Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.
I used to get no results all the time, and it was very useful! Unfortunately, that seems to be happening less frequently for me. In verbatim mode with personalized results off, I noticed Kagi not respecting quotes for phrases. Google will ignore my search parameters intended to reduce results for free, so... :-/
If you have specific examples, I think kagi team would like to hear about, I would suggest that you open post them in support website [1] and I'm sure they will look into the details.
Yeah more and more Kagi seems to be trying to give me the same trash results Google did while ignoring parts of my search parameters.
I have never asked for or even wanted "personalized" results, because on Kagi and everywhere else, personalized is shorthand for "very very poor guesses". It's very frustrating.
Turning personalization off just turns off custom redirects and any website ranking adjustments you've made. That's really the only personalization we have for results.
Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query. There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.
Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.
>Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for.
I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.
> But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want.
This has never been the case. If it can’t find your title, it’ll display “titles similar to”, right at the head part of your search. No 20 seconds of confirmation needed.
I actually prefer Netflix’ way because if I search for “Demolition Man” and they don’t have it, it might be that I’m in the mood for any <2000s action schlok, and who says I already know about “Escape From New York”?
I just tried searching in browser and Netflix says nothing like "titles similar to".
I searched for "Ted Lasso".
It has grey text "More to explore:", white text "Ted Lasso" and then thumbnail list of different shows, and it's literally just thumbnails, you can't even Ctrl + F and you have to read all the titles in different colored and stylised fonts.
It's as if it is intentionally built in such a way to make it hard to understand that it's really not there.
And in TV it says nothing, just gives you the thumbnails and since it takes longer to type you must check after each character whether one of the thumbnails happens to be what you are searching for.
I'm not home rn so I can't test it, but I'm quite sure that netflix says something like "we don't have X, these titles are similar" or smth like that. Maybe I just have an old version in my TV idk.
I've seen both. Sometimes it says it doesn't have it, other times it just displays results like it does have it even though it doesn't. You might be onto something, it's probably the difference between the web interface and app interface (on various devices).
> There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.
With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies.
But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress.
On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that.
Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress.
Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for.
Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.
No. It is the single most important reason why I pay for Kagi.
It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or features or something.
But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is a bug and will be dealt with.)
I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my search.
Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality of the search results.
So many times I'll often search something on Kagi, get no results, and tag on the "!g" at the end to see what would happen. Of course, I get a ton of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for. I love Kagi.
Kagi uses results from almost every search engine in the world plus its own results. If you can not find something on Kagi, it is likely you will not be able to find it anywhere.
I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.
This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such
if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.
I won't, because I have to actually scroll through those results to realize that they couldn't find what I want. It's like asking for where the apples are and then being led to an aisle with bananas, melons and pears. I'd much rather just be told that they have no apples.
Returning random unrelated garbage does not mean you have a higher chance of finding what you're looking for, it just means you're going to waste time sifting through useless noise.
And that is time you don't spend on refining your query, so it makes you actually less effective at searching if you consider people do not have infinite time.
You have a higher chance of finding something. I think you actually have a lower chance of finding what you want if it returns irrelevant results, because then you have to spend time manually evaluate and decide that the results are irrelevant before making another query.
Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.
> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing
WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job!
I have an account with a username that is spelled very similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the username!
I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure
> Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.
No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to. For a search engine that is to show me what it has about the query I input. If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.
> No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to.
That's what I said. "then evaluate the query anyway." I should have added "original" to that statement
> If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.
I'm saying I don't want similarity cutoffs. Most FTS methods involve a similarity score, I'm saying I don't want only results with > 0.1 similarity. I want all of them that were returned.
I'm NOT saying it should somehow inject results that didn't originate from the original FTS query.
It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row" and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"
> Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.
Google does this, and they suck at it, unless you just spelled a word wrong. Do a niche or very specific query, for which Google has no answer and it will, without fail, remove the most relevant keyword and give you a bunch of junk results.
Have you never copied and pasted an error code into Google and have it return zero or only 1 or 2 results?
It’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because Google decided two words out of 10 in your query were the only ones that matter.
I actually have had this happen and it's infuriating.
I've had queries of copy+pasted errors with zero results, but playing around with it a bit just to find a github result that was only like two words off.
> it’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because
Surely the similarity to the one on github would still have it ranked on the first page?
> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.
Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not showing anything.
I strongly disagree on this. If a search with no results costs them about the same amount of compute as one with results, then satisfying that requirement would give them a commercial incentive to lie to you about whether they have any good results for you, and to waste your time scrolling through bad results. Your time doing so is almost certainly worth more than what the search itself cost you.
Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don’t know a single service that packs that many features for the that price nowadays.
