Why pay for a search engine

To be in the top 1% you would likely need to depend on search on a daily basis for your livelihood. As a reminder the Starter plan is USD $5/month with 300 searches included.

99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. That's interesting and hard to accept but might be true with many living in apps and wall gardens like facebook. I wonder what the mode number is for those 99%. 1 or 2 searches a day.

And Google is making 23 dollars on less than 300 searches which means Google makes 8c to 1 dollar per search.

The idea of paying for services online that most people expect to get for free is great, actually.

There was a time when you simply expected to pay for anything that had value. Whether that was a newspaper, a magazine, a movie, music, or even an online service like AOL or CompuServe, you paid for it and you expected a certain level of quality in return.

In the early days of the Web, it wasn't clear at all that sites could pay their bills with advertising. Then in the mid-'90s, Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up ad (he's apologized since) and things progressed - or regressed, if you prefer - and we slid down the long slope to companies selling your data, hyper-targeting ads, and worse.

So many of society's ills right now can be traced to the ad-driven model. It's why clickbait is lucrative, why it's more profitable to run a populist site filled with misinformation than a trustworthy news org, it's how scammers and spammers are incentivized to flood social media sites with slop.

I'd love to see Kagi succeed, and others to follow their lead. I'd much rather spend an extra $20, $30, even $50 a month or more to subscribe to a bunch of ad-free sites that I can trust than to get it all for "free" at the cost of ads, data mining, and scammy clickbait.

I'd assume searches for the majority might be very "bursty", and while they may indeed spend most of their time in Facebook, Tiktok etc. when planning a vacation, searching for stuff to purchase or looking up recipes to try and the like, they'd issue a number of queries to narrow down into their area of interest which would blow past your estimate of 10 queries/day.

There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these.

I’ve been an happy subscriber for nearly one year now. I even tried DuckDuckGo for some time but the quality just wasn’t the same.

Because:

> If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. -- Andrew Lewis

>99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search.

that's pretty crazy to hear. Especially since on this day alone, a weekend, I seem to have 20 unique searches. I can easily hit triple digits a day when researching for a project or on the job. Search is invaluable to me.

Paying customer here. Kagi all day every day

I don't really like that quote. Many services you do pay for still treat you like an asset to make money off. And many services that are free, like the internet archive for example, are not.

I can highly recommend switching to kagi. Happy paying customer here.

[removed]

Are you looking for windows?

If they did that they would lose the bulk of their paying subscribers.

Are you looking for windows?

I'd put it this way... if you're paying a company, you might still also be the product, but if you're not paying for something that a company is spending money to make, you're definitely the product.

I didn't have much success with Kagi for Spanish/local searches. Has this improved?

And someone else can take up the mantle. But perhaps, just perhaps, a business can just exist and turn a modest profit, without trying to scorch the earth raising revenue infinitely.

Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet. Once Kagi gains traction I guarantee result quality will nosedive.

I am on Family plan for over a year. Very happy z including czech sites.

I would convert, but price is too high for me personally.

I'd be willing to pay up to 3$ a month for my searches, but also per-use.

If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay?

A replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap, it's so easy to ignore sponsored search results (for now).

I’m curious if you (or anyone else) know of any other services that are paid-only in a traditionally free/freemium product space.

Perhaps for news, or video content, or music, or something else. What else do you use today for free that often feels like a Faustian bargain?

As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?

The magic is in letting real humans curate what gets boosted and what doesn't. My results tend to be quite good because I've hidden tons of sites that I don't care about. It's the same reason uBlock works: filter lists can be shared.

I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different.

Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall.

For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches.

Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.

In some cases you pay and you're still the product. I paid for a subscription for an online news subscription and they are still showing me some ads (the economist) - likely sharing my data too.

Again, not true. There's many services like the internet archive that do not operate to make a profit. Lots of open source also fits this bill. The absolutism of the quote is just overly cynical. On the other hand, if the company is VC funded I would say this is generally true but it also dismisses basically all of non-commercial open source. How are you the product when you use debian?

I think social data tracking and categorization reached a point of saturation leading to diminishing returns. As a result, data companies that relied on this to target advertising audience are rolling us premium SaaS plans to de-risk their revenue streams from this problem.

> If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay? Do you ever have months in which you don’t use a search engine at all? If so you might just not be the target audience.

I would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly. I think search engines are a dead technology pretty quickly and the entire ecosystem will die in the next 2-3 years.

> Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet

This seems like a hard problem to solve, the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution? Can AI even help? Do we need to go back to manual curation after all? I remember in the 90s there were manually curated lists of websites, something like a website directory. At this point I'd rather get recommended a list of websites from a reddit user than relying on Google's ranking.

You either pay a flat fee, or you have to deal with the added baggage of considering that each search costs you a very real half a cent or whatever.

Would you use your search engine more if every search query were an implicit microtransaction? Would you use it more or less if you had to consider that your first search of the month cost $3, or if it's the last day of the month and you need to search for something but you have to wait to not incur a full month's fee.

This is one of those arguments that sounds reasonable but isn't. Nothing but a flat fee structure makes sense for something you'll be doing hundreds if not thousands of times a month. And let's be real: if you're the kind of person who could go a full month with no web searches, you don't want or need what Kagi is offering.

I would pay for Chrome Premium, as I pay for Youtube Premium. Prefer the Brave/YT Premium model where creators and sites get some share of your payment. The Kagi model, unless I missed it, seems to be "just pay us" with nothing going to creators.

Never going back to FASS, Kagi is great. So much better than Google, and getting better every day now that Google is sticking made up nonsense into the results.

I like that I get to choose when to use GPT.

If you’re on iOS, the Orion browser is great, too - tldr chrome extensions on iOS.

Agreed. Kagi even works well with Reddit. Great that I can just fall back to google easily too.

Another Kagi user for a year or two. I've honestly never had a single negative experience. Since using Kagi, I've only had to use google a couple of very desperate times. I don't notice the subscription fee because I get excellent value from it.

Kagi simply does what you ask and stays out of the way. Because you pay them, they don't need to monetize every pixel on the screen. No tracking or data mining. It's just software that does what it says it does and does what you tell it.

