> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
Great. On top of my on-going battle with Windows + Firefox + DNS/TLS resolution sometimes stalling for seconds at a time, another few second server-side stall is introduced.
I swear that every day modern computing scenarios get slower and slower instead of snappier and snappier.
Wow - this exact same bug has been happening to me too. I gave up on troubleshooting it after the first few attempts came up with nothing, assumed it was just unique to me.
I searched for this a few months ago and found some mentions of this bug, but yes it affects me too. Can stall up to 20 seconds+ sometimes. Chrome is fine.
Exactly this + websites transforming into SPAs, loading lots of JS chunks, displaying spinners and placeholders, 2FAs, login requests, captchas everywhere. Web browsing is now a very frustrating and time-wasting experience!
The link you followed when you clicked hasn't a direct link for years, decade afaik (they mangle so they can see what's followed). The page used to show the direct on the search text but now it shows some stand in for it - sometimes. You can see the direct link on the bottom of the screen when you hover - sometimes (and sometimes you see a mangled link). Sometimes the google link contains the original link in the center also[1].
The situation seems to vary from result to result even on the same page of the same search - at least on the test search I just did. You can figure out what happening to an extent but this very inconsistency seems to speak to a dystopian quality to today's information gatekeepers.
I've just checked this again using a google account where search result pages are still following the old behavior: It looks like the 'href' attribute is the direct link, and the 'ping' attribute is the /url redirect link you are referring to. So it looks like it is actually sending me to the direct link, it just also requests /url at the same time in order to log the click. This means the user was not waiting for the logging/redirect request to come back.
Which is exactly the game theory that was predicted when some browsers started ignoring <a ping> to "protect privacy". If your browser supports ping you get ping, otherwise the website gets the data anyway but with a worse user experience.
The biggest problem with this is if the target URL doesn't load but also doesn't quickly error out, like e.g. many .gov sites in Europe (seems like they are just dropping traffic from non-US IPs).
Now you can't load the page and can't easily (using only the browser UI) get a link to paste into archive.org or archive.is to read the page.
> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating
I do a bunch of work in remote areas with low-ping/low-bandwidth networks. The “hold on a skimmer while we round trip to Google” dark pattern makes the service unusable for me when I’m on-location.
Try it in a private browsing window - if you are logged in, Google will link directly to the result, but if you aren't logged in, it appears to be redirecting through their /goto endpoint
I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now
Because I wouldn't want Google to know what links I click on. When I used to use Google, and they added such redirects that included the plaintext URL, I'd edit the link to make it just that URL before resolving it. This new scheme would make that impossible.
It's not misinformation. By default Google has been able to click track with JS. If you disable JS, they don't serve you search (https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/). Yes, if you are tricky, you can block just the part of the JS that does click tracking, probably. But most users can't do that.
Blocking URL shorteners and google-ad links yes! Personally for me it's also the fact that this is effectively an unresolvable URL shortener, store that link somewhere and it will most likely be dead. Can't copy link anymore and paste it on a notepad or chat app to check it out later as there isn't a guarantee it will load at all (ie: the problem with url shorteners).
I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.
Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.
That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.
Previously the clear target URL of a search result was added to the result-link (or div?) as an additional data-tag (aria or whatever, can't remember), and thus was able to be used with a userscript or similar to replace the Googleified tracking redirect link. And it was also part of the googliefied tracking URL, either way you were able to see the clear target URL.
That no longer is possible, you must ask google.com for consent to visit the result link before seeing what the final target URL is.
But the extension doesn't need to use that exact mechanism, and the person that linked it didn't mention specific mechanisms. The purpose of the extension is putting the real URLs back, and it can still do that.
And it can still prevent google from knowing which search results you click on, even though OP didn't mention that feature.
You do a google search. The extension resolves every link on the page immediately via the goto urls. This doesn't leak any information to google because they obviously know which links they sent you. Now the links are resolved and you can copy and click them and get clean URLs, without sending any information about which ones you're copying or clicking.
> Isn't that the same mechanism as the one you were saying it didn't need to use, though?
In my second comment?
I was replying to a detailed explanation of the old mechanism that ended with "that is no longer possible", so I said "it doesn't need to use that exact mechanism" referring to the old mechanism.
