I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).
All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
Will you stop using Russian indexes (Yandex) and stop paying money to Russia? That is a deciding factor in me re-subscribing (I was a subscriber, but your stubborn refusal to stop buying things from Russia made me cancel).
If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.
What's the point in stopping paying money to Russia if Kagi is incorporated in Palo Alto, so it's paying money and will continue to do so to a country causing no less troubles than Russia?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Much of the HN audience lives in the US, giving money to the US is unavoidable in life. But in return we do have the democratic ability to try to alter the behavior of the country.
It still makes sense to avoid giving money to other bad actors who are acting in direct opposition to your home country, and whom you have no control over, when you can.
Then one should ask for Kagi to move to a country that doesn't use taxes to invade other countries, and stop supporting them, instead of just asking to "stop paying money to Russia". Because fixing two wrongs is better than just fixing one, right? And I want to believe that living in the US doesn't make you agree with your country's foreign policy (which doesn't seem to change significantly even with your democratic ability to try to alter it) specially if you're worried about Russia.
This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity
It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?". Where is my ethically pure search engine that only has ethically pure sources?
Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.
Maybe not that ridiculous, since one can guess that the underlying thoughts are more about geostrategic concerns than favorite color of the day.
The United States (I guess that's also the premise here, I'm not USA citizen myself) has notable rivalries with several countries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. These nations are often considered adversaries due to various geopolitical tensions and conflicts.
I guess that Kahi is doing nothing illegal, so if people have that kind of question, it feels legitimate to reply with a demand of what is the extend this patriotism stance is going beyond the judicial requirements.
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
It was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
Same to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
Using third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy.
Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.
Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.
Astroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer.
Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.
I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.
I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).
What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.
Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
Local business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.
Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.
I'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox.
We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge
We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries
Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”.
Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.
Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
This looks very promising. Thank you for investing time in this.
Assuming it indexes everything locally and falls back to traditional search engines if none found, how do you feel about adding a shared middle layer? A layer that simply indexes all the canonical data that doesn't have any personal info. This way, the contributors can automatically contribute the pages they index - building a shared search engine over time! The whole thing can work without a crawler of its own (under appropriate license so people can trust it)
This is an awesome idea in theory, I'd love to go to this direction, but it's a surprisingly complex topic. I find it hard to come up with an implementation that can guarantee both result quality (no malicious actors) and user privacy.
I'd appreciate any kind of help designing such system. We are on IRC/Discord/Github/Codeberg.
It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.
It isn't supported yet, but it's a good idea and quite simple to implement it. I've added it to the issue tracker: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 . Thanks for the suggestion.
Thank you for making Searx, I use it as the web search tool MCP for local models and it works very well, so that not only big companies have the power to show or hide results now.
I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.
Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus except to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.
I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.
That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.
I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.
What they’ll do is embed ads in the text, which will also be unblockable. I imagine the future will entail running an LLM to remove the ads that another LLM generated :P
This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human.
I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.
I wonder if Google is aware of its identity crisis? Even long after "don't be evil", Google was still "we earn so much from a healthy web that making the web a healthy one is almost a straight forward company interest". Now web content is actively relegated to training input and LLM chat replacing delegating to the source, that web that Google made so much money of, as healthy or not one considered it to be, will soon be gone. Could be either at Google, complete lack of awareness or desperate "we can't stop it but we might still try to profit a little from what we can't stop"
Have you bothered to check @nekzn’s comment history? Attacking new people here is going to ensure we’re left with only bots. This is one of the reasons why HN has the guidelines that you’re repeatedly breaking. If you do suspect a bot after at least taking the ten seconds to check their comment history, the best thing you can do is not engage.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
There is no insinuation. The astroturfing objectively occurs and that it does so is an inherent strain on the credibility of engagement like that of the GP.
they are 100% implying the poster is astroturfing,
easier to accuse someone of astroturfing than accept that different people can have different opinions. especially an opinion as world-shaking as not minding ai overviews.
this sort of accusation is becoming pretty common, and eventually going to ensure that the only new users actually are bots, because any potentially new humans that want to sign up are going to get fed up with the llm/astroturfing accusations.
"This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing "
that is basically a direct accusation of astroturfing, man. no weaseling your way out of it. you're saying their opinion does not hold weight because it is likely to be llm-enabled astroturfing. there is no other interpretation.
if you're gonna break the rules and accuse someone of something, at least stand by it. wet-noodle accusations are even worse.
(p.s., sort of funny to see someone with a post-llm account accuse other post-llm accounts of being an llm!)
If I give you a piece of titanium and tell you a piece of lead with equivalent volume would have greater mass I have in no way said the density of titanium is zero. You would be an imbecile to come to that conclusion.
Then take it from my account that is years old, as I also hold the same opinion that the AI overview is very useful to me as like the parent it usually contains exactly the information I need.
My account is older than yours by a decade and I also like the AI overview more often than not, or rather, I instinctively know when to skip it depending on my query.
I think the greater issue in this discussion is that the TechCrunch author, like most blogger/journalists are facing a complete erasure of their business model and have a vested interest at opposing this
It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…
Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall"
"Yeah, it sounds like a very a common thing back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.
It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible.
I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cost far too much in compute.
> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse
Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.
A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.
I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.
We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.
Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.
Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.
Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.
So you are not actually searching for anything on web. This is more about using google as a web search engine, something it could do maybe a decade ago.
I do like it - however, I find my self using google less and less every day. I lean much more toward agents as my primary search tool for work related items.
For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites.
I disagree with “sometimes”. But anyway, the gargantuan difference is that with websites you can get a feel for their credibility. As a simple example, documentation on MDN is miles more trustworthy that your average SEO spam blog, and you can see this as soon as you enter the page. Yes, some scammers are craftier than other, but the signal is there.
With LLMs, all answers get the same weight.
And asking for sources is not reliable. They are too often made up or contradict what the page says.
> and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it.
And what will you do when most posts on the web are just junk SEO spam to trick LLMs into telling you what they want? It’s not like that’s hard to do, even.
Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.
I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.
This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.
I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.
Wondering if anyone considered the idea of saving search stubs and using local LLM as agents with it. Could cut the search engine completely from the loop.
The idea is simple: collect search stubs, short documents with routing information about a topic. When you want to search something your agent finds the right stub and looks up where on the web to go find that information. Your information is always fresh, while a search stub changes slowly, over years, because the entry points tend to be more stable.
If we use a 4B local model and another 4GB for search stubs it could be portable enough to download and install. As you use it you also generate your own search stubs on top of the generic package. High quality search stubs can be generated with any frontier LLM piggy backing on its agentic search capabilities.
A stub could contain links to news feeds, high quality hubs, search engines and of course, actual websites.
While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")!