It's tragic that "thing that does one thing well and doesn't spy on you" is a scary and alien concept these days.

Maybe, but one major problem with Google search is the perverse incentives. SEO garbage sites tend to be filled with Google advertisements, which means a Google search user who clicks through to a SEO site makes Google money. As long as the result is good enough, users still get what they need and the search is successful. And by good enough, I'm talking about sites like "geeksforgeeks", "towarddatascience" or "realpython" that just put additional text and ads around existing documentation; they do answer your search query, you just have to scroll and ignore the 20 ads on the page to get to it. It's to Google's benefit to offer one of these pages up over, say, python.org as the top result.

Kagi, at least for now, is making its USP the fact that it surfaces more professional, curated results. Its algorithm is susceptible to manipulation, for sure, but unlike Google, it actually has an incentive to keep SEO garbage off the first page of results.

If kagi ranks according to pages that provide high value relevant information about the subject, how would SEO work around that? If they are willing to provide quality content, I guess they deserve to top the search?

Kagi is just a search engine. You're paying to access their index. There is no advertisement of any kind and Kagi has no relation to any site in their index.

This is like being miffed that Yellowpages doesn't pay businesses to list them in the phone book.

I service people for free because I can afford it despite I'm a company. It's part of the philosophy of sharing value for free. There are many services and products I use for free and I then make a donation to them because I love what they do. So clearly it's not true, maybe just true for the companies that do not care much about doing something good for people with only optional contribution in return.

I don't think SEO actually beat Google. Rather, Google simply capitulated or was captured. I distinctly remember a 2019 update where things really went bad.

Part of the situation is that a company that relies on ad revenue will get gradually feel the pull of the advertisers more and more.

I'd be more worried about someone nefarious buying Kagi if it got big. Someone else would be willing to pay a whole lot of money for those eyeballs.

interestingly you paid for a newspaper or a magazine and it was full of ads even if you paid or subscribed. And most people liked it that way. Computer Shopper was way more ads than content and was immensely popular

ChatGPT answers range from completely correct to deranged God-awful wrong, which means I have to use a regular search engine to verify the answers for anything remotely complex. Relying entirely on generative models for information is asking for trouble. Especially because the wrong answers often "look" correct/plausible.

What sort of job relies on internet searches? I’m not trying to be rude or anything like that at all, I’m genuinely curious.

A point I hardly ever see anyone bring up: I’m not a fan of the idea of doing all my searches while signed in, potentially creating a company-knows-me-better-than-myself situation. I do my searches in private windows mostly behind commercial VPNs so that it’s difficult enough to profile me that companies probably won’t bother. Public search engines have to get really bad before I move to a sign-in-required one.

But given that this community which ostensibly touts privacy at every turn seems to overwhelmingly support feeding everything (not just searches) into OpenAI/Claude, I guess my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe.

Btw I’m by no means a privacy maximalist.

I think you could bundle online search and LLM, offline (personsal) search and LLM and it would make 10-20 bucks a month attractive. Why just do internet search. Be my search for everything!

I think it should be free or cheaper for people who genuinely cant afford it to give the equity of access that Google does.

Well yes but it's kinda crappy that you do. Can easily imagine an alternate reality where laws are more pro-consumer such that it's illegal to charge someone for a service in a month that they don't use it.

Agree.

Also, plently of people at Google, Meta, etc feel they are doing good by providing free ads based services.

I suspect people with low income are way better off with free search, free maps, free docs than if each was $3 a month. It doesn't sound like much but their were definitely times in my life where $3 a month per service felt like too much. And yet, those services arguably provide extraordinary value for their users.

Jetbrains.

Well, up until recently. Now I'm paying hundreds of dollars for a cheap copy of VSCode and I'm really not sure why I shouldn't just use the free version.

I’ve considered using kagi before, but I think this blog post finally convinced me not too: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

The quick summary is that they aren’t really privacy focused at all, don’t comply with GDPR, and generally seem ok misleading their customers. The lack-of-privacy doesn’t bother me itself, but misleading customers really troubles me. Why would I trust them with X when I know they’ve lied with Y?

Very serious question:

How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker?

—-

That’s my current solutions, why should I switch to paying for Kagi? Ty!

>As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?

Not if Google continue to make the bulk of their money from ads.

> a hard problem to solve

Indeed. And perhaps part of the issue is that there is not a single solution.

Even manual curation is ultimately based on trust. If someone's trusted list of recommendations gets popular enough, what's to stop them from "selling out," breaking that trust, to make money?

Also, the good curated stuff is typically correspondingly small and focused. But lots of people want broad results in their searches, and it's hard to imagine a person or handful of people being able to cater to all of those varying needs equally well.

Sometimes a person wants excellent narrow results (eg: academic looking for papers), other times they want broad shallow stuff, and at various other points want various other things in between.

There's a whole field of expertise, sometimes called "Library and Information Science" about organizing and making information findable, since long before computers existed. Even for them it is not a solved problem.

But the cat-and-mouse arms race that the online version has turned into makes libraries and asking a librarian for recommendations feel a lot more appealing (:

I use Kagi, it’s pretty good. I pay for it and would recommend everybody at least evaluate.

The worst bits, which aren’t even that bad:

The maps are a work in progress.

No shopping search. If I want something like shopping search I can use Google.

Not sure if it’s because I’m in Australia but sometimes it takes a while for the page to load. Subsequent searches are faster.

There are lots of use cases when you want references to reliable sources written by real people instead of AI slop. Science, law, technical documentation, etc. If you ask an LLM for the sources, it is happy to generate bogus citations for false claims, and the only way to verify the answer is by using the good old web search. I hope real search engines never die, only those that turn to AI slop like Google.

Quick questions por people that have used it: is it good for technical searches? Like math/programming? At some point I tried another search engine but I ended up going back to Google for those. For what type of topics do you find yourself going back to Google/other search engine?

> replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap

The market for most is met with ads. It's why streaming services are adding ad tiers and JCPenney doing "away with constant sales and coupons, opting instead for everyday low prices" failed [1]. That's most consumers. It's almost all non-premium consumers. That's good fodder for Google and whatever LLM garbage replaces them.

