The man who killed Google Search?

It's April 23rd, 2024, and I am still looking for a good, reliable, honest and simple search engine.

All I want to do is search.

No AI.

No ads.

No shopping.

Please don't "Answer my question." I enjoy doing my own original research, thanks.

I'm entirely willing - wanting even - to pay for it.

Currently Kagi has my $, but I'm saddened and frustrated that they're not even focused on Search, they're focused on AI[1] and t-shirts.

Amazingly, in 2024, there is still a market opportunity for a good search engine.

It can't really just be me, can it?

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22

honestly, 99% of the time I don't need search. I want AI. I don't want to have to use a weird syntax to 'talk to a search engine'. sometimes I don't even know what the word is that I am searching for. I want something I can just ... talk to.

I use to use search every day, now I use it about once a month.

Kagi is still a good search engine though. Hopefully they continue to improve that part too, even if they do AI stuff.

As somebody who uses "weird syntaxes" to create applications every day, I like having the option to use a specific language that offers the ability to more precisely describe the parameters of my search.

It's not just you, but perhaps there aren't enough of us to make this commercially viable?

Do you find Bing search to fit your needs or do you use something else? I honestly get tired of having to type so much to get it to find what I actually want. Most often I do prefer to just use my acquired Google-fu of speed reading results.

Another upvote for Kagi. I've been using it for a few months and have been happy with the experience. They do have some AI features/interests, but I'm optimistic that the products they develop will serve me/users. So far, so good.

Indeed, AI is immensely useful! I use it every day too.

However, it's been my experience that finding original works, perhaps that I can cite as a source, is somewhat difficult when the computer might confabulate both the content and the citations.

When LLMs get (much) better at doing math, law and medicine, I'll be much more likely to use them for those things.

Here's my requirement: if I'm using a VPN, don't constantly ask me to do CAPTCHA.

I just want a search engine that prioritizes small sites again

I just don’t want to see another webmd fluff article when I search for a medical query or some gigantic news site’s affiliate section when I search for a product

Half my searches have site:reddit.com appended to them

At this point I’m not even sure there is anything to find. The web as we remember seem to have withered away, suffocated by SEO optimized content farms

Kagi is sure interested in the role of AI in searching, but the fact is that their product works great, so why the negativity?

I would like it if they would actually respect the weird syntax consistently

Yes, and it's possible to turn off the AI / automated summary features if you don't like them as well.

I’m pretty sure that’s mostly down to who your VPN is having you share IPs with. It’s hard to limit unwanted traffic while not impacting regular VPN users.

More annoying to me is getting captchas constantly just for running a recursive dns resolver. That’s a normal piece of internet infrastructure and is well-behaved.

Talk about finding what you are looking for. What does that search even tell us? Of course Kagi is pursuing AI. Why is that bad? It’s a promising search technology.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Kagi’s vision involves organic growth and a pay-for-what-you-use users-are-the-customer Internet. They’re giving us a chance to pay for both a browser and search. Something this community has been asking for.

Brave search works pretty well.

@drowsspa

I don't use bing search, I use chatgpt and claude.

Here are some examples: after pasting hundreds of log lines of output from a failed build request, "why did this build fail?"

After pasting my last 3 workouts, "I am wondering if I am not putting enough muscle on my body / torso. Is this the case? if so, suggest me an exercise that utilizes body weight, dumbbells, or weighted exercise ball"

It suggested dumbbell pull over, so I asked "What weight should I start with for the dumbbell pull over?"

"say I want to go to the club and seem like I know what I am doing, how many dances should I know?"

"say I have a pandas series of numpy.ndarray, and I have an numpy.ndarray. I want to find the cosine distance between the numpy.ndarray and each of the items in the series"

"I made a notebook for non data scientists to follow and use, so I want to add lots of comments and mark down documentation." (paste notebook code) and it adds comments, doc strings, etc.

most of this stuff, using search as it is, is clunky. I would have to find weird ways to word what I am searching for to find results.

Have you tried Phind? I find that it takes most of the "clunkiness" out of the process of searching by interrogating AI + searching the web at the same time.

the quality isn't great. They also have my money though because who else is there?

That is exactly what Kagi does. Kagi Small Web [1] was initiated to surface small personal websites in search engines again.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I definitely noticed and it's a huge improvement. Shame google doesn't make any money from these sites so they won't ever bother promoting them.

I have not seen any ossues with results. I have found what I was looking for every time both around tech and general topics.