Comment by halo18
7 months ago
Doesn't seem to be doing great? The example search I got on their home page was 'best headphones' which pretty immediately surfaces http://www.quietheadphones.com/ - which is openly for sale, and also covered in affiliate links.
A bit farther down the page is a 'best headphones for 2020' article.
And this is the example result set they push on the home page to a potential buyer.
You guys pay for this thing?
What are you comparing it against? Do you actually have a better alternative or just having a bad day?
The fact that you tried to pick on 2 of the results for such a generic keyword, show that it's miles ahead of mainstream search engines which are filled with SEO spam.
I tried that same search on Google, duckduckgo, bing, brave, yandex, even yahoo and needless to say the results were pretty much all SEO spam, list-style keywords farming from generic websites such as NYTimes (how tf is NYTimes an authoritive source on purchasing headphones?). Whereas in Kagi you get a wide range of helpful results focused around reviews/enthusiasts/forums, here are some of the results: youtube video reviews, reddit discussion, discussions on sound design forums, a Quora qusetion, the headphones page on best buy, amazon, walmart, etc.
And as the other comment said, Kagi also has life-saving features that empower the user to have control over the search results [0]. As far as I know the only weak point in Kagi (at the moment) is doing more local-focused searches.
Regardless of the quality of results (which mind you, are already quite superior), it'd be still worth paying for if only to support its ad-less search model and help nurture it. Prove that it's a viable model for the sake of the web. For everyone sake. It's a great effort for that alone. Combine both the model and high-quality results and it's the best in class with no one even close.
[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...
Google, with blacklisted domains. I wish an actual better alt existed.
I didn't 'try to pick on' - I pointed out two garbage results in a query that they literally push you to from the home page as examples for potential customers. If those results aren't doing what people claim (not highlighting seo spam) then I'm not really left with any faith that the queries they don't elevate to their home page will be better.
> how tf is NYTimes an authoritive source on purchasing headphones?
Acqui-hire. So what happened was in around 2010 or so a voice-over artist named Lauren Dragan who I think was already dabbling in professional tech journalism, wanted to write about headphones and microphones since she was getting really opinionated about them in her VO work.
So she contributed an article to “The Wirecutter,” which was trying to be like Tom’s and Engadget (I think they then dropped “the” from their name? Which makes one want to abbreviate as WC which is just tragic). I think it was just a freelance article on “audiophile headphones”...?
Well, the audiophile community online was growing etc. and this proved to be remarkably successful because it gave the audiophiles some professional validation, right? “I work in audio booths, I have to listen super closely, I know what I am talking about.” So it made money for The Wirecutter and they pitched her on “if we just bought you dozens of headphones online would you take notes and make a rec” and she's been doing stuff like that for them ever since.
Wirecutter broadened its focus to a lot of other topics, usually not with the same reliability—it really depends on the reviewer’s biases and such, and Lauren’s VO/audiophile bias of “I want my headphones to have a very flat EQ to match what's on the track, it's more important that they don't croak at higher volumes...” was something she could communicate well about in terms of sibilant highs or feeling too much or too little bass. Vs “we looked at air purifiers and, uh, they purify air!” ...
Meanwhile NYT was trying to grow their online presence as newspaper sales die... So they bought up Wirecutter, as a sort of “new journalism,” a “we wanted to get into this anyway, and it's easier if we don't try to build up the network effects ourselves but just take a site’s traffic who is already successful.” So yeah, they aqui-hired Wirecutter and put all their stuff on their domain and it kinda sucks now, but some of that were trends that were already beginning before they were acquired and there's still usually some decent data hiding in the “the competition” section of every “WC” article.