Paraphrasing Scott Galloway, advertising is a tax on the stupid and the poor. I wish something like Kagi got public funding. But we have better priorities than taking ads out of search. So for the time being, you get one product for the wealthy and savvy and another, that's just good enough, for everyone else.

[1] https://excelsiorcapital.substack.com/p/jc-penneys-lost-barg...

I’ve been a subscriber for about a year. It’s best at technical searches. I would say other topics, particularly niche questions I have about like sports or something, it has a more difficult time on. Absolutely do not regret subscribing though

> Can easily imagine an alternate reality where laws are more pro-consumer such that it's illegal to charge someone for a service in a month that they don't use it

Didn't use my vacation home this month, skipping the mortgage payments!

The interesting thing about their calculation of Google's $23/m revenue per user, is how much of that is simply by matching a user's query and location to ads? i.e. Is all the additional data collection and abandonment of privacy entirely necessary to reach anywhere near that number?

Also it's not clear if the numbers used in the article omits publisher ads from Adsense.

It would be great if G's advertisers were opened up to competitors, I think a CPA model would work out well since combatting click fraud involves a lot of profiling.

> How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker?

Rubber duck to a battleship.

The number of times I've found something in seconds that a co-worker was digging around in pursuit of for minutes has by this point escaped me. Were you around for Alta Vista vs. Google? This feels the same. The only difference is it's paywalled, which for the consumer, is generally good--it means the benefits won't be generalised and the product will remain an elite minority offering that doesn't gain traction with SEO bots.

Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions (along with JetBrains and my cloud backup provider), where if it were a local business, I'd go there to pay in person, and smile while doing it.

I feel respected as a customer and I feel like I'm getting great value from the service. A LLM-fueled storm might be brewing on the web, but I'm definitely riding into it with Kagi.

Pro... gramming? I'm sorry, are you aware of what website you're on?

Why are there so many paying Kagi customers who feel the to write multiple paragraphs of testimonies? This is so unusual of HN.

Reeks of astroturfing.

> Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions

Funny, in terms of (non-niche) brand loyalty and evangelism, I'd say it's up there for me with Apple and Delta.

I would pay extra for services from a company that promise not to try to grow indefinitely.

> my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe

Kagi provides strong privacy guarantees [1]. They could be lying. But so could your VPN providers.

[1] https://kagi.com/privacy

You really can't distinguish enthusiasm for a product in a sea of crap from astroturfing?

> would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly

Kagi integrates GPT 4 and other LLMs, as well as its own Quick Answer product. The Quick Answer product is 9 times out of 10 superior to any of the pre-trained LLMs. Mostly because it's accessing live information.

Put another way, I'd love to go head to head with a competitor who relies on ChatGPT for their queries.

I do 100+ searches a day, but that would easily drop to ~10 if I don't count searches where I know from the beginning that I am going to click on the link to Wikipedia / GitHub / some other familiar website. With the rise of AI-generated content and low-quality content farms, I am turning to the old habits of keeping bookmarks to reliable sources anyways.

I use it for programming and math. When I started using kagi almost 2 years ago, I had to go back to Google occasionally. Now I basically never go back to Google search.

I’d put it in the “I’m paying for this but I’m not sure the CEO will never make me regret that fact” category.

There’s been some… ego-fuelled decision making happening in Kagi’s communication.

Skimmed. Not seeing how Kagi are lying about anything. To the degree I can fault Vlad, it's in going down irrelevant rabbit holes with these folks.

i liked the idea but here in SEA the latency is just nuts compared to google.

Just tried that example screenshot of 'postgresql query analysis' and got the same results on Kagi vs Google with uBlock. What exactly is novel here?

I’m a software developer, have been for two decades. I was suspecting it may be the case which is why I asked. Again, I’m not meaning to be rude or snide or anything, but what do you use search engines for? I almost never use them, I tend to head directly to the documentation when I need to look up the APIs for a library.

This is mainly because “free” search engines suck at it these days, and I’m curious if Kagi doesn’t.

> the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution?

To not be top ranked ? /s

Disclaimer: I’m a paying customer of Kagi.

It felt truly bizarre to subscribe to a search engine. To actually pay for access. There’s been a bit of drama with the CEO directly emailing people when they left poor reviews.

Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality.

I’m not surprised there’s a lot of people having thoughts and feelings about Kagi and expressing them. The fact that there’s a significant overlap between HN and Kagi’s user bases is hardly a surprise either.

I work as a dev like many here. Specially games. So lots of documentation lookup (or tutorials on what should be in documentation. Let's be real, games don't document a lot publicly to begin with, and public documentation is really poor for the tech industry), research on tooling for project, research to understand some new technical feature that rose up, spell checking for technical terms the built in dictionaries can't check, etc. I could go on for paragraphs, there's always something to learn, re-learn, or simply fact check.

and of course: discussions among communities talking about all of the above. Be it benchmarks, landmines to look out for, bug reports, highly opinated design choices, etc. Definitely couldn't find all this restrained to a Discord server or Facebook page.

And that's just all on the business end. Sometimes you just want to search up a reaction gif for a chat, or find news of the goings on (which is down on the weekend).

I'm calling marketing fluff here, given that its founder seems to hold a skewed model of kagis power in regard to collecting personal information altogether: "personal information is what you can be identified with as an individual. no information you submit to kagi is personal information except if you use your real email address to register"[0]

[0]: https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png

Because of the new ui? Seriously it's terrible, but the classic ui is still benevolently available as a plugin. Don't know for how long.

I don’t believe I’ve ever used shopping search. I remember seeing it a decade ago or something, but I never understood the point.

What is it for?

Well being technology oriented, this community has disproportionate number of technology enthusiasts. Remember when everyone and their dog was cryptobro? There were multiple such spikes, coinciding with hype cycles of coins, nfts, etc.

These days the most vocal are GPTmaxxing, tomorrow there will be a new shiny thing.

As a bit of a socialist I guess I should at least suggest that in the information age search is infrastructure. IP addresses are the commons. Capitalism will, of course, argue it's right to make money where it can but .. And I am sure it is not in the national interest to have another country in a position to turn off your infrastructure.

I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.

SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)

You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access.

We have entered the internet's dark age.

Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).

Fyi you can search "titanic movie Wikipedia !" And when you use a bang it doesn't count against your searches. Or at least that's what it was like before I moved to the unlimited plan :)

The image looks like it's from this post [1].

Long story short, this appears to be a case of a CEO needing to restrain themselves from saying (or typing) everything that comes to mind when faced with a combative user who clearly isn't trying to understand something or bring anything to the table.

At the end of the day, what you care about when it comes to privacy in search are your search records. They say--in a way that generates liablity--that they don't store them. I see no reason for them to break that promise. Between a commercial VPN and Kagi, I trust Kagi more.

[1] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

Top tier Kagi subscription allows you to tack a '?' onto the end of search and an LLM of your choosing will reply FYI.

https://files.horizon.pics/dfcedf80-2b55-422e-9960-42d730532...

A user asking for the state of GDPR conformance is not by any means a "combative" user. They just want to know if their personal information a treated in their best interest and according to current laws.

Privacy is a VPNs first business, for kagi that would be search. It feels like you mix your evangelism with a bit of whataboutism here... why do you bring up VPN providers when we talk about the privacy guarantees of kagi?

> I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.

I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general.

[1] https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

I do not blame Google for web’s current wasteland landscape, I blame ads and all the grifters who poison the landscape with SEO waste to try make some bucks with ads or other similar means.

How do you find the documentation in the first place? ;-)

I search for Errors / StackTraces that I get. For me stackoverflow / reddit / forum answers are often more helpful.

Or examples on how to implement something, the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together. Give me some working code that I can fiddle with.

High level comparison between two frameworks / libs that I'm not familiar with.

To find where a products is being sold for the cheapest price.

For electronics I know 3rd party services that compare prices for different shops. But in cases like "Where can I by this specific dental floss" I sometimes use google shopping search.

Its hard to check is person geniune on internet. Also, too often we all see a lot of prise for not-so-good products.

Because a massive share of the kagi users are part of the hn-adjecent crowd. When you look at the most manually upranked domains, you'll probably get a clearer picture. https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6

The typical kagi user uses hn. In the past, hn was even further up, though I guess they're slowly getting "normal" people too.

Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?

I hit my year too just two weeks ago. I always think "is it worth it" when the payment hits my credit card, but every time I come to the conclusion that it is very much worth it.

Just the universal summariser has saved me insane amounts of time. I can feed any rambling youtube video (with subtitles) or a long article to it and it'll give me the key points of it. Then I can decide whether it's worth spending an time on or not.

Something like this is the future of "AI" in my opinion, you can "teach" the system what you're interested in and it can curate content just for you - locally, without an unicorn startup getting all your data.

Google is an ad company that specifically lets SEO fill up its search results because those websites make them the most money per click. If Google continued to fight SEO abuse like they were literally founded to do then we wouldn’t be in this mess.

The same way people make adblockers happen. By making block lists of SEO garbage cruated by human beings.

Nextdns and the RPi alternative do it. Kagi has all the infrastructure in place to make it happen at the search level, it just requires more manual work right now.

You cite Facebook as an example of no meaningful content yet put all the blame upon Google? Maybe content creators are just incentivised into giving 90 percent of the public what they want.

Here’s an easy one: Vlad claims they are GDPR compliant. However, they do not provide a way to download stored personal info, as required by GDPR. This is a contradiction

The only time I think about using or paying for Kagi is when I see these posts on HN and get FOMO. I think that's because I actually don't have that SEO garbage problem anymore. AI apps have made search, and learning in particular, a lot easier.

The content added to Facebook was not what made the web what it was. The content indexed by Google, in turn, it was. The countless blogs or cooking recipes, fan sites, etc, were overriden with SEO filler slop over the years.

OP example of what a content-devoid internet would look like is exactly what Facebook is now. A site that started as the place to connect and share with your friends and family now is just a place that is filled with AI slop and emptiness.

Almost everyone is paying for their electricity based on usage, and yet people don't seem to think "this will cost me a dollar" when turning on the washing machine (unless really short on money). I think usage-based SaaS subscriptions could make sense from user's perspective, they are just too uncommon right now.

It really is Google's fault. Those blogs SEO goals are only targeting top Google positions.

AI apps like Perplixity and Phind index and rank web content too. They have the same problem.

When I do a Google search for the example query "postgresql query analysis" on mobile chrome (no ad block), I get 0 ads. Same thing if I select the "Example" filter as shown in the demo image.

I’m a technical writer. I use Kagi dozens of times a day for research. I particularly like custom lenses where I can limit search results to a client’s site, their existing documentation, related standards and regulations, etc. Plus, I can exclude competitor sites and other results I don’t want to see.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

I do wish they’d increase the number of domains allowed in custom lenses and the number of lenses you can create.

it's not, there's clearly astroturfing going on, there's two articles by kagi on the front page of hackernews.

There's several examples where Google's SEO has actively made things worse, even before you look at ads. And to be clear, I do agree that advertising has also done massive damage to the web.

All the long, rambling stories you see before recipes? That's just there so the recipes can rank higher.

I can't remember the source, but I also remember a website adding AI generated slop to cater to Google's wishes, and leaving a page to explain to normal users why they did so.

It's also seen when you look at YouTube videos, where now it's basically necessary to have a clickbait thumbnail + title + reminders to like and subscribe.

> I think the web is dead

The web cannot 'die'. Everything and everyone moves online.

Point one: A return to pre-internet days is not likely.

Point two: Walled gardens had their peak moment. The dangers of everybody relying on them for our entire online existence are more than apparent to anybody with a firing neuron (and despite appearances, our species is not entirely inane).

Ergo. The only path is forward, a more sane, less monopolized web. Build it and they will come.

yes, yes, yes and yes!

Thank you! I think I’ll use quick bangs even more: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs

> This is so unusual of HN

Is it? I see paragraphs of testimony from HN users who love anything whether that's a programming language, web framework, etc.

I assume these numbers are heavily skewed by the amount of people doing 0 searches a day.

Lots of people hardly use their webbrowser, spending almost all their time within apps.

YouTube and TikTok have become popular search engines, partly for this reason.

