32 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
32 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
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X-Date: 2023-08-27T00:55:00Z
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X-Note-Id: adbfb0ca-907e-4f61-b930-b7235dde341f
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Subject: Kagi Search: a decent Google alternative
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X-Slug: kagi_a_google_alternative
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A few months ago I've found the [Kagi Search Engine](https://kagi.com). It is a commercial
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product, that costs around $25 per month at the time of this article.
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The reason why I initially became interested is mainly because I would like there to be
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an alternative to the ad-supported model of web search. If you think about it -- regular
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users are not Google's customers. It's actually the advertisers. This means that Google
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is not interested in making search results better for you, or to help you find high-quality
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answers.
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When you search for product reviews, or programming-related advice, you'd often land at
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content farms that have very low-signal content, often biased towards their own advertisers.
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What initially tipped the scale for me is that Kagi, in contrast to Google, allows you to
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down-rank certain domains or classes of websites, so that your results are better tailored
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to you. In addition, they try to tune the base search algorithm to prioritize higher quality
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content. So I decided to give it a try, and subscribed for a few months.
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To be honest, I didn't have high expectations. I used alternative search engines before,
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and they all were pretty underwhelming. DuckDuckGo didn't last a week being my default
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search engine, mainly due to poor relevance of the results.
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Surprisingly, this was not the case for Kagi. I've just looked at the billing history, and
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seems like I've been using it for the last 9 months. The number of searches where I fall
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back to Google is almost zero.
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If you're interested in a user-friendly search engine -- give it a try.
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