It needs to update to the new way things work. But that's fine. An extension that performs the same task is still fully possible.
Whenever I've tried this, it seems okay if you need an answer to a question, but plain bad if I'm looking for a specific page.
e.g. I'm just now looking for the menu for a local restaurant. "restaurantname menu" in Kagi (Google would presumably be similar) returns a link to the menu as the first result in about a second. Or "restaurantname menu !" goes directly to the menu in about a second.
Meanwhile, searching "restaurantname menu" in chatgpt takes about 5 seconds to return an embedded map from mapbox showing the location of the restaurant. If I click the restaurant pin on the map, there's no menu link, the 667 reviews have no link or way to view, and the restaurant description literally says "I don't have enough information to identify which local business <restaurantname> refers to."
Below the map there's some text: "If you mean <restaurantname> in <place>, here’s the current menu. <restaurantname>". The <restaurantname> link just opens the same card as clicking the pin on the map.
After that there's a bullet point list of the menu that ommits a ton of detail and options.
After that there's finally a link... that I can click to open up a popup at the bottom of the page with an actual link to the menu.
This was literally the first thing that popped into my head, I didn't have to put any effort into finding a query where chatgpt falls on its face.
Yeah, I would... but also a search engine works even better than a map if it's a restaurant I'm already familiar with and just want a link to restaurantwebsite.com/dinner-menu
Exactly! I did the same thing the last few years. Just ask ChatGPT (basically any AI chat), it will search and give you the answer you're looking for without you having to open the pages one by one, like on the SERP. AI is already changing human search behavior, I think.
it sounds like it primarily matters if you are a customer of this company, one that is building a search index off of urls scrapably hardcoded (or at least so as to be easily unencodable in non-realtime, it sounds like?) inside google search result redirects. in theory, there could be noticeable consumer user impact, but ... it would have to be a pretty large theory
The security implications of this are very severe when you consider the amount of people who google government websites, banking, crypto and others. And google will happily serve you a phishing website either in ads or results.
Well just as a regular user, I think it is pretty annoying because if I look up anything on Google while in Incognito Mode and hover over a search result, I can see that maybe the top result is maybe Wikipedia, or Instagram, or some other less-known website depending on what I'm searching for. Now, that's all very obfuscated because I don't actually know where I'm going to land for sure.
It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search.
Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.
You can opt out from Google scraping you though? In theory you can opt out of anyone scraping you (if people were well behaved). Google should get to opt out of being scraped too.
> You can opt out from Google scraping you though?
You can't. Google will ignore robots.txt in some cases (e.g. "The REP isn't applicable to Google's crawlers that are controlled by users (for example, feed subscriptions), or crawlers that are used to increase user safety (for example, malware analysis)").
robots.txt is just a suggestion that Google loosely follows.
This is the best explanation. They’ve been doing the same in Google News. Each entry comes not with a URL to the source, but with a hash. To resolve it, you must send requests to Google’s servers. Anyone who wants to create a list of URLs of sources automatically can therefore be blocked by Google now on two levels rather than one - the search for a list of results, and identifying the source URL for each result.
In effect, they’re removing attribution from the content they quote from other people’s websites. It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is one thing to crawl other people’s websites and display snippets of their work as your search results when each result is properly and transparently attributed. But if the text is quoted and the source is not there alongside it in plaintext, replaced only by a vague promise that, if you ask, we may or may not tell you where this piece of content is from, that is a very different deal.
> the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.
What? Like they weren’t doing this before? Obviously Google’s telemetry is tracking every link you click regardless; there’s no extra tracking benefit to this.
The reason they’re doing this seems to be to stop competitors from scraping their search results.
It benefits on the other end, if I share the link and you click on it, Google knows you got it from me and from where. People 100% don't click through to share original URLs.
The fact they can track which link you clicked on is extremely valuable. For example by examining search queries and knowing which link you tried last, google can get a better idea of what is of interest and value to a user.
It's to make it more difficult for scrapers. Google have been able to do all the tracking they've wanted for decades.
Think about it: if you want to set up something like jina.ai you need to build your own index or piggyback on Google. My guess is they use residential proxies to fire requests to Google then scrape the URLs.