If you only count people for whom paying a monthly subscription for search wouldn't be completely ridiculous, I'd guess these numbers would skyrocket.

> Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)

I'm in a couple of dozen groups on Facebook and they produce interesting and thoughtful content every day.

Of course I wish they were on the open web, but don't blame the network.

Tangent to that, I hadn't realised their Orion browser was mac only, which is a flag of some colour to me. A company that takes privacy seriously ought to be taking Linux or cross platform seriously and if they do not I assume they do not.

The web is very much dead as a matter of fact. I don't think a search engine has he ability to filter out all the LLM garbage that's flooding the internet. Just look at stackoverflow and github. Ever since chatgpt was released, the contributions skyrocketed and the quality dropped off the face of the earth and into a dark oblivion.

> or you have to deal with the added baggage of considering that each search costs you a very real half a cent or whatever.

And one way to "deal with" that is get used to it and forget about it unless you get some surprise hit (which can be avoided with a cap). But you'll have a warm glow feel that it's "fair"

It's not like this is some novel issue average people have never had exposure to (eg, utilities)

Apart from search customizations, I also use the bang searches (a few mine and many from https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs). I also recently switched to ultimate and created a few assistants with system prompts for my various needs (coding, learning chemistry, etc.)

> We will always respect your privacy.

I don't trust "always" in tech, and take its usage as a negative signal -- if you have no problem promising something both of us know will have a 99.9% chance of being broken, I'll devalue other parts of the promise as well. (Incidentally that applies to basically any promise that involves "always", not just in tech.)

Wording aside, I don't think these privacy policies have teeth. If they violate it, at worst they'll lose some users and have a harder time acquiring new users who care about this stuff, which may not be a lot of users.

Therefore, I prefer not giving them easily correlated data in the first place. Sure, my VPN provider knows I'm going to google.com/bing.com/duckduckgo.com/etc., violate away, that's the necessary sacrifice of using the Internet without going full paranoid mode. Thanks to TLS they don't know the content.

It might appear like that from a corporate PR perspective, but from the perspective of a user that's just one of those rare cases where you get a glimpse of honesty, which is just (if not more) as valid as some undefined liability to be the ground for you assessment

I think that the core of the issue isn't "big corporations" but rather the fact that the internet is more accessible than ever, which means that the ratio of users who want to create content for fun, to the users who want to just consume content or create it for monetary reasons, is completely different than years ago.

People are sad over google demise, but we have more tools than before, and easily we can mitigate.

- there are other search engines, like kagi

- we have AI, chatgpt, which some people find use for. I use it to ask general questions about programming problem solving and it often helps me. I do not know every language, and when I needed to write browser extension it saved me a lot of time

- bookmarking software. I wrote my own self-hosted software [1], with search ability. I do not have to 'research' everything I find interesting. Google will not bury inconvenient news anymore, or filter it

I think we need is adapt. When Google entered, Yahoo was not able to change. IBM was not able to change. Old tech is replaced by new solutions. We need to reconsider how to find things online.

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

You can just use !w to search Wikipedia, no need for the "I'm feeling lucky" bang

what do you mean by "the web"? The web is all the people, companies, public sector etc. that are setting up web servers (whether self-hosted, cloud etc. it doesnt matter).

To say that the web is dead means that nobody outside massive social media type sites will still run a server (and SO / github are social media type walled gardens at this point, thats why they get enshittified).

But this development would be absurd as a whole. Mind you search engines as we have come to know them might be dead, but thats of their own making. People need to find / communicate useful, truthful information and sooner or later they will get it.

Another happy Kagi user here, I also love the fact they also give FastGPT as a bonus.

Well, you could consider a 'search engine' to be a searchable curated website directory. You could manually curate this directory and only use scrapers to allow text search on these websites. This will always be a possible option and a way ensure that your search site is good.

Adblockers do not eliminate geekforgeeks in search results.

Seems like a good use-case for zero-knowledge cryptographic tokens.

You could buy an allocation of tokens that would be difficult to link together when used through a large VPN and fingerprint-resistant browser.

We are talking on a website on the web.

Not everything needs to go through a search engine.

>The web is very much dead as a matter of fact. I don't think a search engine has he ability to filter out all the LLM garbage that's flooding the internet.

this presupposes the argument that for the web to have value then you must have a search engine to allow you to find things of worth on the web.

Which argument you have not made but only taken as a given.

>Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention?

different Search engines with different rules and so forth would lessen the benefit of the O part, because it seems unlikely you could efficiently optimize for every particular algorithm and ruleset.

Perhaps SEO is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine and also made worse by that search engine not really giving a shit about making its search work that well for years and years but only about how many ads they could push at people and how much they could charge for those ads.

That's an interesting idea.

While I don't have the answer, what we might consider is the incentives that come with each model.

In the current model, the incentives are clear. Google's incentive was to rent-seek all usefulness out of web search, privileging advertisement and their own profitability over usefulness.

I am not sure if a search engine beholden to the government would be ideal. Governments do have their own sets of interests (legitimate or otherwise) that may at times go against users.

Web search is in the end a piece of public infrastructure, used by billions across the world, very much subject to the Tragedy of the Commons.

Perhaps it should be some sort of nonprofit, as other projects are (Linux Foundation comes to mind, being a successful one).

> faced with a combative user

the user from your line: "I really want to stress that I don't have anything against you or kagi :) just trying to be constructive."

Is combative that he was explaining what GDPR was while while other side was insisting on confidentially incorrect view?

I... Actually think that is an extremely poor answer from Kagi's founder, one that would give me pause before trusting them with personal data.

The most charitable reading there is that they clearly don't understand what PII even is, why it is important, and therefore that they would handle it properly.

> the web is dead [posted 3 hours ago on the web]

m-hm.

How do you square your idea that genai sucks with the fact that people are paying and using it, and not just for seo spam?

Pessimists live in a world built by optimists

I've been doing the same but using the browser shortcut to select a search engine. If I start with "k " it searches with Kagi, with "g " it's Google, etc.

I've been using Kagi only for non-trivial searches, so the starter plan has been enough. For very local searches (mainly about a local business or finding where to buy a product) I use Google. And most of my searches are just looking up the url to a website (like searching "steam"), so any search engine will do (I default to Duckduckgo for that).

