I know that everybody here likes to bash on Google but i tried ddg, bing, qwant, brave search, all the other niche ones (searx, swisscows, etc...), and i found Google to be still better than all of them, especially for technical stuff.
I thought the same, and still get annoyed when I get "no results" back, but almost every time when I then try to use Google I get nothing but totally inapplicable results I had to sort thru. Google made the news a number of years ago about this, they found people really don't like to see "no results", so Google silently drop terms, even if they're quoted, when it can't find enough results otherwise.
Primarily I've found the source of issues like this are the lack of indexing anymore, and it's not just Kagi. A lot of tech discussions now have their own Forums or Discourse that are poorly promoted and (seem to?) have a robots.txt that says not to index them. I often have to manually go to those sites to run searches and find results from years ago. Also a lot of prohects keep moving away from Forums or equivalent, and using Discord, Matrix, or IRC, none of which end up searchable. No one is going to use those the same way no one is going to call you on the phone, and everyone just has to keep asking the sme questions if they do use it, so I always take that as "we don't support this software/product anymore" and rarely expect to find anything technical about it.
I've been paying for Kagi for the last few months and I guess the compliment I could give is: I have it on some machines but not the other and I don't really notice? when I'm on the kagi one other than ... no ads and no ads-ranked results
Which, frankly, I'm willing to pay for. I think it's a good product.
No ads, privacy of searches, and ability to filter junk sites is why I pay. I think the google results can be good but they are drowned out in this noise and constant reminder I’m seeking help from a malevolent agent.
I mean, it's something I'd consider. I have a little ARM SBC here that I run Plex and Immich etc on. But Kagi makes it very easy for a not terrible price -- not much more than the monthly power bill for a little server -- and they also do more than just grab from other search services as they _do_ have their own crawler (unclear how much it's used for results?) and have LLM stuff which isn't terrible.
Also as a former Google employee... I dig the idea of contributing funds for some competition in this space.
How much maintenance does running a private instance take, and would you say it should be fine to run from your own IP? I've been using Kagi for ages, but I wouldn't mind a fallback that does better than DDG.
Not much? I mean, I set it up initially to use as an LLM search tool for agents. That required me to use a specific version of SearXNG due to a JSON bug. My exact docker command is here:
I run this from the directory where I want to store the data on windows (hence the weird PWD thing). I also use cloudflare tunnels and have the internet facing website, https://sear.mydomain.com, pointed at http//localhost:9017. I set up all my cloudflare tunnels with email authentication. My token lasts a month (but is configurable to whatever time frame you like). My traffic is strictly mine, so it seems to be working ok.
Its basically no maintenance after this setup. I can mess with all the settings (except results format) from the main interface.
Because I can configure exactly which search engines to index, no ads, use it for my local LLM's for search, better image search (maybe not better, but totally different results), a bazzillion tweaks and mods. I don't have to pay Kagi for the same results or keep track of how many searches I have left.
product made by monopoly company worth $2T is better than small startups with less than 30 employees. shocker. the reason people are supporting Kagi is because we see the trend with google quality and we want alternatives, even if they are currently worse. it's called activist consumerism. it's why we supported AMD when they were at the brink of bankruptcy, and now look at their CPUs and look at intel.
I am 100% in agreement, between SearXNG and Google I can find darn near anything. Kagi was ok, it seems to really prefer reddit for the types of things I was searching for. I was also super conscious about the number of searches I had left in my plan. F-that. I type random stuff into the omnibar all day. Leaving Kagi as just enough friction to go to kagi, type a search, etc. that I didn't want to deal with it.
No, I believe it is true because it’s harder to find what I was looking for and it’s clear that the algorithm is skewed for political reasons and likely also economic reasons.
> I believe it is true because it’s harder to find what I was looking for
Yes, because there’s more stuff and different stuff than there used to be.
What makes you so sure the old algorithm would’ve worked as well with more and different stuff to sift through? Other than the fact that you really want to believe it.
> it’s clear that the algorithm is skewed for political reasons and likely also economic reasons
I agree but I also think it is also a google problem specifically because their other products (most notable maps) started giving me worse and worse routing over the last several years and it is very bad now, like they are purposely sending me out of my way to pass some store they think I will impulse stop and shop in or something. I ended up switching to organic maps, which is missing a ton of stuff like store/business locatiosn in my area but if the thing is in there i almost always get better routing that google maps.