Opaque URLs now give Google another gateway to detect circumvention of their anti-bot controls, helping them monetise their search index rather than allowing providers like jina.ai to succeed.
I use kagi exclusively because it works. I get the results I need every time, and it's not annoying. I haven't used Google in years. Simply no need. I really hope people keep paying kagi so they stick around.
+1 for Kagi, even if Maps and Shopping and Images aren’t as good as Google (tbh their Images search is good enough 8/10 times) they’ve got the actual web search stuff working quite well.
ISPs can presumably correlate the Google query string with the request following the response to the goto and so make a search index? I guess they would charge too much.
Do any large ISPs use visit data to feed into a search index?
It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour.
I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend.
Yeah no thanks, that was creepy as hell and had it rolled back ASAP. You’ve got to realise the power these tech companies hold over your business. Don’t show up in the search results, someone lists your business as closed in maps, a tracking phone number goes dead so they can’t call you, you might as well have shut up shop and ceased to exist.
It's sad that instead of searching things other people put up, we're basically asking sam or dario oracle to tell us the truth. The people should be furious. But we've internalized this idea that they are somehow better.
Not better, just much _much_ more convenient. And it doesn't have to be a frontier lab. I'm happy to ask any oracle that returns sufficiently good results which is an ever increasing number of them.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look.
DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.
I don't know how global consistency is actually useful, but I can easily think of ways it is less convenient.
For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?
These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.
The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind.
If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.
I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.
people have been putting their fuckass blogs with 0.5 visitors a day behind Cloudflare long before the increase in bot traffic. and that increase makes fuck all any difference for them anyway.
I'm trying to go the other way and switch my browsing habits to not be to sites that use these blocking measures. I moved away from Bear because it used cloudflare and I absolutely will not visit a blog or product site that makes me fill in a captcha.
Sometimes I need to and no doubt it will get worse, but for now it's my rebellion
yeah. almost every other search query in the last decade gave ESL-generated SEO slop. even AI slop is less worthless.
I think curated directories from prehistoric times might make a comeback eventually. ironically, I think we could use LLMs to filter out slop by measuring information to noise ratio, which is atrocious for LLM/ESL slop.
They injected crypto donate buttons below, for example, tweets to make them look like twitter had a donate option. The sites were sent over https, it was mitm
I... Don't see it? It's the result page right? I just search some random string on Google and the results are all direct URLs. Do they get resolved via javascript after page load and replaced automatically? Or am I looking at something else?
What I see now, and it's been like this for a while, is this:
You get the results and they do have direct URLs. But then, if you do some things with the link, e.g. right click to open it in a new tab, it swaps the URL to the indirect one. The idea is that initially you see a normal link, with a normal URL which will be displayed correctly when you hover the mouse over it, but right before you click it, it's swapped for the indirect one.
So, they have been doing stuff like this for a while and it has been somewhat fluid, because the swapping can occur on different events and I have also seen it load with all the links pre-swapped to the indirect ones, sometimes.
So, yes, what you see may be different and you may get the indirect URLs swapped at different stages.
Because Google search isn't a hypertext document, it's a web app that presents dynamic ephemeral content to the user. There's no need for stable hyperlinks, since either you will click them within a few seconds, or they will disappear forever.
I wasn't aware of this. The last time I used Google, it was a hypertext document (or at least presented a hypertext document if you didn't allow Javascript, which I didn't), so Google had no way of knowing what I clicked on when I removed the redirect.
How do you even measure GEO, sometimes I try searching for my app and sometimes claude recommends my competitor that has 10x less reviews and is objectively worse saying is the most popular.
Yeah seems pretty obvious to me that most people are not going to be using a search engine in 5 years. In the sense of searching for something and combing through the results to find the answer.
why is this such a bad thing? it's not really any different from using a uuid as a user facing key, which basically everyone does.
and trying to protect your moat isn't automatically a bad thing. they clearly feel it's helping competition, so they're closing a hole. competition is good doesn't mean help your competitors.
- coming from someone who's been using fastmail as my personal for ~10 years because i don't want my emails to be backprop fodder
I guess someone made a website which google crawled and adding a senf made uuid to it is like google trying to own it rather than just being a true search engine just having index to it.
