Comment by BobbyTables2
11 hours ago
For me, Google search results have gotten so poor (and other engines aren’t any better), that I’d rather just ask an online LLM for what I’m looking for.
I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist).
I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cite links to what they summarized. Sometimes the tone of the summary is slightly wrong “algorithm X was designed for Y” (when I know it wasn’t) but it’s otherwise very close to the mark.
What does amaze me, is the LLM seems to “understand” my question with very little context — I would have to give a human many more details about goals/intent.
I know damn LLMs are not capable of thought and are just a glorified search engine, but they do it well. Perhaps all my education made me little more…
I used to mock Sci-Fi movies where characters lazily dictated questions to the computer and it gave high quality answers.
We’re living in that world now.
Kagi is better. Kagi is damn good, as much a revelation as the Google of old. Not free, though.
As a user and fan of kagi, the problem with kagi is that it reveals how badly degraded the web is.
The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.
When you run a website where 80% of users are ad-blocking, and less than 0.5% donate, you quickly realize why these centralized websites (which turned apps to force ads) are the only survivors.
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I've used Kagi for a few years but it's gotten significantly worse for me the last year or so. I'm curious if anyone else has seen the same thing happen. I'll search for something and usually see a bunch of barely relevant SEO sites. Avoiding this is why I started paying for Kagi in the first place, so it's been disappointing to see. Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) seems to be better at finding content written by humans rather than SEO specialists, but it's not a silver bullet (for example, the last time I checked they didn't index non-English sites).
Google is still very good, just get rid of evil stuff on their homepage to get the old google.
https://www.google.com/search?&udm=web&q=hackernews
Been using Kagi search for more than a year. Been happy. I use GPT/et al for the little things (e.g. unit conversions, rather than search for and then try to use an enshittified web page from 10 years ago). But for actual real tech leaning content, Kagi has been pretty good.
A lot of unit conversions are just built into Kagi (and Google!). "Searching" for "10nzd in usd" gives me a price, "10kg in lb" gives me a converted unit, etc.
Yep, really advanced Google searches were never that good. LLM, yeah, it halucinates, it's never spot on but as sure as heck it knows what I'm trying to ask. It doesn't give me arborists if I say something like "list tree searches".
> Google search results have gotten so poor (and other engines aren’t any better...
Ah, but they are! Kagi is light years better than Google, and is a worthy replacement. You do have to pay for it, but I get my money's worth.