Just this morning I was helplessly looking at r/ecosia for a way to get rid of the new AI tab they've added (there's no way). Signed up for Uruky, let's see how it fares.
As of two weeks ago, you can get a couple of hours for unlimited (rate-limited) testing, just go to top up your account (or try to search) and click the PoW local and private captcha to get that.
No, but you do get the source code after 12 months of being a paying customer (signing an NDA), though we're considering releasing the code under AGPLv3 if we reach 300 monthly active accounts (we just reached 100 last week) before next year.
I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so O disabled it and never looked back.
You are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: <insert your query here>
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
Pre-2010 Google search didn't use https by default, almost no one did besides specific cases, like processing payment. And even then, only the critical part was https, the rest, like images was plain http. So, for a true pre-2010 experience, you want http:// links.
Post-2010 Google played an important role in pushing for https. From boosting https search results, to Chrome being annoying to unencrypted connections, to sponsoring Let's Encrypt, to forcing HSTS on their TLDs.
I kind of miss http, it was a time when the web was a public thing, a place for sharing, not for keeping secrets. But to be fair that's just nostalgia, the modern (commercial) web that generalized encryption enabled is so useful and convenient that I can't imagine going back.
I had to laugh as I read this, but it feels so appropriate to the current state.
I will say off topic that, speaking to an early googler, there is actually documentation of meetings where they discussed what "don't be evil" meant and decided actual business options they should and should not pursue. It was not just a motto or a "code of conduct", but meant as and used to justify consequential actions.
Brave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well.
And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.
Kagi is the only search engine that actually provides me with results comparable to plain Google. I do not need to adapt my searches or learn some sort of syntax to avoid pinterest or other offenders. DDG, Bing & Qwant are just not good enough for my use.
My search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
I am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.
I switched to DDG a long time ago (maybe close to a decade now?). There's plenty of reasons to dislike Google, but my main reason for switching was better quality results and a faster, simpler UI.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
Also a long-time DDG user here, the lack of AI chat by default at the top of searches is great, if i wanted to use AI I wouldn't be opening a search engine.
Sad, because Google's homepage was once a paragon of bloat-free design. While their competitors enshittified, Google kept just giving good results fast without a lot of junk. They became the 90+% market share leader, and enshittified thereafter.
I used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value
I pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important.
There’s so much content getting buried now.
If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it.
The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
Brave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.
Brave is such a horrible brand. I don't think they'll succeed, but they're definitely trying to do MS-style EEE. Browser, search engine, and security (nefariously called "ad blockers" by the people that don't want users fully controlling traffic and code that reached and runs on their machines) should forever be separate entities.
I've been using Brave for years and have no complaints. Their browser's security is better than Google Chrome thanks to them disabling a lot of the stuff that Google ships and keeping their own stuff disabled unless I opt in. Brave browser is private by default (unlike Firefox)[1], and it doesn't try to force me to accept an EULA or terms of service just to use it.
Their search engine isn't the best but none of the search engines I use are, not even Google.
So to me, they've already succeeded. Can you elaborate on the issues that make you think they haven't?
Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms.
That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
Everyone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.
When is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
Google hasn't been useful to me as a general search engine for a good while.
I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time).
The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
Over the past 10 years I've been using general search as little as ever. For 95% of my requests I know the website that will resolve my request. DuckDuckGo bangs are a great feature for landing on a specific website with your search: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Not sure how Brave is. I'm using its API on OpenClaw, and so far my experience with OpenClaw has been satisfactory — though search is only one part of the overall quality.
I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
I really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.
The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.
Not the greatest example because they both do find me, but here's an example of where Kagi is supposed to be better at precisely this, but isn't. Search without quotes for daniel drucker mclean.
That's me, and Google correctly on the first page finds ONLY pages related to me.
Kagi pollutes the page with many results for my doppelgänger, the much more famous Daniel J Drucker of the University of Toronto, even though none of those results mention mclean.
That is literally the thing Kagi was supposed to be better at - actually respecting your search terms instead of thinking it knows better!
Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
This comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!"
Let me correct.
Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.
We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
you did a lot of wind up for a "slightly worse" when half the first page is either AI or advertisement; they ditch pure keyword matching with "feels like you want this" matching which works for serving more ad to more eyeballs for longer. For bland searches, sure, its 'slightly worse' but for the ability to find verbatim results necessary to drill down into a subject it's absolutely worthless.
For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.
This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
Been using DDG for about 8 years instead of Google search. Occasionally use google image search for matching an uploaded image. Use google maps for any local searches (credit to where credit is due its a superior map product).
(What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them.
DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches?
Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)
Are we both blocking Google ads and scrolling past the AI summary?
Their business practices are just the worst. But are the first 10 blue links they show you usually bad? (Like you know that one of those 10 should be the exact thing you want, so you decide to rely on another search engine instead, & the alternative search succeeds where Google failed)
Have read this comment before multiple times, even a year or two ago. Hence my “unreasonable” demand for screenshots if someone has the minutes to script it. - Hmm, really should be a live site to track over time... Can make that and Show [Three People On] HN!
(Google could give better results to those unloyal to them, as one example, so testing needed! We could be getting wildly different results or just have starkly different usage tendencies, there’s just no way I could disagree with so many of y’all on something this basic assuming no DDG astroturfing or anything unless we’re looking at things differently one way or another)
Waiting for your screenshots. Do the legwork yourself first.
And obviously there is no astroturfing here from DDG. That you could have seen from a tiny look at my profile. I have a pretty public persona on the internet.
In my experience, DDG brings up relevant results, maybe a bit more so than Google does.
But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites and gives me 0 or 1 result while Google gives me 5-10 results. Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though.
> But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites
Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).
DDG catches the fallout.
> Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though
Years ago I remember Google asking the person lodging a similar complaint for an example of a query because they found there was always an explanation. Noticed this no longer holds as of perhaps a few months ago if I’m not mistaken. Even this* fails:
+”omg just tell me no results if this exact string isn’t present come on I even put the plus sign”
Infantilizing for us, maybe optimizing for the 99.5% in reality (understandable, annoying)
*edit, made up example based on what I believe I’ve seen this year
edit:
> DDG brings up relevant results
Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun? Spellchecking e.g. brand names, new/fad current event topics is apparently really hard (IIRC Bing not perfect here either?)
> Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).
DDG was never good at quotation marks so I forgot to mention it also sucks at these.
> Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun?