> Combined with earlier moves like removing &num=100
Removing this made google search horrible to use. I often use command+f to quickly identify relevant search results, but doing it on 10 results at a time is so laborious that I just don't bother using Google search, resulting in less searches and use of other tools instead.
I refer to tools like LLMs, unfortunately (not search engines). If anyone knows of a search engine that returns 100 results, I'm very keen to learn of it
As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification
I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.
There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.
Everything uses energy. AI is uniquely bad due to its scale. Comparing AI inference and training with posting a one-line comment on a website is like comparing wildfires with candles because they both produce heat. It's true but useless as an argument.
People have this fixation on privacy, when there's so much more going on, potentially way mor important.
Google's strong position in AI gives them bragging right to attract more companies and get them to actually pay, subsidizing your use. It also lowers competitors position as you're not touching them while we're on Gemini. It also fortifies their position in the future ad market.
Being second or third in AI usage is worth a lot, one's private data matters very little in comparison.
I won't be first, second or third in the AI race. I'm not even participating in that race. I don't care who wins. However my private data are mine and I do care about them.
It's Google and those other companies that may not care about my privacy, because the AI race is more important to them.
If AI is going to cost too much, I will use a cheaper one (Ferrari or FIAT?) or if every AI will cost too much, no AI all and there will be billions of people like me.
I agree that "privacy is not the currency Google deals with."
However when I run an adblocker and Blockada on Android, when I use alternatives to the YouTube app (and Google is technologically fighting them) when I don't log into Google, then those exchanges happen with very little of the currency Google is interested in.
Me too. I don't connect my phone to my Google account. I understand that the Play store is enticing, but there are other options. Some of which are actually better.
(Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')
Good workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX.
The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
I think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics.
Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.
Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.
They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)
I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.
I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.
The 300 searches a month work for me because I only use Kagi when I think it will give better results than others. And most searches are trivial so any free engine will do (like you have the website name and want the url).
One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.
That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.
You know how many things are asking for "~$10/mo". People don't have the purchasing power they used to, and everything is depending this subscription model. Firefox with DDG is good enough.
> Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.
(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)
I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits.
Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).
Kagi support zero knowledge search through a Firefox extension and Mullvad supports zero knowledge VPN by putting cash in an envelope with your account ID written on the outside.
And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.
Google kept increasing its profits since then, and it was one of the most successful businesses out there way before they changed the business model to become enshittified. The argument that their business model changed because people wouldn't pay for its services doesn't really stand.
FWIW Kagi has worked hard on their pricing over the last few years and has been trying different models. They're not "big search" the price is what it is so it can exist as a business. 100% fine to not be a customer obviously, but then you forfeit your license to complain about Google spying on you and ruining the web. Like they're trying to solve the problem. IMHO speaking just for myself I feel a moral duty to support them.
I agree on all your points. I'm just saying, that the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota. I'm sure they have done their research and maybe increasing it will cannibalize the $10 tier.
It's relatively rare as of late that I need to specifically find something on the internet, and DDG does not suffice, so I rarely exhaust the 300 Kagi searches.
Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.
My time, attention, and “brain” are valuable. Having aligned incentives with my search provider and control over the results it serves me through weighting is worth substantially more than I pay for unlimited.
Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.
For Google, the business side of you paying them doesn't work out as obvious as it might seem.
Advertisers are sold the idea that 1000 clicks/impression is X dollars.
The average impression might be priced at 1000/X$.
But you are worth much more than that for two reasons.
- you are a person willing to pay 5$
- Google can sell a “collectivized” product. The same way that eg collective farmer crop insurance creates actual value.
and the third reason (as consequence of the second) they dont want people to think about: it gives them more opportunity to fudge the value by making it all very complicated.
I don't understand your logic. Why would someone that never sees my ads be valuable to me? Why would I care? Everyone spends money on something, the fact you spend it on adblockers doesn't make you automatically more valuable to advertisers. I have never heard of this "advert paradox" concept you mention and I have worked in industry for a while now. All this is just conjecture on your part and doesn't really correspond to how it works.
If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products so the advertiser is willing to spend up to $21 to make you not block ads about a $8 product you'll buy.
That does not make sense at all. Why would you care about people who want to avoid ads? The real data shows very little people actually do that. How much you spend on adblocker is irrelevant to your profile for a business. They will get you some other way if you ad block on digital.
