The man who killed Google Search?

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

Kagi ftw

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

I typically go google -> yandex -> kagi -> chatgpt.

This describes my own experience 100% accurately.

The same for me. I tried it for a month and it just didn't work well enough to make a switch :/

I've literally made the jump last week and switched all my defaults over to bing, after Google couldn't find the simplest query I had about a video game that Bing found in first result. I'm just so done with google.

Agreed

Strange, I rarely don't find what I need on Kagi, and when I do and fall back to Google, the results there are no more helpful.

For what it's worth, I have the opposite issue - when I can't find what I'm looking for on more privacy focused search engines, I go to google because 99 times out of 100 it gives me what I'm looking for in the easiest/quickest way.

this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the results to be demonstrably worse most of the time

the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet"

Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House.

Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

These days I go chatgpt4 -> ddg -> Google. I did the Kagi trial but it wasn’t compelling.

I am generally sceptical of GPT results, but also of other results, and GPT search is easier to fine tune and drill down into. For example if it gives me an obviously wrong answer, you can call BS. And it even apologises! Much more difficult to do for search engines.

I tried to lie to myself because Google occupies a lot of good emotions and I have great memories, but it is incredible how many searches were replaced by a simple prompt to ChatGPT, except when I add a site:reddit.com to my Google search.

For example, if I want to benchmark products I go directly to some subreddits and make my own benchmark spreadsheet.

I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen share works during an important meeting.

Google is disappointing. Microsoft actually makes me scared. Fortunately Apple hasnt really made its way into corporate life, so I've been spared their punishments.

Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done except set up a federated darknet where any commercial activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all wrong.

This is my experience too, I'm baffled that when making a basic search about a programming language on Google, the top results are only SEO garbage that waste your time for a basic answer. I'm better off asking GPT those days.

Append a "?" to the end of the kagi query. It runs what appears to be a ChatGPT RAG query backed by a search engine index, and puts the results at the top of the normal search engine result page. It greatly outperforms any other LLM I've played with, and, as a bonus, each paragraph in the response contains working hyperlinks to primary sources.

If you don't want to pay Kagi or login, you can play with it here:

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

(no need to append "?" when you run queries through that form).

I didn't know it runs an LLM when you append a "?", but for any Kagi-users out there, you can use the bang: !fgpt $QUERY if you automatically want to jump to an LLM.

The !fgpt-bang seems to be the model: "Claude 3 Haiku" going by the developer notes. Which often outperforms at least ChatGPT 3.5, easily recouping some of the money I put into Kagi every month.

Then why use it? I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago and it's fine.

Kagi seems to have their heads up their asses though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

One dude's crappy blog doesn't change the fact that Kagi has excellent search results.

Kagi lets me raise and lower sites or even block sites, so I get results more relevant to me. If I see a site that is not useful (hello Quora) I can block them. If I see something I like, I can raise it.

After reading the author's article and the emails, the only thing I'm convinced is that the author has an axe to grind and Vlad comes off as entirely normal and reasonable.

>>the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet"

>Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House.

>Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

JFC.

This illustrates one of my biggest complaints about current Google (which has been the case for sometime):

They make their software behave as though they know what I (you) want, better than I do (you do).

So they give you the results they think you need, rather than those you really want.

Infuriating squared.

And idiots cubed.

Searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" on Google turned up the page from "This Old House" immediately (top 3 results, top 2 were wikiHow and a YouTube video that seemed OK at a glance).

I'm not sure why my personal results are often so much better than posts like this one whenever I do the experiment - maybe it's based on location?

>So they give you the results they think you need, rather than those you really want.

Correction: I should say, their stupid machine learning algorithms think you need.

I would like to report that this emotion and experience completely disappeared after I ported my business workstation over to Ubuntu budgie. Not only does my computer crash a whopping 80% less, but it also uses 30% less memory on average.

The main challenge was that I have to run my CAD software in a Windows VM. Ironically though the solution is more stable than running the CAD software on bare metal!

I can definitively say that being free of Microsoft anxiety is very sweet, and worth far more than any effort I had to spend to do the porting. It has radically improved my computing quality of life.

The SEO spam domains could be blocked or de-prioritized by google. However, these SEO links generate significant income for Google via advertising.

When OKRs are tied to revenue, no executive is going to sign off on a change that reduces it

Start learning how to accurately prompt ai's, and have valid and constructive conversations with them. This replaces 80% of the need for search, and gives you a number of valuable things search could never provide including valuable and constructive critiques and analysis. If you think that you can't do this with llms because they are just parrots that means you have not read the latest papers on prompting and meet update your beliefs on the capabilities of llms like gpt4. These things do effective critical reasoning, with increasingly low rates of hallucination.

To reduce the anxiety of search, use AI enhanced search to filter through the dross and find both meaningful search terms and results.

After I did this my search anxiety reduced back to the level it was around 2012-2014, when Google had an effective search product. The quality of life improvement on search alone has been profound. But when you add in the fact that gpt4 can also help with communications issues, conflict resolution, and understanding my own complex and sometimes baffling emotions, the quality of life increase has been far greater than anything Google search ever gave me.

Please consider upskilling with llm assisted search and analysis skills.

I feel there's a place for a search engine that doesn't give an f about currency / recent results.

Although sometimes useful, I find my my search results contaminated by popular, recent content.

And it must cost Google a lot to continuously scrape the web.

Do you use an ad blocker? I can confirm the results: plumber ads that extend below the fold, followed by one useful article from Home Depot, then a useless "people also ask" blob of links, some videos (likely useful, faucets aren't complex), and another useless "people also" blob.

I am in the US, if that matters.

Even worse, besides spam domains there are countless legit enterprises that like to be at the top of results that create bad incentives.

Imagine the community manages to set up a walled off non-commercial web that gains enough popularity to be interesting to advertisers. Who would be in charge of such a thing? And what would they do when Coca Cola showed up at the front door with ten million dollars in a briefcase? Federated would not be much better, they just need to pay the most influential nodes.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try

I still need to use Teams...

I searched on mobile, so no ad blocker. There were no ads for that query, and all of the content up to maybe the 5th result was an acceptable answer to the query (i.e. on a site that wasn't plastered with ads)

If I search "plumber" the first 3 results are ads.

I'm in Australia.

I haven't used it, but teams is on Linux, and might be polished enough for your needs:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

Consider evaluating it in a VM before taking the plunge.

Good luck and Happy Porting!