I haven't but I'd really prefer 2 options:
1) I may mispel thinks quote freqwently but gimme any sorta relevent result
2) I know what I am searching for. Maybe add a "Did you mean X?" link but still show me the results containing the misspellings. If I search for "motorolla" or "mottorolla" (misspellings for "Motorola") in quotes, DDG gives me 1 incomplete page for that misspelling. Google (StartPage) gives me mostly misspellings but with "Motorola" included in some results. Without the quotes both engines treat me as a moron who can't type. If I search for
"mottorolla" phone 2026
DDG still shows me "mottorolla", not "motorolla" while Google has decided I am indeed someone who can barely type even though I've put in quotes.
What are your metrics for good? I’ve exclusively used ddg for years and have zero issues. You ask for an outrageous level of proof- you prove it’s not good.
Whattttttt this is a few bucks of request from some open source model, just been lazy
Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.
> "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch"
I would rather not.
Edit: clarifying that this is not strictly due to ads. I think the article itself is an ad judging by the slug 'six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google....'. Usually such articles include a plug. I am not disabling adblocker to read that plug
On one hand browsing web is completely impossible without adblocker. On the other hand the only sites that can survive without any ad revenue are product spam blogs that participate in "Amazon PartnerNet" and similar affiliate programs. Well, unless Google AI starts stripping referral link or replacing them with own one (Honey/Brave style).
Do we even need search engine when there are just few hundreds of huge sites left?
For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.
Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.
The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex but this list has many spiders and engines that traverse the web.
I don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed.
Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
searxng works well but it's not perfect. I tried qwant for a bit but results were mediocre at best. Kagi, I've shared my views on why I'd never use it. I wouldn't use it even if they paid me to use it in fact. For the time being I'm swapping between searxng and ecosia, the latter has been giving me the best results for just about anything(and I hope their indexer partnership with qwant pays off). As for google - even before the change, results were absolute crap, not a recent thing but since around 2020, the quality of the result hit rock bottom and they have been hard at work, drilling into the rock ever since.
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
It did for me, I can no longer find any GitHub project. Duck duck returns them on first try. Absolutely ridiculous, couldn't believe my eyes when I finally realized that. I get a ton of ads and product placements on first couple pages. What I search for is literally, word for word, name of the repository and it's not ambiguous.
Thats interesting, because for me, I cant find anything on github, through github search and need to resort to google. Google search is super super terrible for other things tho :/
And honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.
Yes, significantly, but not recently. It can't search anymore. Like literally, it can't. You cannot reach a web page you know exists, like you used to.
Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.
I think the endgame is you go to Google or your favorite subscription based LLM for knowledge instead of visiting websites. Ads can continue living within LLM search results and it can even become a marketplace where you order within the LLM environment.
I feel like this is a scene from a movie where a character goes "what are you talking about? Look around us, it's already gone" (idk why i am picturing Mark Whalberg for some reason).
But it's all just reddit, medium, twitter (twitter pages, w/e those blog things are).
I'm surprised that Perplexity isn't mentioned in the article or on HN. It has replaced Google for all but the most trivial queries. It runs circles around Google for finding anything niche or underspecified.
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
I use Perplexity heavily as my general research clerk, and it's great at that, but I find trivial queries still make up a majority of my search activity. Waiting for an AI response to each of them would be an enormous time sink.
I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
Yandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful.
The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, but it now appears to block anyone who blocks google tracking. But this is where ChatGPT does an excellent job of generating lists of technical papers and reviews and it interprets natural language queries with no problems. The kind of complex logical search queries google used to support (what, 15 years ago?) can be written without strict logical language (! & | ()) and all that. Pubmed isn’t bad for cross-checking and simple searches. And if you put sci-hub into the yandex.com/search box and click on yandex ai it tends to tell you where the current active sci-hub sites are, which is handy.
Honest question: isn't AI Google better than the Standard Google of the past 2 years?
I mean all the privacy concerns are still there, but the current product is just better than the SEO SPAM-ridded result page we used to have.
I appear to be one of the rare few that doesn’t have any trouble - or even see much difference - in the ‘new’ google (non-) search.
Maybe this is a frog in boiling water situation but… it’s just the same search as it’s always been, there’s just now a chunk of Gemini up top, that you take with a grain of salt, same way you’d take the promoted results. If you don’t like it, Adblock it.
When I ask myself honestly, has google search gotten worse over the past 25+ years? My answer is… ehhhhhh… not really?
Other people have always claimed google was ‘getting worse’ and I just don’t see why it should be any more true now than it was then. Isn’t this just the latest round of whinging?
Gee at least 15 years too late for this article? How many articles did I read from tech media over the years drilling into people that you could never take down Google because everyone says "Google it" instead of "do a web search"? It's too embedded and consumer choice is stupid because Google it lol!*
This is because of the Google I/O (developer conference) announcements this week. They're about to overhaul their regular search and make it even more garbage, to the point - so it sounds - of it being more just a Gemini chatbot interface and less an actual search engine, ergo: not Google anymore.
It’s crazy that a company like Google, full of very talented people, is making a decision that is so obviously bad. I’m convinced Silicon Valley is so deep in the AI hype machine that these guys have completely lost touch with reality and have no one left to ground them.
> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"
People think Google removing "Don't be evil" means Google somewhat implicitly told everyone they'll be evil from now on. That doesn't make much sense. It was likely a marketing decision since having "evil" in your motto is not good even if you explicitly state "DON'T BE" before it. Just like if I write in my profile text "I'm not a pedo", you'll think "this guy is likely a pedo"
I would have loved to be in the room when this decision was made, but my guess is that they decided that it was better to face some subtle nerd backlash now rather than having this quoted at the start of countless congressional hearings over the next decade.
What about a distributed way of doing search, does that exist?
Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search.
Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search.
Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now.
We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website.
A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach:
* copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB.
* privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these.
* spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one
* moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc..
* how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
Thank you. “ What if you took Startpage and made it simpler? The search engine &udm=14 is named for the string of characters it appends to all of your searches on Google.
If you add &udm=14 to your Google searches, you’ll get the same Google results, only without an AI overview. But doing that yourself after every search is pretty annoying. That’s why &udm=14 does it for you automatically.” (Sorry i am in a country where text only websites like Hackernews are one of the few places that load within 5 seconds instead of minutes)
What's your monthly usage, aprox.? Do you use Kagi for getting to pages you know of but doesn't want to type the whole URL for, eg. typing "Hacker news" in the URL bar instead of "news.ycombinator.com"?
Just like parent poster, there's a few things I pay for, and those are Kagi and Fastmail :)
Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.
I think the comparison is that they just seem to give a shit about putting out a very good product. Filter and snooze automatically is probably my favorite unique capability but it’s less one thing than the overall ethos and execution.
Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
It annoys me to no end that Safari only gives you a limited set of search engines to pick from. Changing it to anything else requires a cumbersome trick of catching a search URL and redirecting to something else, which not only stops you from using that particular search engine, it makes every search slower you’re sending your query to two entities instead of one.
