1y ago

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

1y ago

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

pluralistic.net /2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/

Technology @beehaw.org

mozz @mbin.grits.dev

1y ago

pluralistic.net /2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/

5 comments

this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it: https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:
When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.
In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product
Heckin' accusation if true. Everything I've heard up to this point is SEO and bots are primarily to blame for how bad Google has gotten.
I quite like using Kagi, what I really lack though is localised results based on the query. If I am looking for a restaurant in my area, Google knows to suggest me restaurants that have a similar name that are close to me. Kagi will show me something in Germany while I am in Canada. Searching businesses in Google is a much better experience than on Kagi, with reviews and maps integration all on the same page. I also don't like that when I enter an address in the search box, there is no map widget for a quick access to the fullscreen map.
Is there any place I should post this feedback for it to be taken into account? These features are what's really making Google search shine in my opinion, and having these would make me more at ease about paying 10$ per month for a search engine.
- They have attempted to make this but you have to be rather specific to trigger local results. "Chinese takeaway" will not trigger it for instance but "Chinese takeaway near me" will.
  Improving this is hard but a possibility I see would be to have certain categories of search default to region-local (as in: country, general region) or location-specifc (town, borough).
  Searches on the topic of shopping, taxes, bureaucracy etc. should automatically make results local.
  Searches on the topic of restaurants, shops, leasure, transport etc. should be location-specific.
  Determining these topics would be the hard part though; especially given that it'd have to happen in multiple languages.
- Is there any place I should post this feedback for it to be taken into account?
  Kagi Search feedback forum. They're also quite active on Discord, but prefer feature requests and bugs to be tracked on their forum.
  Ref: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/discord-server.html
  
  Good to know, thanks, I'll search if I see something similar posted tomorrow