To provide some counterweight to all the overwhelmingly positive reviews:

I've used kagi for 6 months and have over 7500 searches with them. It mostly works, but there are a few downsides compared to Google:

- The latency is a lot higher than google, taking over a second to display any results. - The results are often not as relevant, I have to frequently retry my search in Google. - The results for anything local (I'm not in the US) are abysmal. Searching for anything in my city instead only gives me results for the city's history.

Still, I persist in using Kagi, mainly because it's not Google and I want them to succeed. The results are frequently good enough for me to stay with them.

Being paid, I don't think Kagi will ever "gain traction" in this way. Which is great for its users.

Would you mind sharing links to those groups? (unless they are local to your community/region/etc.)

I figure if 90% of everything is crap, https://medium.com/luminasticity/90-crap-48e4c79419a9 then if the amount of available content has doubled in a decade, that is probably just too much crap to find the good stuff.

While you can already sign to Kagi with disposable email and pay with crypto, we will also be bringing privacy pass (blind token) support soon. We already have a working proof of concept.

More info here https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-anonymous-searches...

Offering another perspective: A company that takes privacy seriously creates their web browser as a zero telemetry and with 'pay for your browser' business model so there is no incentive whatsoever to mine user data (Orion is both of these, and unique in the browser world as such).

And a company that is 100% supported by user funding (which Kagi is) can only do so much with resources available, which is the reason we have to pick our battles (read more about Windows/Linux/Android versions for Orion https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l... ) People often criticize us for doing too much (eg link in the parent of parent comment) but we also at the same time do get critique that we are doing too little :) If Kagi is not doing something, believe me, it is not for the lack of will or ambition. (Kagi CEO here)

If you’re using chatGPT, you can add a prompt (I’ve set it in my rules) to “fact check from other websites” when I’m asking it things I’m not an expert in. It then provides some links which I then open up. I’ve found that to be a lot more efficient than searching from google straight up especially with very specific questions I sometimes query.

Half the websites it shows are those I wouldn’t have found on google and are relatively high signal for what I’m looking for (including very niche blogs from experts from the field).

What? My niche is already dominated by the same SEO spammers as Google on Kagi and always has been. Kagi just takes google results... I swear some of you guys it's like we're not even using the same software.

I love my Kagi account, and will continue to pay. It is too US-centric, something I've been asked to report in HN comments (I have), and something that continues to be a problem.

But as with all of these things, I'm paying to no longer be the product. That's the value for me, and so "it not working exactly as I expect 100% of the time" is actually a small price worth paying.

Generally speaking, I find the quality of results usually on a par with Google.

Care enough to give an example or report to kagifeedback.org so we can check what is going on?

It's very well done-- really props to the Kagi marketing team, (you have a duckduckgo-style marketing book for sure to sell) but if you read a lot of hackernews you see the same stupid pattern over and over again in these Kagi threads with these testimonials like you said and becomes obvious.

Especially if you have used kagi

Kagi's mission is to humanize the web and it is boosting creators (small, personal blogs and websites) in search results:

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

How would you design a system where creators are paid in a search engine? We have always had an idea of profit share for showing up in results but we would need to reach about 10M members for this to be more than few cents a month. (Kagi CEO here)

A key difference is that you’re actually the customer here. I am much more comfortable telling my doctor everything about my health, for example; than Gmail with all my emails.

It’s a personal choice at the end of the day; and I aspire for a world where there is genuine choice of companies. For the time being, I’m supporting competition by using Kagi (and I get a better search engine!)

We do, just email support@kagi.com. Please do not spread disinformation.

You can use multiple search engines. I use Kagi, Bing, and occasionally Yandex.

> and the number of lenses you can create.

I didn't know we had such limitation. Have you considered creating a feature request on kagifeedback.org? This sounds like an easy fix.

SEO spam is correlated with ads. Google dominates web advertising. Google’s interests are aligned with SEO spammers, as long as it’s not so terrible you switch to another search engine or stop searching.

My best answer is try your 100 free trial searches and compare the search experience. Kagi has every incentive to create a superior search experience or you do not pay. For Kagi, every customer matters.

The open web as a concept doesn’t really make sense anymore, at least for written content.

Since by definition it will need to be open to the majority of the world’s population, regardless of writing skill, but the bottom half of writers are already indistinguishable from cutting edge LLM output.

And no one can install some sort of worldwide identity verification system, or it wouldn’t be ‘open’ anymore.

I mentioned my issue with the latency last time Kagi was posted, I would love it if they could bring it to be a bit closer to Google

Thanks Andrea!

Sure, my niche is entertainment, so let's search anything in the international music scene and check out the rank orderings...

Lo and behold it is exactly the same as Google pagerank.

I can say that I’m a 10x dev since I use Kagi because it gives me good results most of the time at work. And when I accidentally switch back to other engines, I’m always disappointed.

But the truth is that subscribers are happy because it’s the only decent alternative out there. Google/DDG/Bing all suck. SearX may be good and free but I haven’t tried it yet.

There are only few products which I believe are genuinely good and I am happy to be a paying customer. Next to Intellij, Kagi is one of these products.

I’m glad to hear you have updated your policy.

How about an exact example so that we are on the same page? Thanks.

That was always our policy.

The linked article has screenshots showing that it was not

The comparison with a house does not work, it relies on a misapplication of the word "use". In the context of a house, "use" refers to ownership. You receive the benefits (use) of ownership regardless of your presence. You basically pay for the inability for others to live on the property.

Sure, I'll give you a recent example that I'm #1 in on both Google and Kagi:

2NE1 ages

I can go through this list and see you are exactly the same, except you leave up more spam.

Just one example of thousands I've looked at.

That speaks to the relative intrusiveness of those ads, and the quality of the ads as well. Newspaper advertising was generally well distributed so that it didn't interfere with reading, and its black and white on paper look wasn't jarring.

Magazine ads, at least in specialized pubs like computer magazines, were actually useful. As a kid, I subscribed to Dragon Magazine because I played D&D, and the ads were half the fun for me.