Seeing as Apple has reportedly partnered with Google to power their LLM offering, I don’t expect that to change soon. I hope I am wrong.
`&udm=14` just sends you to the "web" tab of search, which does remove the AI summary, but you also lose the widgets that google puts at the top of search, if you like those (weather, calculator, games, etc). one of my friends recently found that you can add a short invalid filter parameter like `&tbs=1` and it'll give you the main search with no AI but with those widgets if they would normally appear. you do still get the "People also ask" section, but that's probably easily removed with an extension or user script
I don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines. They are a huge step above traditional ones like google. So what that google uses LLM's as a supplementary tool for no cost? This really looks like some ideological thing evoking visceral emotions.
If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close.
This one is also stupid:
> But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money?
> That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews.
UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free.
----
Edit: getting downvoted
Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere.
From the article:
> many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot
This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people.
Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue.
Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them.
In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications.
I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??"
I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.
Google's explicit plan is to never let users go to the websites. They scrape the website and have their AI summarize it.
If nobody goes to the websites, those websites no longer get traffic or revinue. In very short order there will be no more websites from which to scrape, and the AI will no longer have new data to summarize.
I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).
All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
Will you stop using Russian indexes (Yandex) and stop paying money to Russia? That is a deciding factor in me re-subscribing (I was a subscriber, but your stubborn refusal to stop buying things from Russia made me cancel).
yandex provides objectively better results for many things than google/ddg/bing
If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.
Then you have to stop using search engines.
What's the point in stopping paying money to Russia if Kagi is incorporated in Palo Alto, so it's paying money and will continue to do so to a country causing no less troubles than Russia?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Much of the HN audience lives in the US, giving money to the US is unavoidable in life. But in return we do have the democratic ability to try to alter the behavior of the country.
It still makes sense to avoid giving money to other bad actors who are acting in direct opposition to your home country, and whom you have no control over, when you can.
Then one should ask for Kagi to move to a country that doesn't use taxes to invade other countries, and stop supporting them, instead of just asking to "stop paying money to Russia". Because fixing two wrongs is better than just fixing one, right? And I want to believe that living in the US doesn't make you agree with your country's foreign policy (which doesn't seem to change significantly even with your democratic ability to try to alter it) specially if you're worried about Russia.
Why that ability didn't result in less loss of lives in middle East for such a long time.
A lot more one could argue.
What other countries do you want nothing to do with?
North Korea, Eritrea, a few others but Russia is the only one in the list getting paid for search indexes.
This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity
It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?". Where is my ethically pure search engine that only has ethically pure sources?
Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.
Maybe not that ridiculous, since one can guess that the underlying thoughts are more about geostrategic concerns than favorite color of the day.
The United States (I guess that's also the premise here, I'm not USA citizen myself) has notable rivalries with several countries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. These nations are often considered adversaries due to various geopolitical tensions and conflicts.
I guess that Kahi is doing nothing illegal, so if people have that kind of question, it feels legitimate to reply with a demand of what is the extend this patriotism stance is going beyond the judicial requirements.
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
How broad will they be? Do you aim to ever have large scale indexing of the web?
Hurry. Google might give up the ghost on its search product and maintaining indices on anything not geared for LLMs.
I'm not sure antitrust will help you.
> We're actively working on building our own indexes
Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
> Nobody wants to pay for anything
Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.
I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
They are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.
> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google
Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.
Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
Qwant and Ecosia try to build their own index: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-sta...
I do not believe that Qwant can produce something good, they always were a company to extract money from the french taxpayer to wrap bing results.
I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
Yes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.
They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
This is incompetence, not malice. YT devs would skip testing on Chrome if they could get away with it, but are forced to.
On numerous occasions, I had issues with YouTube and Firefox that were fixed by changing the user agent to make it look like chrome.
I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
Kagi uses Yandex which is Russian.
But does it surface relevant search results?
Many things on the web use Yandex.
Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
I just use the tools that work.
I mostly interact with their AI through bangs.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
It was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
Same to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
The small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration.
I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
Then don't buy Apple!
There's more to device quality than whether a monkey can operate it and looks shiny.
Using third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy.
Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
3rd party browsers don't actually exist. iOS Chrome is just V8 bolted onto Webkit/Safari. Chromium is not part of it.
I know right. It’s simple. Google pays them over a billion dollars and Kagi doesn’t.
However, Apple does allow DDG, Ecosia, and Bing. They just don’t allow Brave or Kagi.
Easily fixed by installing Brave Browser.
I get annoyed at Whatsapp and see it as a case for antitrust but apparently Google is just as guilty of this
My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.
Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.
You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.
Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.
The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.
The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.
Astroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer.
Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.
I hope it stays small compared to the tech giants.
I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.
Well, for one thing at these user numbers using it is close to de-anonymizing yourself.
That chart is programmed to always shows the same shape, no matter if the number of subscribers increased by 10 or by 10 000.
I noticed if you change to the “all time” view it shows a steady linear growth, with no big spikes or valleys.
A good graph would start at 0
I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.
I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).
What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.
Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g
I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
Local business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.
Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.
Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.
They do have something called Privacy Pass that lets you search using an untraceable cryptographic token instead: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
Privacy Pass.
Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.
my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft
I'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox.
We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge
I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
Can you give an example of your searches?
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?
If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries
I do try to search but often the results are pretty low quality.
Agents do. I'm actually very curious where does their traffic go.
Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.
Yandex also censors political things. Your best bet is to search everywhere because everyone is "compromised" from some side.
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.
The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”.
Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.
Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
Links: - https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister - Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen... - Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
I'm on a self-hosted seaxng. It's great. I just need a computer up 24h/7d.
A VPS with without a black listed IP is good. A simple rootless container, update is easy.
Configuration takes little time, not much.
I still hate that I have to double the bang to use the same bang as DDG.
Example: "!!wde Ente" to go to the German wikipedia page about duck instead of "!wde Ente" with DDG.
This looks very promising. Thank you for investing time in this.
Assuming it indexes everything locally and falls back to traditional search engines if none found, how do you feel about adding a shared middle layer? A layer that simply indexes all the canonical data that doesn't have any personal info. This way, the contributors can automatically contribute the pages they index - building a shared search engine over time! The whole thing can work without a crawler of its own (under appropriate license so people can trust it)
This is an awesome idea in theory, I'd love to go to this direction, but it's a surprisingly complex topic. I find it hard to come up with an implementation that can guarantee both result quality (no malicious actors) and user privacy.
I'd appreciate any kind of help designing such system. We are on IRC/Discord/Github/Codeberg.
I use my own domain index to navigate the web.
- If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?
- Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?
- Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)
My domain index
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
> If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?
Yes, Hister has a built-in crawler which supports standard HTTP and different browser based backends
> Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?