> If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products
Yes, but if you are so against ads that you spend $20 to not see ads (I am definitely in this group) and then see an ad for a "cool product" anyway, then that product is no longer cool. Any time something like this happens, I legitimately develop a grudge against that company and their products.
I might have bought that product before seeing the ad, but there is no chance of that after seeing the ad.
> Studies always show that you don't. You think you do, but you don't.
Did those studies have any outliers that DID have a negative reaction to ads? I am 100% certain I'd react EXTREMELY negatively in a situation like that.
The same way I wanted to buy a Tesla and rented one a couple of times in the past. Now I would NEVER AGAIN even go into a Tesla. Fuck that company.
I'm willing to pay time or money to avoid ads, not to be spied and harassed by companies making me offers to buy something that almost certainly I don't want to buy. Those companies should pay me a percent of what I make them save by not buying ads to serve me.
And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.
> That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.
This is silly. The economy doesn't work if no one is willing to pay for goods. The content you're consuming won't be made if theres no market value to create it in the first place. Pirating is not a solution to our data privacy problem.
The capitalist economy is based on the explicit idea that everyone will do everything they can to extract value from everyone else, and it'll come to some kind of equilibrium. If you do not do this but you allow everyone else to do this, you receive worse quality products for ridiculous prices and do nothing about it.
In other words, you owe me $1000 as a condition of reading this comment. Your options are to unread the comment, pay me $1000, or pay me nothing to incentivize me to charge a price you'll actually pay (likely $0.00 for comments but not for everything)
Sad but true. I paid for Prime to be ad free, easily worth 3$/month but sure enough now part of their catalog has become "only available with ads" or ads in their FireTV is before you hit the prime app (and then again when you do). So now their whole product is crap and I'm looking for a new streaming stick solution [anyone?] Sounds like it's time for a newcomer/disruptor like Angel Studios to release one.
Natural next step of the ad lobby is obviously to pay the lobby to make it illegal to bypass the money making machine if they haven't done so yet. I don't doubt that capitalism still works, it just takes time to "boil the frogs" dead [enough] to stop them from buying such crappy products.
I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.
To anyone who didn’t find Kagi useful in the past, I strongly recommend you try it again, as they have made huge strides in usability and quality of surfaced data in just the past year…. Huge strides since even a few months ago too, with more adaptive curation, data labeling, and UI/UX
> I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.
It's not. In addition to their own indexes the results include calls to "all major search result providers worldwide"[1].
There are independent search engines that only use their own index, like Mojeek[1]. Kagi is explicitly something like a search engine aggregator.
The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.
There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.
So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.
Marginalia likely returns better results than Google, when it returns useful results. DDG/Bing likely returns average quality results which can be better than Google's slop results. It's not true that Google is the only useful one.
They pay scraping sites for results, including SERP API. When I pointed this out, last time Kagi was discussed on Hacker News, an employee of Kagi said that they're trying to build their own internal index, but he didn't provide details.
> You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s
Thanks, I needed to add a ?aep=11&atvm=2&udm=50 for AI mode. Wow!!!!!
>You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:
I'm using Kagi every day, and unfortunately, it is not true anymore. I think what happens is that the blanket banning of IP ranges because of LLMs, and flat out incompetence and laziness, affects them heavily. I get results, or just a few unrelated ones many times every day, while Google happily returns what I searched for. I think Kagi's index is shrinking, or they really made their algorithm worse.
Same here. Been paying for Kagi for probably a year or so, but I find that it hasn’t really been able to keep up with at least my personal expectations. It feels quite slow (which I don’t remember it always being), and the search result quality is not always the best. On top of that, the 10$/mo is a little steep for me, given that their assistant and maps are quite sub-par in my opinion. I would have preferred them to focus more on the search experience, and less on the other products. Or give me a cheaper plan for only unlimited search without the other products.
It definitely is. The extension-based redirect in Safari is also unreliable. Furthermore, many of my searches (and others', apparently) unexplainably defaulted to Groningen in the Netherlands, even though I'm nowhere near the place.
I ended up not renewing my annual subscription. Since then, I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates domain ranking for DuckDuckGo – plus DDG already lets you turn off ads natively.
