this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Thank you for bringing up Kagi, I had never heard of it before. An intriguing idea for sure and I am not averse to paying for searches, but as a serial Google-fu practitioner $10/month for 1000 searches (1.5c per search after) seems quite steep to me. Some days I swear that would last me 24 hours at most. I need to start tracking that I think.
I do however applaud the seeming transparency on their website. It may or may not be for me, but if they really plan to operate how they lay out on their website, it truly is a breath of fresh air and I wish them luck.
Just seeing this for the first time also, but one of the features they list is it looks like you can "block or boost" domains in your search results. I miss when Google let you block domains for results, so this would be a killer feature for me. I don't mind paying, but just the pricing seems a bit odd. I could see myself paying $5 per month for unlimited searches, not sure if 300 or 1000 is enough, $25 per month for unlimited is crazy.
After using a search engine with this functionality, I quickly realised how many domains I never wanted to see again, and how many I valued. Google has been promoting garbage domains for so many years now because they pay better than the quality sites. The algorithm goes both ways, as in, "show me more," and, "show me less." To make the bad ones disappear, you'd need a notepad next to your Google window with a list of dozens of domains you don't like to append to every query you make. Unfortunately Google doesn't offer you the ability to positively bias domains because they'd earn less. So you'll still see the first few pages of garbage, depending on your search.
Comparing search engines is not easy. I went down the rabbit hole and concluded Kagi is the best right now. A search engine has one primary function. Everything else is icing. That is to find the best result as fast as possible. As their incentive is to find you the best result, not the result which pays Google the most. I find relevant results more often, and much less spam. That's the value proposition.
They also have great features like the ability to block and rank domains, and a kind of filter feature which focuses on certain kinds of information you're looking for.
As for ranking, no search engine uses humans to rank results. There are billions more pages going online every day. It would take the entire world's population working on nothing but that to accomplish. So the magic is in the algorithm and how data sources are combined. As above, Kagi's motivation is to provide good results, and I think they're succeeding. I'm sure Google could provide amazing results to us, but that's not profitable. Of course, humans review the algorithms and test them and improve them, and Kagi appears very good at this.
FYI they have a $5 tier which includes 300 searches a month, and this is enough to cover most users. You might be surprised if you actually track your habits over time. You could start on that tier and upgrade if it's insufficient.
Google is the reason recipe websites are notoriously bad. They try so hard to keep you on the website long enough for ads to work and for Google to think you like staying at that website and so on.
So that's why we have 20 paragraphs of life stories before each recipe with 10 add shoved in between them, 6 adds on the left and on the right of the page, ads at the top, and so on. You spend so long trying to find the recipe, it's a win for all the ads that you're staying on.
And it's a shame because obviously the smaller blogs don't WANT to do that but they have to in order to have any chance to compete with major conglomerate corporate recipe websites.
I don't know if I'm ready for kagi yet... But it's tempting and definitely something I'm considering.
It is SHOCKINGLY bad to search for recipes now. To the degree I don't even bother or I use ChatGPT now. Google is going to have their lunch eaten by others if this keeps up.
I thought I make a ton of searches too (and yeah apparently I do vs normal internet user) but when I tracked my usage it turned out to be around 30-40 searches / day. So, it's not that bad. ATM I still have Ecosia as the default search engine and when it fails to turn up good results I rerun the search with Kagi (which is indeed quite a bit better). So far I seem to use Kagi like 1-3 times a day so it's not that bad.