I hope they don't stray too far of course with other features. Been using Kagi continuously since August, and I've developed a pattern where I still jump to Google when I need to buy stuff, get latest news and find local (national, or EU) content.
It's great for technical lookup, and answers, but for general search usage it's not there yet. I'd love to give actionable feedback on how they could improve, but can't figure out exactly what's missing on that department. It could just as well be a small crawled index.
I switched to Kagi almost two years ago. I have an experience opposite to yours. I never ever use the google bang. I did in the beginning, when a query wouldn't give me results, only to get worse, more verbose, equally useless results from Google. Quickly learned that if Kagi can't answer a query, Google will fare no better (and will waste my time with junk).
I'll note that to get local news, I do have to switch the region selector from "International" to "Portugal". Kagi doesn't have Google's behaviour of using my IP location. Which is good. Getting international results from Google is a struggle.
Been using kagi for awhile, also in Portugal. Google shopping is the one thing that Kagi can't beat them at yet. If i'm looking to buy a product online not from amazon it's still the best option.
I don't know what you're searching for, but I'm also from EU and I'm able to use Kagi for everything, including content from my own country. Sometimes I might have to change the country or language filter, but I've never had a situation where something was available on Google but wasn't available on Kagi. Nowadays, I'm only using Google for some quick answers, like showing the score of a football match or the population of a country. Kagi doesn't seem to support quick answers for these queries yet, although I have seen quick answers for weather, calculations and shipping and flight tracking. So I'm sure more quick answers will be added eventually.
Kagi has just also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so it is now much better at answering factual questions such as population of a country or timezone. Wofram Alpha has always been more accurate than Google on these questions.
Showing the score of a football match, and doing online shopping, are the two remaining use cases I have for google. My usage of Google has now gone down. 95%. Kagi is simply better.
Wolfram Alpha seems to work quite well from my small tests, even with recent events. However, I don't really like to read an answer that seems like it's a person talking, I would rather just see the data in a big size like on Google. That's just a nitpick though, it's definitely useful. Thanks for telling me.
One example is that if I try to lookup a specific product I'd like to buy, I'm going to find more results on Google. Also (with the country filter enabled, Romania in my case), I still get results from US, Canada and other countries (which in practice is a hassle with delivery), but even if that weren't the issue, the pages are not in Romanian either to have a reason to show up in my results.
I didn’t realize they supported full conversations with my choice of model. They need to advertise this better! I just upgraded to ultimate and can cancel my ChatGPT subscription. Love that I can give more support to Kagi _and save money_ VS my pro plan+ChatGPT.
Kagi assistant is technically still in beta, gathering feedback. We are not satisfied with the experince yet and are working on an overhaul, planning to officially launch it in March. This is why it is a bit 'hidden' from view, but yet available.
It depends on the feature/product. They have custom models for some things (and honestly FastGPT and their summarizer gives pretty good results), but when it says it uses GPT4, it really does.
I’m sure it is, but terrible relations doesn’t make people forget a language and we’re only speaking to the number who know the language. I’ve no doubt a generation from now that number will be a lot lower if things continue on this path.
It’s not “declining” but rather being actively replaced and rejected by the population. When your nation suffers brutal aggression perpetrated by the neighbor - it makes it no longer fashionable to speak the language of the aggressor. The fact that Russia also denies that Ukraine and Ukrainians are even a real nation and culture distinct from Russia fuels the sentiment too.
not anecdotal, I speak both languages. The trend now is to reject everything russian even though you do understand it, no way around this. And yes, the “kitchen language” for many ukrainians, especially east part, remained russian. However, on public or outside ppl try their best to speak Ukrainian. The younger generation will be more like the one in the baltic counties or Georgia. Understand russian but rather speak their native language.
But you may recall that in 2014, a few political directives regarding culture and language use have been made by the Rada, and then a few political decisions were made in the Kremlin, and then everything turned to shit (To put it simply).
It's easy to do a lot in 11 years when you start banning foreign-language media, stop using a language for government services, stop teaching it, etc, etc.
February 2014 Moscow occupied Crimea.
12.04.2014 Moscow occupied Slovyansk.
Name "few political directives" in 2014 before Moscow invasion. Ukraine actions are direct response to Moscow aggression. People don't want to be occupied by Moscow like Donetsk, Luhansk. Life is awful there, million fled from occupation. That's why changes were supported by majority of Ukrainians.
Still occupants language was learned in schools, media could use it though eventually quotas set to use Ukrainian too. And officials continued using it.
Ukraine policies fought discrimination of Ukrainian in Ukraine. Discrimination that stems from centuries of occupation by Moscow. In 2016 state stated at least 60% TV should be on Ukrainian. Only in 2017 education in schools was switched from occupants language to Ukrainian. Since 2019 Ukrainian should be used in services unless requested otherwise by customer. People switch to Ukrainian voluntarily, state provides means.