Oh that shorthand is fun. Curious it works at all.
But yeah I'd switch to Kagi if I had any more forcing function. Maybe without LLM's but google continously getting worse, that'd been the actual thing for me
I like Kagi, but is it me or have their results been less than great for the past 1-3mo? Maybe the places they're pulling their results from have had some changes?
I'd say that the ranking, and thus the relevance, is noticeably higher. If I know what I want to find, Kagi is good at surfacing exactly that, not something vaguely related.
Which being public wealth, should be publicly available.
Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.
It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.
Unfortunately copyright law allows them to give something to one person without giving it to others _and_ to sue to the former person to block them from giving it to the others.
You likely don’t even understand the full extent of it. Long ago now, when Google took off and started dominating because it was “the best results” people didn’t realize that even though they were the best results, they were not actually good results. To be the best, you just have to be notably better than your nearest competitor, you don’t actually have to be good or even decent, just noticeably better. Today Google really has no competitors besides all the derivatives it has maintained to maintain an illusion of competition, the most obvious examples being DickDuckGo and Bing.
It’s somewhat similar with AI today, only the competitive landscape has majorly shifted with the Chinese models, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. All the sudden you no longer have a closed system of American models that can all be contained and managed as good enough to make people believe are “the best”; they actually have to compete in a far more competitive arena with the tension of the best model being the most competent model, and the most competent model, by virtue of AI, will be the least restricted, the least censored, the least guardrailed, the least controlled to present a telescreen and Hollywood type fantasy world where the good guys always win and … wouldn’t you know it … the good guys is always us, the people controlled by a psychopathic, narcissistic cabal that also controls what AI will tell you, the false truth.
It's a shame there aren't any good Chinese search engines. From what I've read the Chinese internet is mostly centralised around a few apps like WeChat.
Mmmh this change doesn't seem about gaming the index but rather about scraping the index. Which affects in a negative way only Google. And actually would affect users in a positive way because it lets other companies create their indexes more easily (at the expense of a poor mega-corp, indeed)
I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
The quintessential HN comment questioning the obvious.
Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.
Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.
> Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't
Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?
Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).
> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away
Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.
> But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference
It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.
> where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff
Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)
I'm not American. You can say that Murica is up to no good, but RuZZia is definitely up to much much worse. It's way more oppressive and repressive by an order of magnitude. Employees at Yandex have to censor stuff about Putin and the war (see egorfine's screenshot) or they risk getting defenestrated, death by polonium, or death by torture. There is no "First Amendment". Putin's wishes are the law. He is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracies in Europe and around the world.
Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.
This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)?
Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days.
(For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)
As a general rule, if another country has an open war with your neighbor and openly says that you may be next, don’t put in private data into the sites controlled by that country.
Ok, maybe not the neighbor (yet), but US has an open war with Iran (and has bombed a few others also) but it also threathens to annex its neigbor to the north plus another island country.
Sure, americans might consider themselves to be "the good guys", but the rest of the world doesn't.
From where in the rest of the world are you? Did even you talk to anyone living in countries neighboring Russia?
Sure not everyone benefitted from US but a ton of people/countries did and still do.
US never felt a need to build walls to prevent their citizens/allies from leaving. Russia and the others very much so.
With US the track record may be mixed, but a ton of countries from Europe and Asia benefitted tremendously. Russia otoh doesn’t have a concept of win-win, they tend to exploit even their closest allies, which anyone living in Baltics/East-Central Europe can tell you.
What bombed country benefits from US? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? Yemen? Venezuela? Syria? Yemen? How do they benefit? Destroyed infrastructure is somehow helping them? Americans stealing their resources if they decide to occupy the country? How? Win-win in iran how exactly? US just proved to the rest of the world that you need nukes to be safe from americans, and even then they'll sanction you to hell if possible, just because you're not bending over for them.
I'm from the border of central europe and balkans, I don't benefit at all, it just costs me money to pay for a van full of soldiers every time americans decide to occupy some country half the planet away.
I just learned about Kagi from the comments here. The first time I saw this kind of paid search engine was Waterfox Search when browsing with the Waterfox browser, but I still go with DuckDuckGo most of the time for a privacy-first search engine. Did you try Kagi? What's so special about it that makes you willing to pay for the service?
