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Comment by kerkeslager

7 months ago

I'm not convinced it's actually that complicated.

Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive.

The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.

I could see Kagi being able to sidestep maybe 95% of the 'arms race'.

But even the remainder will trip them up every now and then.

If these periods last only a few minutes it probably won't matter but if it lasts a few days or more then it's very likely to impact customer retention.