You can create priority rules to boost the ranking of the matching domains/URLs
> Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)
It is possible to add a label to indexed documents
It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.
It isn't supported yet, but it's a good idea and quite simple to implement it. I've added it to the issue tracker: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 . Thanks for the suggestion.
Thank you for making Searx, I use it as the web search tool MCP for local models and it works very well, so that not only big companies have the power to show or hide results now.
Happy hister user here. Thank you!
I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
> It messes up sometimes
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
For simple queries it’s fine. The main value it adds is that it’s above the ad spam.
But it was trained on ad spam wasn't it?
Never ever trust AI summary cooking instructions. Holy crap.
I made a serious error with that once.
I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.
Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus except to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.
I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
The blame for this is 100% on Google.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.
google literaly makes the rules for SEO and discoverability and penalise you for not following them. Hense all websites end up with slop content now.
That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.
I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.
What they’ll do is embed ads in the text, which will also be unblockable. I imagine the future will entail running an LLM to remove the ads that another LLM generated :P
Hey, finally a real use for AI in the browser. It could probably be a pretty small model, too.
This is what people wanted, and we all act like it's bad they did it.
This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human.
I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.
Same thoughts exactly.
I wonder if Google is aware of its identity crisis? Even long after "don't be evil", Google was still "we earn so much from a healthy web that making the web a healthy one is almost a straight forward company interest". Now web content is actively relegated to training input and LLM chat replacing delegating to the source, that web that Google made so much money of, as healthy or not one considered it to be, will soon be gone. Could be either at Google, complete lack of awareness or desperate "we can't stop it but we might still try to profit a little from what we can't stop"
I don’t doubt that people feel this way. I doubt that every new account inflating the apparent consensus is genuine.
Have you bothered to check @nekzn’s comment history? Attacking new people here is going to ensure we’re left with only bots. This is one of the reasons why HN has the guidelines that you’re repeatedly breaking. If you do suspect a bot after at least taking the ten seconds to check their comment history, the best thing you can do is not engage.
I agree that not engaging would have been preferable and is going forward.
From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
There is no insinuation. The astroturfing objectively occurs and that it does so is an inherent strain on the credibility of engagement like that of the GP.
To me, it read like you implied the poster to be an astroturfing account. Though I may have misinterpreted that.
they are 100% implying the poster is astroturfing,
easier to accuse someone of astroturfing than accept that different people can have different opinions. especially an opinion as world-shaking as not minding ai overviews.
this sort of accusation is becoming pretty common, and eventually going to ensure that the only new users actually are bots, because any potentially new humans that want to sign up are going to get fed up with the llm/astroturfing accusations.
What you infer from reading the text is your problem, not mine. My follow up comment articulates exactly my position.
"This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing "
that is basically a direct accusation of astroturfing, man. no weaseling your way out of it. you're saying their opinion does not hold weight because it is likely to be llm-enabled astroturfing. there is no other interpretation.
if you're gonna break the rules and accuse someone of something, at least stand by it. wet-noodle accusations are even worse.
(p.s., sort of funny to see someone with a post-llm account accuse other post-llm accounts of being an llm!)
If I give you a piece of titanium and tell you a piece of lead with equivalent volume would have greater mass I have in no way said the density of titanium is zero. You would be an imbecile to come to that conclusion.
Then take it from my account that is years old, as I also hold the same opinion that the AI overview is very useful to me as like the parent it usually contains exactly the information I need.
My account is older than yours by a decade and I also like the AI overview more often than not, or rather, I instinctively know when to skip it depending on my query.
I think the greater issue in this discussion is that the TechCrunch author, like most blogger/journalists are facing a complete erasure of their business model and have a vested interest at opposing this
As not a Large Language Model, I also like the AI overview feature.
It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…
Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall"
"Yeah, it sounds like a very a common thing back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.
It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible.
I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cost far too much in compute.
> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse
Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.
A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.
I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.
We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.
Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.
Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.
Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.
Same here , about 95% of my searches o just look at the AI overview, and that’s been enough.
I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine
So you are not actually searching for anything on web. This is more about using google as a web search engine, something it could do maybe a decade ago.
I do like it - however, I find my self using google less and less every day. I lean much more toward agents as my primary search tool for work related items.
For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google
You are not the only one.
Sometimes? It gives completely incorrect/hallucinated information more than 50% of the time, making it nearly useless.
As a user: I love it!
As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.
Forums, engaging with people directly still works!
What was your point in blogging before? And how is that point gone because of google's behaviour?
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites.
I disagree with “sometimes”. But anyway, the gargantuan difference is that with websites you can get a feel for their credibility. As a simple example, documentation on MDN is miles more trustworthy that your average SEO spam blog, and you can see this as soon as you enter the page. Yes, some scammers are craftier than other, but the signal is there.
With LLMs, all answers get the same weight.
And asking for sources is not reliable. They are too often made up or contradict what the page says.
> and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it.
And what will you do when most posts on the web are just junk SEO spam to trick LLMs into telling you what they want? It’s not like that’s hard to do, even.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.
I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.
This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.
I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.
Google themselves are the primary driving reason why most websites are unreadable.
And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.
I hate that it confidently claims something based on a single Reddit/forum comment. This happens very often and it’s often wrong.
I hate it conceptually but in practice it often has what I need, and I can usually just scroll past it when I don’t
Wondering if anyone considered the idea of saving search stubs and using local LLM as agents with it. Could cut the search engine completely from the loop.
The idea is simple: collect search stubs, short documents with routing information about a topic. When you want to search something your agent finds the right stub and looks up where on the web to go find that information. Your information is always fresh, while a search stub changes slowly, over years, because the entry points tend to be more stable.
If we use a 4B local model and another 4GB for search stubs it could be portable enough to download and install. As you use it you also generate your own search stubs on top of the generic package. High quality search stubs can be generated with any frontier LLM piggy backing on its agentic search capabilities.
A stub could contain links to news feeds, high quality hubs, search engines and of course, actual websites.
While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")!
[1]: https://kagi.com
[2]: https://uruky.com
Just FYI, at DuckDuckGo we have a search setting to turn ads off: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
We also have a no ai version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Just this morning I was helplessly looking at r/ecosia for a way to get rid of the new AI tab they've added (there's no way). Signed up for Uruky, let's see how it fares.
Thanks! Reach out for any suggestions, questions, or comments!
Am I right in that I cannot demo a couple of searches without subscribing?
As of two weeks ago, you can get a couple of hours for unlimited (rate-limited) testing, just go to top up your account (or try to search) and click the PoW local and private captcha to get that.
It does appear that way, but when you click on register you get an account valid for one day, without having to fill in any data whatsoever.
is it foss?