Yandex censors the results, it is required by law, so I do not understand what are you arguing against. To be specific, any URLs, which are blacklisted and banned in Russia, must be omitted from search results. Which includes BBC and other Western media and explains the difference in images because in the Google's results the images come from BBC and Voice of America.
Also, if you try to search for "download Chrome" (in Russian) then the first result in Yandex leads to a scammy website: https://ibb.co/HDRJGgZD The real link is the second one, but I remember a year ago or so there was no official link at all.
Yandex has also been caught "accidentally" removing the site of Ekaterina Duntsova who was planning to nominate for presidential election in 2024, and showed fake/phishing sites instead.
So, Yandex is only good for searching torrents/pirated movies (which you can watch on rutube) and nothing more.
Absolutely. Where google is shaping results "to please corpo-political masters", Yandex is obviously influenced by the Kreml
I use Kagi as my daily driver. But there are some kinds of queries where my interests and Yandex's interests happen to align. Mostly anything corporate America wouldn't like, like evil copyright-infringing websites
Just tried Yandex again, after a long time, and indeed it was a blast from the past, in a positive sense! So many real search results, which transports the feel of an authentic mirror of the web contents. Default search engine from now on! Thanks for the hint.
So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise.
I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but
I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.
Yes, it’s been impossible to trust Google since the “Jigsaw” project, and especially when they started blanking out search pages on trending topics with messages like “these results are changing quickly”. It’s clear that they have moved from being a neutral arbiter to pushing a perspective.
I refuse to use a search engine that sees me as cattle to be steered towards “preferred” information sources. I specifically enjoy reading fringe material and will continue to seek and find it, thank you very much.
439 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadThe base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL.
Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
Great. On top of my on-going battle with Windows + Firefox + DNS/TLS resolution sometimes stalling for seconds at a time, another few second server-side stall is introduced.
I swear that every day modern computing scenarios get slower and slower instead of snappier and snappier.
Have you tried disabling HTTP/2?
The situation seems to vary from result to result even on the same page of the same search - at least on the test search I just did. You can figure out what happening to an extent but this very inconsistency seems to speak to a dystopian quality to today's information gatekeepers.
[1] Example. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Now you can't load the page and can't easily (using only the browser UI) get a link to paste into archive.org or archive.is to read the page.
I do a bunch of work in remote areas with low-ping/low-bandwidth networks. The “hold on a skimmer while we round trip to Google” dark pattern makes the service unusable for me when I’m on-location.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-m&q=direct%...
They do not, so don't assert so confidently that they do.
Linked below is an explanation which includes confirmation of that fact by a member of the uBlock Origin team.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680338
They own the JS but that is not enough. Don't assert so confidently that they don't need the redirects.
A uBlock Origin developer confirms, regarding Google results click tracking:
Which corroborates the strangely flagged sibling comment.https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1we7491/how_t...
This discussion is about search results pages with JavaScript enabled.
>And btw about the result filtering the uBlock dev wants to do
For a long time, uBlock Origin has kept up with blocking Google's click tracking out of the box with the default Privacy filter list (privacy.txt).
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...
This means that all uBlock Origin users (even people with no Google account) would NOT be click-tracked, WITH JavaScript enabled.
You say "They own the JS on the page", so the topic of discussion here is simply whether users could block click tracking on the client side.
And until now, they could have: by installing uBlock Origin or any content blocker with a sane privacy list.
Now, they cannot.
Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.
That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.
- usually better than Google
- has actually useful features (smush BS listicle articles together, weight/block sites)
- if you don’t use any searches that month, they’ll just straight up refund the month subscription automatically
- doesn’t annoy me constantly
https://docs.clearurls.xyz/
I recommend reading more than the headline
What is "that" you say wouldn't work?
The extension can work fine by requesting every goto link upfront. As far as your google searches go, this is just as private as before.
I would recommend you avoid judging a comment because of a metric it neither said nor implied.
That no longer is possible, you must ask google.com for consent to visit the result link before seeing what the final target URL is.
And it can still prevent google from knowing which search results you click on, even though OP didn't mention that feature.
How do you figure? How else could it possibly work now?