You'd think that with the hyper-targeting of online ads, that we'd be happy with them, too. But the actual products behind them are usually low quality spam. And we've lost a lot of discoverability from all this targeting. Sometimes it's good to see things that aren't aimed directly at your immediate demographic.

I would beg to disagree. The screenshots show that I think there is very little information to be downloaded to begin with because Kagi does not collect it, which is true. That does not mean that our policy is to ignore GDPR requests, that is a ridiculous inference to make.

The article you point to is a perception of one person, unfortunately sharing screenshots out of context to create a negative narrative and exploiting a fact that we run a 100% transparent business where you can ask the CEO literally anything directly.

Our policies have always and will belong in kagi.com/privacy and not on random websites. And it is hard enough to do what Kagi does even without misinformation shared in bad faith, so I'd ask you to please not do that going forward.

Here is why Kagi exists:

https://dkb.blog/p/kagi-interview

I find it super useful for listing all the places in my country where I can buy X, orders by price. Doing a more generic search for a product tends to give results heavily dominated by sites in the US. Also really useful when combined with image search. I can take a picture of a cool lamp and quickly find all the places where I can buy a similar lamp.

Did I misunderstand you when you said Kagi results are same as Google results and you really meant that just result #1 happens to match? For your query I can see there is a difference already at result #2, #3 etc..

Also if you believe this is wrong you should submit search quality feedback to kagifeedback.org

We get a lot of feedback but it is mostly for technical queries that we usually address:

https://kagifeedback.org/t/search-quality

If you provide details what went wrong in kagi results for this query (and what sites should rank #1, #2... in your opinion) we can take a look. With search quality because it is such a broad space, what does not get reported, does not get looked at and addressed.

Why waste that time and mental effort to save literal pennies? Isn't your limited time alive on this incredible earth worth more? This is like driving the whole afternoon around town to find the cheapest gas.

I have signed up off and on. For me, the starter is just a tad to few searches per month. If I had 400 I would most likely just pay the $5 out of support for the team as I am also hoping to see Orion do better (bitwarden issue)

I have some months where I search for stuff I already know. Like I goto url bar and just type imdb which then initiates a search. I know the dang url but am lazy lol.

I wish the team tons of luck, I monitor the pricing page monthly usually, just hoping to see a small uptick in starter limits as unlimited is just not my use case. $8.00 for unlimited and again, I would sign up just to support them.

I agree with your assessment that maybe this is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine.

But I would argue one big search engine is unavoidable since no one would want to use the second best search engine.

Google search didn’t come the best because the other service like mail map and YouTube. So breaking up Google does nothing to stop google search from being the monopoly it is today.

How would you define “SEO garbage”. Who has the power to decide what belongs in the list.

I would guess just the incentive for any website to become top of the search results would likely create the outcome of today’s SEO landscape.

Any kind of knowledge jobs. I mean, what job relies on having a computer with an office suite? None, because you can use paper and pencil?

Let's say you're a plumber working at a job site where your company is digging up and re-doing lines. You come across a piece of material from the old contractor that you don't recognize, so you look up the name and code printed on the material... on a search engine.

> company that takes privacy seriously ought to be taking Linux or cross platform seriously

Going out on a limb, but guessing that the chief hurdle a company like Kagi faces is willingness to pay. I'm going to guess the 'this is a great product, but I just can't bring myself to pay more than 20¢ per year for search' crowd is crowded in Linux. (I may be totally wrong on this!)

> from the perspective of a user that's just one of those rare cases where you get a glimpse of honesty

User asked for data download. Company said there isn't any. User said that isn't GDPR compliant, which is nonsense. Company gave correct, snotty response.

I get it. I've been pissed off at companies before, too, and basically engaged in a support conversation to get something ambiguous in writing that I could use to cost them time and money in New York, California, Texas or the EU. (Big regulatory organiations, some of which love fodder with which to justify their existence.)

User was going down a rabbit hole. Kagi followed them there. They shouldn't have responded to that thread after it went into territory that on HN would have been flagged and in real life been settled with a glare.

> Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality

As someone who uses Orion as their daily driver, I'll admit I'm somewhat confused by why Kagi isn't staying mission focussed. That said, it may be the case that they're a premium company for a small, well-defined niche. In that case, broadening the service offering makes sense--it's what Apple did.

If different search engines optimized for different niches, there would be an user base for "second best" search engines. For example, nothing beats Bing for porn search.

I agree, I started this way to test it out and just kept doing it. Although it saves 65€/year, not pennies. And I'm in Europe so I don't earn nearly as much as the average American engineer.

I would still select the search engine for a number of queries though. I find Google better for local stuff, use WolframAlpha for computations, and Perplexity for LLM answers.

I get that the scale of this problem is dazzling but think that fundamentally you do not have a solution if you are copying pagerank (even adding upvotes etc.) for queries that haven't been screened by your staff.

I think you need to take a good hard look at what makes for shitty content and build some parameters off that. And if you had to go off pagerank (to begin with) I would be trying stuff like adding hidden penalties to popular CMSes, boosting reddit/HN content, and following SEO trends just to thwart them. I would categorize websites by expertise so queries related to korea do not rank pages from the hindustantimes. When you search for air filters, you should probably get that housefresh team and not forbes etc. The upvote system you have is moving in the right direction but even that will need to be fortified with anti-seoer measures.

I would try to create real EEAT standards that cannot be gamed without massive investments.

It's too late to undo the damage that the Danny Sullivans of the world have done but maybe can save something here.

Google Maps is the undisputed king for local results. Not even Apple has any chance of contending that throne, much less Kagi. My prediction is that maps will become the core of Google's search business quite soon.

With being paid it's golden target for various "influencers" because it's users already did auto segmentation and assigned themselves to group of very wealthy individuals and ones eager to pay for internet services.

Except that Google is complicit and directly benefits of the current state of their search engine, no matter how awful it is to actually use it.

All we need is a search quality report as I indicated before and our team will look into it. The fact that there is no or little spam for other things Kagi users care about, is a testiment to our determination to deal with it.

That's not at all the same.

Are you talking about the quality of the prose or about the content of writing? An LLM can only act on information that has been put into it by people, while a real person can create new and important information – even a person with low literal or oratory skills.

For local searches (meaning in your city or even more local) I find Google better.