No, but you do get the source code after 12 months of being a paying customer (signing an NDA), though we're considering releasing the code under AGPLv3 if we reach 300 monthly active accounts (we just reached 100 last week) before next year.
I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so O disabled it and never looked back.
You are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: <insert your query here>
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
> https://
Pre-2010 Google search didn't use https by default, almost no one did besides specific cases, like processing payment. And even then, only the critical part was https, the rest, like images was plain http. So, for a true pre-2010 experience, you want http:// links.
Post-2010 Google played an important role in pushing for https. From boosting https search results, to Chrome being annoying to unencrypted connections, to sponsoring Let's Encrypt, to forcing HSTS on their TLDs.
I kind of miss http, it was a time when the web was a public thing, a place for sharing, not for keeping secrets. But to be fair that's just nostalgia, the modern (commercial) web that generalized encryption enabled is so useful and convenient that I can't imagine going back.
I had to laugh as I read this, but it feels so appropriate to the current state.
I will say off topic that, speaking to an early googler, there is actually documentation of meetings where they discussed what "don't be evil" meant and decided actual business options they should and should not pursue. It was not just a motto or a "code of conduct", but meant as and used to justify consequential actions.
Brave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well. And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.
Kagi is the only search engine that actually provides me with results comparable to plain Google. I do not need to adapt my searches or learn some sort of syntax to avoid pinterest or other offenders. DDG, Bing & Qwant are just not good enough for my use.
My search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
I am surprised people are not talking about Brave and its goggles which allow to block off crappy searches like pinterest all the time + a neat community feature and biggest point, its own search index.
I'm using the 'Hacker News / 1k short' goggle all the time.
I switched to DDG a long time ago (maybe close to a decade now?). There's plenty of reasons to dislike Google, but my main reason for switching was better quality results and a faster, simpler UI.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
Also a long-time DDG user here, the lack of AI chat by default at the top of searches is great, if i wanted to use AI I wouldn't be opening a search engine.
Sad, because Google's homepage was once a paragon of bloat-free design. While their competitors enshittified, Google kept just giving good results fast without a lot of junk. They became the 90+% market share leader, and enshittified thereafter.
I used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value
Any that have a free developer api? Google has shutdown theirs https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
I pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important.
There’s so much content getting buried now.
If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it.
The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
Brave Search has its own index which is fine, 10 blue links and no forced AI, and more importantly support for DDG-like "bangs" (like !gi sending you to Google Images), without DDG's performance issues. I highly recommend it for people who don't want to pay for Kagi.
Brave is such a horrible brand. I don't think they'll succeed, but they're definitely trying to do MS-style EEE. Browser, search engine, and security (nefariously called "ad blockers" by the people that don't want users fully controlling traffic and code that reached and runs on their machines) should forever be separate entities.
I've been using Brave for years and have no complaints. Their browser's security is better than Google Chrome thanks to them disabling a lot of the stuff that Google ships and keeping their own stuff disabled unless I opt in. Brave browser is private by default (unlike Firefox)[1], and it doesn't try to force me to accept an EULA or terms of service just to use it.
Their search engine isn't the best but none of the search engines I use are, not even Google.
So to me, they've already succeeded. Can you elaborate on the issues that make you think they haven't?
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
Surprised not to see a mention of https://tenbluelinks.org/ here.
Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms.
That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
Everyone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.
When is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
DuckDuckGo?
Google hasn't been useful to me as a general search engine for a good while.
I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time).
The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
Over the past 10 years I've been using general search as little as ever. For 95% of my requests I know the website that will resolve my request. DuckDuckGo bangs are a great feature for landing on a specific website with your search: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I miss the old days of two weeks ago when you guys complained that Google Search was unusable for non-AI reasons.
Not sure how Brave is. I'm using its API on OpenClaw, and so far my experience with OpenClaw has been satisfactory — though search is only one part of the overall quality.
I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
I really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.
The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.
> my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches
any chance you have an example of such searches off the top of your head that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Not the greatest example because they both do find me, but here's an example of where Kagi is supposed to be better at precisely this, but isn't. Search without quotes for daniel drucker mclean.
That's me, and Google correctly on the first page finds ONLY pages related to me.
Kagi pollutes the page with many results for my doppelgänger, the much more famous Daniel J Drucker of the University of Toronto, even though none of those results mention mclean.
That is literally the thing Kagi was supposed to be better at - actually respecting your search terms instead of thinking it knows better!
I've used Brave Search and found it better than Google's in some cases
AltaVista was excellent. On a different timeline we'd be searching on AltaVista running on Alpha chips.
AltaVista had so much noise that it was basically unusable... which exactly the issue Google solved and why it still exists and AV doesn't.
Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
This comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!"
Let me correct.
Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.
We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
you did a lot of wind up for a "slightly worse" when half the first page is either AI or advertisement; they ditch pure keyword matching with "feels like you want this" matching which works for serving more ad to more eyeballs for longer. For bland searches, sure, its 'slightly worse' but for the ability to find verbatim results necessary to drill down into a subject it's absolutely worthless.
I turned off AI overviews in Google search a few days ago. It's often wrong and always distracting.
I changed my default search engine to: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Author should mention that you can change your browser's default search engine.
Appreciate the advice! Took me a little bit to figure out how to do this, so I'll drop a useful guide: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.
This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
I usually switch between DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Both are good.
Been using DDG for about 8 years instead of Google search. Occasionally use google image search for matching an uploaded image. Use google maps for any local searches (credit to where credit is due its a superior map product).
Yandex seems to be better at image reverse search. Maps is the only one I still use Google for.
What
(What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them.
DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches?
Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)
DDG is a mediocre search engine. A mediocre search engine is still much better than whatever Google's become.
Honestly, the answer is so often a little toy search like Marginalia or going straight to the website in question now, its frightening.
Are we both blocking Google ads and scrolling past the AI summary?
Their business practices are just the worst. But are the first 10 blue links they show you usually bad? (Like you know that one of those 10 should be the exact thing you want, so you decide to rely on another search engine instead, & the alternative search succeeds where Google failed)
Yes, I am. And these days Google has become about as bad as DDG. And not because DDG has become better.
Have read this comment before multiple times, even a year or two ago. Hence my “unreasonable” demand for screenshots if someone has the minutes to script it. - Hmm, really should be a live site to track over time... Can make that and Show [Three People On] HN!
(Google could give better results to those unloyal to them, as one example, so testing needed! We could be getting wildly different results or just have starkly different usage tendencies, there’s just no way I could disagree with so many of y’all on something this basic assuming no DDG astroturfing or anything unless we’re looking at things differently one way or another)
Waiting for your screenshots. Do the legwork yourself first.
