccamsMirror 2 days ago

Isn't Kagi basically Brave search?

[–] iamnothere 2 days ago

No? Different features, different indices, Brave Search is free/ad supported. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html

[–] JoshTriplett 2 days ago

I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".

[–] reaperducer 2 days ago

The only thing I use Google for anymore is reverse image search.

[–] foxylad 2 days ago

N+1 I have paid for Kagi for a couple of years. I describe it as google search back when google search was actually useful.

[–] kevinfiol 2 days ago

Tried them all. When looking for obscure sites, I still find Google to be the best above all. DDG will often miss results, Kagi and Brave will be better but still not have the vast amount of sites indexed like Google does. Also, I'm still surprised to this day that searching "duckdns" on DuckDuckGo doesn't bring up the DuckDNS site -- maybe they have something against other ducks?

As for Google, I typically only use its "Web" search so I skip all the junk Google adds to the `All` tab. With Firefox or Chrome, you can make a custom search engine with `&udm=14` appended, like `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` if you want it to be your default search engine.

[–] hedora 2 days ago

I think Kagi more aggressively blocks garbage, which is probably the tradeoff you are seeing.

The last time kagi failed me, I flipped on claude research mode. It found a microfiche archive, OCR’ed it, then started retro-stalking obscure 90’s celebrities (read old interviews, found coworkers, etc).

It took 15 minutes, but it produced an accurate 20-30 page report, then converted it to machine readable form for downstream use. I tried doing the same research myself a few years ago and failed to find anything at all.

As the kids say: Google’s cooked.

[–] troupo 2 days ago

As far as data goes, Kagi often lags behind Google. It will return outdated or irrelevant articles quite often.

However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.

So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.

The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.

[–] xp84 2 days ago

I am waiting for someone at Apple[1] to explain why I can't set any arbitrary site as my search provider on mobile on the phone that I paid for.

(Does Chrome on mobile allow it? I use Edge on iOS which also only has a hardcoded list, so while I don't know for sure, but I assume not)

[1] no doubt i will be waiting until i am dead

[–] autoexec 2 days ago

I'm guessing that apple wants to get paid for placement in the preferred search provider listing.

[–] sehansen 2 days ago

Safari on iOS allows it, kinda, the search engine needs to put an app on the app store that activates it. That's how you get Kagi search in your iPhone browser.

[–] wolvoleo 2 days ago

Yes Firefox does, you just need to visit it once and it's in the list. You can also add it manually if you want. I used it that way both on desktop and android.

[–] troupo 2 days ago

My mind managed to completely blank out and not even see the "Add search engine" button in settings :D

[–] dmje 2 days ago

Try Kagi. Honestly. It craps on DDG.