For national searches, I find Kagi good at long as you specify the country. That’s one of my favorite features actually, you can leave it international by default, and add “!es” to search in Spain.

After your post I tried to find dotnet groups in facebook, but all I found is spam and almost no humans, which again reminded me about dead internet theory. Could you please recommend some groups?

Both.

How do you differentiate between say 20 real people with low skills and LLM output lightly edited by a high skilled individual?

I think there may be a way forward for the internet. Why isn't hacker news being strangled by SEO spam for example? I think the way forward is a much smaller internet predicated on tight-knit communities approving everything that's shared. I don't know how this could scale but maybe that's the point, it must stay small to succeed.

If I could differentiate between it, then what the real person wrote or said would still have a separate value, even if the prose was bad.

Consider a normal criminal court case. Most witnesses don't know how to express themselves well neither in the written nor spoken word. Their testimony still holds value and gives important information.

But you can’t differentiate it… unless you have some method that you can share?

Of course we can separate fact from fiction if we need: By checking up things ourselves. There is only 1 reality and only 1 truth.

What power? The power to push a github commit? That’s up to each blocklist owner.

There is no one list to rule them all. Tons of people curate their own block lists and make them available. It’s entirely up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to use that most align with your views on SEO garbage. You can override them with your own preferences too, as I do all the time with NextDNS. Like I said, all the infrastructure to support this is already in place in Kagi, they just need to implement the support for external lists.

For example, here is a list of the crowdsourced blocklists available in uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Filter-list-licenses

It is against the spirit of this forum to assume bad faith.

I notice that your GDPR policy is not discussed on the policy page you provided. Here’s an archive taken just now: https://archive.ph/9bnhY

Why wouldn’t the fake output mimic real human output after some light editing?

And it’s not like a live video call, where a few seconds delay would be noticeable.

There would still be a real human being, just as smart as you, behind the LLM, but pretending to be say 20 different lower skilled people.

> How do you find the documentation in the first place?

Typically I’ll go directly to the online documentation from one of my bookmarks. Sometimes I’ll have a local version. I did use to just type the thing I was looking for into the google search bar in Firefox, but once the results started being for ridiculous articles (or similar), rather than the actual documentation I started using bookmarks. Which was sort of why I was curious.

> the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together

If you have the time I’d love to see an example of some random person on the internet giving you a better introduction into using a language library than the documentation itself. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

That being said, I think we simply work on very different things. I’m not sure what searching for an error in my code would help me achieve that reading the error output wouldn’t. I suspect this is because you may be stringing together a lot of frameworks and possibly higher level external libraries, that you’re perhaps not too familiar with? Which would also explain why the documentation you have to work with isn’t always very good.

Yes it would mimic real human output. That's why we have to verify if the subject matter is important. Knowing who to trust or not is not easy, if we have to be sure we have to do some work.

I still don’t get how this helps you differentiate between them… or do you mean to assume both are genuine human outputs regardless, if the information proves to be genuinely true?

Kagi even mentions in their FAQ that you’ll have better luck on google for local stuff than you would on Kagi

You have to select your country as the default region to get better results, the "International" region is not as good as it was before, and leans very heavily to English.

The good part is that after you've selected your country as the region, you still get good results in English or other languages.

> Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?

I've said this before (on HN) and I'll say it again: a search engine that refuses to index sites containing advertisements absolutely kills off SEO.

What's the point of getting to the top of the search results if you are unable to monetise it?

The only way forward is to refuse to index sites with advertisements. Google will obviously not do this (and, in fact, to me it looks like they do the reverse - downrank non-monetised content - because it's in their best interest to serve sites with ads).

> but once the results started being for ridiculous articles (or similar), rather than the actual documentation I started using bookmarks. Which was sort of why I was curious.

Still works for me. When I search for "Angular signal documentation" I get to the right place (They just changed domain for the brand new version, but .. yeah) That said I also use an ad blocker.

Currently google still works for me.

> If you have the time I’d love to see an example of some random person on the internet giving you a better introduction into using a language library than the documentation itself. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Can't remember a good example right now. Most recent trouble that I search for was the good old classic of centering a div in CSS :) I think I used a mixture of this side [1] and an LLM ( Github co pilot)

Uh, now I found a small example. When I want to know how to sort a stream in java. When I search for "java 17 stream" go to the official documentation and search for sort I get: [2] more or less it just says "Stream<T> sorted(Comparator<? super T> comparator)"

But when I google "java stream sort" and the first stack overflow contains a great example: [3] or a bit short answer on the same page [4] Those code examples just work better for my brain :)

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/csS/css_align.asp [2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base... [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/53183266 [4] https://stackoverflow.com/a/40518343

If the information proves to be true, what does it matter?

> What's the point of getting to the top of the search results if you are unable to monetise it?

Promoting your product/service, see brand astroturfing in Reddit.

> Promoting your product/service, see brand astroturfing in Reddit.

But ... that's the point, is it not? Someone searching for "FOO" will find all those sites who optimised for selling FOO.

That's an improvement over finding the top 10 results all optimised on FOO but delivering ads to make money, not FOO.

Because your interlocutors would be 20 people that don’t exist… and would take up 20x more of your time than a single low skilled individual.

Yes, even scoundrels may supply to you true information for some period of time but eventually they will try to obtain their actual goals…

> There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these.

There would be fewer of these queries if people had a financial incentive to learn to use bookmarks and the address bar.

You get features like manual personalization of results, bangs, redirects, paywall warnings, WolframAlpha integration, etc.

Thanks for sharing. I guess Google is still king for some things. Most official documentations I work with are good on their own, I think the C# (really .Net in general) is perhaps the hardest to traverse. But that is mostly because there is so much of it for so many versions, and here a search engine typically doesn’t do much better than their own search.

I use LLMs, almost exclusively as fancy auto-complete because I’ve never had a computation result from them that wasn’t wrong. I think I would frankly ask one before I use Google though. I used ChatGPT for a recipe the other day. For baking very basic bread which I sort of know how to do, or at least well enough to spot a terrible recipe even though I can’t do it without one. The three results I clicked on Google were worse than the chat bot, though to be fair, two of them were just advertisements and probably written by an LLM.