And obviously there is no astroturfing here from DDG. That you could have seen from a tiny look at my profile. I have a pretty public persona on the internet.
DDG is unusable compared to Google for searches not in English.
I've been generally satisfied with ddg for a few years now. Started using it when Google was had obviously turned to shit, didn't look further.
In my experience, DDG brings up relevant results, maybe a bit more so than Google does.
But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites and gives me 0 or 1 result while Google gives me 5-10 results. Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though.
> But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites
Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).
DDG catches the fallout.
> Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though
Years ago I remember Google asking the person lodging a similar complaint for an example of a query because they found there was always an explanation. Noticed this no longer holds as of perhaps a few months ago if I’m not mistaken. Even this* fails:
+”omg just tell me no results if this exact string isn’t present come on I even put the plus sign”
Infantilizing for us, maybe optimizing for the 99.5% in reality (understandable, annoying)
*edit, made up example based on what I believe I’ve seen this year
edit:
> DDG brings up relevant results
Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun? Spellchecking e.g. brand names, new/fad current event topics is apparently really hard (IIRC Bing not perfect here either?)
> Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).
DDG was never good at quotation marks so I forgot to mention it also sucks at these.
> Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun?
I haven't but I'd really prefer 2 options:
1) I may mispel thinks quote freqwently but gimme any sorta relevent result
2) I know what I am searching for. Maybe add a "Did you mean X?" link but still show me the results containing the misspellings. If I search for "motorolla" or "mottorolla" (misspellings for "Motorola") in quotes, DDG gives me 1 incomplete page for that misspelling. Google (StartPage) gives me mostly misspellings but with "Motorola" included in some results. Without the quotes both engines treat me as a moron who can't type. If I search for
"mottorolla" phone 2026
DDG still shows me "mottorolla", not "motorolla" while Google has decided I am indeed someone who can barely type even though I've put in quotes.
DDG works well enough for me. I wonder if people who pay for Kagi perceive it as being better to justify the money spent.
What are your metrics for good? I’ve exclusively used ddg for years and have zero issues. You ask for an outrageous level of proof- you prove it’s not good.
Whattttttt this is a few bucks of request from some open source model, just been lazy
Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.
> "Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch"
I would rather not.
Edit: clarifying that this is not strictly due to ads. I think the article itself is an ad judging by the slug 'six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google....'. Usually such articles include a plug. I am not disabling adblocker to read that plug
On one hand browsing web is completely impossible without adblocker. On the other hand the only sites that can survive without any ad revenue are product spam blogs that participate in "Amazon PartnerNet" and similar affiliate programs. Well, unless Google AI starts stripping referral link or replacing them with own one (Honey/Brave style). Do we even need search engine when there are just few hundreds of huge sites left?
Turn on reader mode.
For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
Actually, I think Gemini is great. And the AI overviews are quite good.
I think Google is getting its act back together.
I find the bigger problem now is how many top results on search engines are AI written websites.
I'm using uBlock's AI Blacklist. It doesn't remove AI generated pages from search results but when a page doesn't load, you know.
The number of "Kagi" comments here is amusing (suspicious), considering how few people actually use Kagi.
Sometimes there is, actually, a vocal minority.
And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.
Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.
HN is cringe with their influencer marketing, always have been.
Kagi, Claude, Rust, and other Canadian trash nobody will ever use in the real world.
a list of engines I ran across the other day: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex but this list has many spiders and engines that traverse the web.
I don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed.
Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
To be fair, it hasn’t really been one since SEO
searxng works well but it's not perfect. I tried qwant for a bit but results were mediocre at best. Kagi, I've shared my views on why I'd never use it. I wouldn't use it even if they paid me to use it in fact. For the time being I'm swapping between searxng and ecosia, the latter has been giving me the best results for just about anything(and I hope their indexer partnership with qwant pays off). As for google - even before the change, results were absolute crap, not a recent thing but since around 2020, the quality of the result hit rock bottom and they have been hard at work, drilling into the rock ever since.
> now that Google isn’t really Google anymore
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
It did for me, I can no longer find any GitHub project. Duck duck returns them on first try. Absolutely ridiculous, couldn't believe my eyes when I finally realized that. I get a ton of ads and product placements on first couple pages. What I search for is literally, word for word, name of the repository and it's not ambiguous.
Thats interesting, because for me, I cant find anything on github, through github search and need to resort to google. Google search is super super terrible for other things tho :/
Im curious, what is your query?
Huh? the github page of pretty much anything is always in the top 5 results for me.
And honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.
Yes, significantly, but not recently. It can't search anymore. Like literally, it can't. You cannot reach a web page you know exists, like you used to.
Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.
I switched to Kagi years ago, never looked back.
It is pretty sad that google has embraced enshitification for search results for what more than 10 years of decline now? And then this.
DuckDuckGo is about to surge!
If google stops driving traffic to the websites, website owners will have zero incentive put out new content, and then what?
I think the endgame is you go to Google or your favorite subscription based LLM for knowledge instead of visiting websites. Ads can continue living within LLM search results and it can even become a marketplace where you order within the LLM environment.
What websites?
I feel like this is a scene from a movie where a character goes "what are you talking about? Look around us, it's already gone" (idk why i am picturing Mark Whalberg for some reason).
But it's all just reddit, medium, twitter (twitter pages, w/e those blog things are).
The internet as we knew it is gone, man.
I’ve tried them all and found that Kagi is the only one that my subconscious feels is equal to or better than google.
Which of these alternatives actually doesn't use Google under the hood?
I'm surprised that Perplexity isn't mentioned in the article or on HN. It has replaced Google for all but the most trivial queries. It runs circles around Google for finding anything niche or underspecified.
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
I use Perplexity heavily as my general research clerk, and it's great at that, but I find trivial queries still make up a majority of my search activity. Waiting for an AI response to each of them would be an enormous time sink.
Do you gave an example query? I am curious.
Perplexity.ai
It's an AI like Google's "AI mode", in that it also surfaces URLs. I have not found it to be a good search engine replacement.
Is it me or the mentions of Kagi on HN are overly positive?
I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
For me its either bing or duckduckgo
Yandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful.
The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, but it now appears to block anyone who blocks google tracking. But this is where ChatGPT does an excellent job of generating lists of technical papers and reviews and it interprets natural language queries with no problems. The kind of complex logical search queries google used to support (what, 15 years ago?) can be written without strict logical language (! & | ()) and all that. Pubmed isn’t bad for cross-checking and simple searches. And if you put sci-hub into the yandex.com/search box and click on yandex ai it tends to tell you where the current active sci-hub sites are, which is handy.
Honest question: isn't AI Google better than the Standard Google of the past 2 years? I mean all the privacy concerns are still there, but the current product is just better than the SEO SPAM-ridded result page we used to have.