Ukraine is a democratic state, check out Euromaidan. Stop pretending like changes is anything but result of Moscow agression.
"Name "few political directives" in 2014 before Moscow invasion."
"On February 23, 2014, the second day after the flight of Viktor Yanukovich, while in a parliamentary session, a deputy from the Batkivshchyna party, Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, moved to include in the agenda a bill to repeal the 2012 law "On the principles of the state language policy". <...> The bill would have made Ukrainian the sole state language at all levels.
<...>
However, the move to repeal the 2012 law "On the principles of the state language policy" provoked negative reactions in Crimea and in some regions of Southern and Eastern Ukraine. It became one of the topics of the protests against the new government approved by the parliament after the flight of Viktor Yanukovich." [0]
And more generally: Ukrainization Post-1991: Independent Ukraine. [1]
"check out Euromaidan."
“The mob, whatever it is, has no legitimacy before the sovereign people expressing themselves through its elected representatives.” [2]
There was a bit of a coup against one of the branches of government on Feb 2014, it's odd that it's missing from your timeline, given that it kind of precipitated everything else that followed.
But perhaps that's how you think democracies work - when you don't like the government, you bring your friends to wear funny hats and storm the capitol, and get a new one... Should Americans do that the next time an unpopular politician ends up heading the executive? It certainly speeds up the transfer of power, even if it drops the 'peaceful' aspect of it...
Euromaidan was response to violent dispersal of protesters. Government escalated, eventually killed hundred of citizens. Do you claim Americans would do nothing if killed in hundreds? No persecution, approved by "unpopular politician", passed laws on dictatorship (16.01.2014).
Moscow invaded Ukraine (Crimea) 20.02.2014. Yanukovych fled 21.02.2014. Occupation does not just "happen", it was staged. Ukrainians felt that as betrayal, seen as occupants population cheared in support. That hurts, breaks cultural ties. In a few months Moscow invaded east of Ukraine while spreading lies. Lies obvious for Ukraine citizens, believed by occupants population.
> Do you claim Americans would do nothing if killed in hundreds?
They'd blame the people who died. At least, that's how Kent State went down (And the students there weren't even trying to overthrow the government).
There's a process for peaceful transfer of power. Some countries have good processes for this, some have bad ones, some are in between. As far as I'm aware, though, no country has a process of 'Enough people storm the capitol' for determining when that happens.
When you don't follow the permitted process, this compromises a democracy's legitimacy. Now, obviously the coup was only carried out against the executive, not the legislature, so the resulting government was partially legitimate - at least, the legislature remained representative of the public (And the issue was resolved in the subsequent election).
But that aside, just because the coup only finished on the 21st, and the invasion happened on the 20th, doesn't mean that the weeks of the revolution leading up to it weren't intimately related to the start of the war.
Peaceful transfer of power is not possible in Belarus or Russian Federation. Ukrainians have no guns, democracy is not stable, judiciary and special forces are not independent, media influenced by state and oligarchs. Euromaidan saved Ukraine from Belarus fate.
Moscow invasion staged not in preceding weeks but in years. Putin revealed intentions in 2007, occupied Georgia in 2008.
I never understood why they keep manufacturing these platform locked monstrosities. I bet no Linux distro will properly support it.
Once I made a mistake and bought MS Surface Book, which now is a magnesium brick that doesn't last a few hours without a power socket. I'd rather bought an intel based desktop for that money, at least it would age better.
I find it strange to seriously consider any intel laptop these days for portable work.
More than 20 years passed and nothing really changed. What makes you think it will be different now. It's a "Tango" part 2 all over again. Except now, the ship has long sailed.
They didn't say it would be different now, they're just reminding people that Walter is here on HN so to try to be respectful and realize that he's a human being too. Unlike most here, he's attached his real identity to this project, so drive by anonymous pot shots would be inappropriate.
He pretty much derailed the D forum forking thread into remotely related tech discussion. This was weird to observe tbo, in the end my take is that he doesn't seem to bother much and would rather continue living in his version of the story.
It's worth pointing out that Walter is one of two co-maintainers of the language. The other has not said anything at all. On the other hand, I'm not sure what there is to say if they're not going to make any changes in the process.
I'm far more concerned about community development of libraries, IDE support, and the beginner experience (especially on Windows) than I am about changes to the language, which is already pretty good. As a Linux user working on top of C libraries, the experience is incredible. That's not the case for everyone.
Aren‘t these connected? Its about the contribution culture. If there is so much pain that it led to a language fork, what IDE and quality of life improvements from a shrinking community can we talk about? When I started with D several years ago, there were a few meetups and active contributors. These ppl now have left D for Rust and now we have this fork. Does it look like there is success ahead? I would say it looks more like the last desperate effort to change things.
