Comment by o_m
14 hours ago
I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it.
Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
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I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies.
However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
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If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
- start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.
> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures.
But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.
The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.
A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.
It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)
This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.
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Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.
Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.
The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.
kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.
of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere
I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
> although I heard there's a Linux version now?
Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
All my hopes lay with Ladybird now