Brave.
Does google have a option to avoid AI summaries?
I liked Kagi a lot, but gave up on it as I couldn’t configure it as a default search engine on iOS. Ended up with Duckduck go.
You can set Kagi as the default search engine today on iOS. Unless I’m misunderstanding.
Only with an extension, at least in the UK.
Before switching to seek.ninja I used DuckDuckGo.
Reeks of product placement and astroturfing
You can't replace google, not in a million billion years..
Brave search does well for me.
I appear to be one of the rare few that doesn’t have any trouble - or even see much difference - in the ‘new’ google (non-) search.
Maybe this is a frog in boiling water situation but… it’s just the same search as it’s always been, there’s just now a chunk of Gemini up top, that you take with a grain of salt, same way you’d take the promoted results. If you don’t like it, Adblock it.
When I ask myself honestly, has google search gotten worse over the past 25+ years? My answer is… ehhhhhh… not really?
Other people have always claimed google was ‘getting worse’ and I just don’t see why it should be any more true now than it was then. Isn’t this just the latest round of whinging?
So much for llms replacing search
At what ? Propaganda ? Can a llm find gwm-1.8d.tar.gz ?
Gee at least 15 years too late for this article? How many articles did I read from tech media over the years drilling into people that you could never take down Google because everyone says "Google it" instead of "do a web search"? It's too embedded and consumer choice is stupid because Google it lol!*
Google hasn't been "Google" for quite some time.
* I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo before that.
This is because of the Google I/O (developer conference) announcements this week. They're about to overhaul their regular search and make it even more garbage, to the point - so it sounds - of it being more just a Gemini chatbot interface and less an actual search engine, ergo: not Google anymore.
I just use DeepSeek and I find it works great. You can give pretty loose queries and it will do a good job of finding articles and giving an overview.
It’s crazy that a company like Google, full of very talented people, is making a decision that is so obviously bad. I’m convinced Silicon Valley is so deep in the AI hype machine that these guys have completely lost touch with reality and have no one left to ground them.
They used to have:
Who was president at this time? Was this while they were denying students the option to code on the computers we bought for them because security?From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil :
> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"
That sounds like NY to me.
People think Google removing "Don't be evil" means Google somewhat implicitly told everyone they'll be evil from now on. That doesn't make much sense. It was likely a marketing decision since having "evil" in your motto is not good even if you explicitly state "DON'T BE" before it. Just like if I write in my profile text "I'm not a pedo", you'll think "this guy is likely a pedo"
I would have loved to be in the room when this decision was made, but my guess is that they decided that it was better to face some subtle nerd backlash now rather than having this quoted at the start of countless congressional hearings over the next decade.
Don't create the Torment Nexus
What about a distributed way of doing search, does that exist?
Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search.
Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search.
Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now.
We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website.
A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach:
* copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB.
* privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these.
* spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one
* moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc..
* how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
I have seen this posted many times but can anyone elaborate?
>I have seen this posted many times but can anyone elaborate?
Read the article.
Thank you. “ What if you took Startpage and made it simpler? The search engine &udm=14 is named for the string of characters it appends to all of your searches on Google. If you add &udm=14 to your Google searches, you’ll get the same Google results, only without an AI overview. But doing that yourself after every search is pretty annoying. That’s why &udm=14 does it for you automatically.” (Sorry i am in a country where text only websites like Hackernews are one of the few places that load within 5 seconds instead of minutes)
Kagi. Just use Kagi. It is by far far far the best. Best money I spend, aside from Fastmail.
https://kagi.com/
Anyone here who uses kagi in a language other than English? Specifically German? Is it any good?
Works well for me! Have been using Kagi for well over a year now. (I assume you’re talking about the German search results, not their German UI.)
German works great on Kagi, no problems at all.
What's your monthly usage, aprox.? Do you use Kagi for getting to pages you know of but doesn't want to type the whole URL for, eg. typing "Hacker news" in the URL bar instead of "news.ycombinator.com"?
I average 800-1000 searches per month and I don't generally search for places I know the URL for (usually only when I can't spell it)
As someone who also loves Kagi, what do you like so much about Fastmail? Seeing it compared to Kagi makes me want to give it a try as well haha.
Just like parent poster, there's a few things I pay for, and those are Kagi and Fastmail :)
Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.
I think the comparison is that they just seem to give a shit about putting out a very good product. Filter and snooze automatically is probably my favorite unique capability but it’s less one thing than the overall ethos and execution.
Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
Kagi is good, but only for English language queries
I use it for Finnish all the time and it is comparable to Google I would say.
I find it great for Japanese, provided you search in the Japanese language mode.
How do you set it to search in Japanese language mode?
Second filter from the left on the results page is the location / language filter.
Seems to require an account... no thanks
Honestly, same. I don't even think about it, I just and only use kagi.
It annoys me to no end that Safari only gives you a limited set of search engines to pick from. Changing it to anything else requires a cumbersome trick of catching a search URL and redirecting to something else, which not only stops you from using that particular search engine, it makes every search slower you’re sending your query to two entities instead of one.
Seeing as Apple has reportedly partnered with Google to power their LLM offering, I don’t expect that to change soon. I hope I am wrong.
On MacOS Safari you can set your homepage / new tab page to whatever search engine you like. It's almost as convenient. On iOS it's worse.
They are all crap. The best seems to be, unfortunately, yandex.
udm=14 is still working for me (for now) to disenshittify the results. You can use my Firefox extension to inject it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
`&udm=14` just sends you to the "web" tab of search, which does remove the AI summary, but you also lose the widgets that google puts at the top of search, if you like those (weather, calculator, games, etc). one of my friends recently found that you can add a short invalid filter parameter like `&tbs=1` and it'll give you the main search with no AI but with those widgets if they would normally appear. you do still get the "People also ask" section, but that's probably easily removed with an extension or user script
I don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines. They are a huge step above traditional ones like google. So what that google uses LLM's as a supplementary tool for no cost? This really looks like some ideological thing evoking visceral emotions.
If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close.
This one is also stupid:
> But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money?
> That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews.
UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free.
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Edit: getting downvoted
Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere.
From the article:
> many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot
This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people.
Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue.
Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them.
In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications.
I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??"
I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.
Curious to know your stance on Google discouraging Adblock. And whether users are morally obligated to not use Adblock.
Google's explicit plan is to never let users go to the websites. They scrape the website and have their AI summarize it.
If nobody goes to the websites, those websites no longer get traffic or revinue. In very short order there will be no more websites from which to scrape, and the AI will no longer have new data to summarize.
Where do you think this ends?
> I don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines.
By eating the source of their results, pretty soon there wont be any sources that aren't crap.