I view them as two separate issues. On the one side, there are the complaints about language changes. It's hard to convince Walter to change the language, and it's hard to contribute to the compiler and/or standard library (those are the complaints, true or not).
Then there are problems for users of the language not having enough libraries and a sub-par IDE experience (again, true or not). Go and Rust built communities of programmers that aggressively used the language and made their work available to others. I don't see any reason we couldn't have more of that with the language as it currently stands. Adam certainly had no trouble knocking out hundreds of thousands of lines of nice libraries. Edit: And Ilya doing all his good work with Mir.
The first is a long-term problem. We'll see the effects ten years from now. The second makes it hard to have a reason to use the language right now (largely for anyone that doesn't want to write scripts or interact with C libraries). That's most of what concerns me.
I recognize that pattern of behavior because I've done something similar at times myself. Or at least, in my pattern it was this: what's done is done, confronting it will just create a lot more drama for me, and I don't feel confident in wading into a fraught social situation anyway. I'm much more in my element working on technical problems. So I let the social thing go and go work on the technical thing. This is not always a healthy thing to do, but to me it's not in the least weird.
That being said, never assume that no response from someone means someone doesn't care. I felt awful when dealing with situations like this. If this were my project, I would probably be extremely frustrated and more than a little bummed, whether or not I thought the fork was understandable.
Those are not things that are constructive to air in public, though, and I think it is a mark of leadership that Walter's dialogue remains as calm and polite through all of that thread as he usually is.
> That being said, never assume that no response from someone means someone doesn't care. I felt awful when dealing with situations like this. If this were my project, I would probably be extremely frustrated and more than a little bummed, whether or not I thought the fork was understandable.
Contrariwise, I read through that forum thread and some of the linked github issues, and it wouldn't be shocking if he were happy to see some of those people walk away. It would not be politic for him to say so.
Just a couple of weeks ago, and this is a perfect moment to share, a colleague told me how he wanted to reschedule a flight and in a hurry clicked on one of the first Google provided links (ads) and got redirected to a scam site which was identical to the one his airline uses. In the end, he had to suspend his credit card and lost money. He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him.
But you are right, ppl tend to justify their choices more, especially when they paid for them ;) Still, no harm knowing there is a good alternative out there I guess.
Google, Instagram and Facebook are so infested with scam ads that protecting yourself against those platforms is necessary. How is it possible that there is no lawsuit against all the rampant scam ads on these platforms? Alphabet's and Meta's main source of income in 2023 is blatant crimes.
Subscribed for a year after a free trial. Returns more relevant results than Bing, snappy interface and just overall gives you a good impression. They have a fast GPT powered article summarizer, which I find extremely useful when exploring library documentation. Not something that a plain ChatGPT cannot do, of course, but Kagi is just faster.
You should as well check out their lightweight webkit based browser, Orion (MacOS only).
or you could simply be supported by a billion revenue company that pays your bill if you code "their custom version of C". No need to do social analytics. D could totally be that language but it was never driven by big enough companies and had a specific early years history which obscured it pretty well from pragmatists crowd.
Not sure that's true. One of the first adopters of D in production was Facebook, because one of the engineers (Andrei Alexandrescu) worked there and evangelised it heavily internally. Many projects were written in D. But eventually the cost of maintaining support for one more language in production didn't make sense. D didn't solve problems that C++ (another supported language at Facebook) didn't. The D code was rewritten. It's not that Big Tech didn't adopt it. It's that it didn't show enough value in time.
Those days D2 was probably not ready to be adopted in prod anyway and Andrei worked as a research scientist on a specific problem so I don't think he was on "that" level of corporate influence. He then left FB to work fully on D.
When you read about D and why it is not popular, one thing to keep in mind, is that there was D1 for a long time and then came D2 and this process was not as smooth as it could be. The dev progress was and stays slow but steady. D is in a better place today than it was 3 years ago for example.
It's safe to say his salary is high enough that Rob Pike would have done the same thing. Important to note that he left his D leadership position years before moving to NVidia and he's still involved with the language.
Internal document at Meta written to explain why Meta only officially supported 3 languages at the time for server side development - Hack, C++ and Python. Rust is supported as well now, bringing the total number to 4 (https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/progra...). The post explained why D was used at one point, but the use was phased out.
I no longer have access, but if a Meta employee is reading this, I'm referring to a post that called Alexandrescu a "whirlwind of energy" in terms of how he personally encouraged and enabled teams to adopt D for projects.
Hmm, yeah, I never saw any internal stuff (I'm just a random person on the internet), but my impression from public info is they had a few isolated individuals experiment with it on small projects but the company never formally adopted it or supported it for anything serious.
