Why pay for a search engine

>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.

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.

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

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’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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.