You do a google search. The extension resolves every link on the page immediately via the goto urls. This doesn't leak any information to google because they obviously know which links they sent you. Now the links are resolved and you can copy and click them and get clean URLs, without sending any information about which ones you're copying or clicking.
In my second comment?
I was replying to a detailed explanation of the old mechanism that ended with "that is no longer possible", so I said "it doesn't need to use that exact mechanism" referring to the old mechanism.
It needs to update to the new way things work. But that's fine. An extension that performs the same task is still fully possible.
The article also suggests that it cannot be decoded.
Nothing good ever comes from businesses desperately trying to protect their moats rather than making their products better so they don't need to.
Its not because chatgpt is so superior. Its just because google search is dogshit.
They work on killing the web as we knew it and I fear its kinda working.
e.g. I'm just now looking for the menu for a local restaurant. "restaurantname menu" in Kagi (Google would presumably be similar) returns a link to the menu as the first result in about a second. Or "restaurantname menu !" goes directly to the menu in about a second.
Meanwhile, searching "restaurantname menu" in chatgpt takes about 5 seconds to return an embedded map from mapbox showing the location of the restaurant. If I click the restaurant pin on the map, there's no menu link, the 667 reviews have no link or way to view, and the restaurant description literally says "I don't have enough information to identify which local business <restaurantname> refers to."
Below the map there's some text: "If you mean <restaurantname> in <place>, here’s the current menu. <restaurantname>". The <restaurantname> link just opens the same card as clicking the pin on the map.
After that there's a bullet point list of the menu that ommits a ton of detail and options.
After that there's finally a link... that I can click to open up a popup at the bottom of the page with an actual link to the menu.
This was literally the first thing that popped into my head, I didn't have to put any effort into finding a query where chatgpt falls on its face.
Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.
You can't. Google will ignore robots.txt in some cases (e.g. "The REP isn't applicable to Google's crawlers that are controlled by users (for example, feed subscriptions), or crawlers that are used to increase user safety (for example, malware analysis)").
robots.txt is just a suggestion that Google loosely follows.
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robot...
In effect, they’re removing attribution from the content they quote from other people’s websites. It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is one thing to crawl other people’s websites and display snippets of their work as your search results when each result is properly and transparently attributed. But if the text is quoted and the source is not there alongside it in plaintext, replaced only by a vague promise that, if you ask, we may or may not tell you where this piece of content is from, that is a very different deal.
As others have elaborated, the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.
What? Like they weren’t doing this before? Obviously Google’s telemetry is tracking every link you click regardless; there’s no extra tracking benefit to this.
The reason they’re doing this seems to be to stop competitors from scraping their search results.
Think about it: if you want to set up something like jina.ai you need to build your own index or piggyback on Google. My guess is they use residential proxies to fire requests to Google then scrape the URLs.
Opaque URLs now give Google another gateway to detect circumvention of their anti-bot controls, helping them monetise their search index rather than allowing providers like jina.ai to succeed.
As a regular user, it's a minor annoyance.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Uruky is the way. 2x cheaper also.
Do any large ISPs use visit data to feed into a search index?
I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend.
Yeah no thanks, that was creepy as hell and had it rolled back ASAP. You’ve got to realise the power these tech companies hold over your business. Don’t show up in the search results, someone lists your business as closed in maps, a tracking phone number goes dead so they can’t call you, you might as well have shut up shop and ceased to exist.
DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.
For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?
These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.
If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.
Sometimes I need to and no doubt it will get worse, but for now it's my rebellion
Firefox, Waterfox, Iceweasel, Icecat, Seamonkey, LibreWolf, Pale Moon, Mullvad, Tor Browser
Chromium, ungoogled-chromium, Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Falkon, qutebrowser
Safari, GNOME Web, Konqueror
No difference.
I am 100% certain it has nothing to do with my browser.
I think curated directories from prehistoric times might make a comeback eventually. ironically, I think we could use LLMs to filter out slop by measuring information to noise ratio, which is atrocious for LLM/ESL slop.
It's the only recommended Chromium browser by Privacy Guides. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#brave
I don't miss Google at all.
Goodbye you shit company.
&udm=web works fine for me, you can use a browser shortcut or extension to enforce it
You get the results and they do have direct URLs. But then, if you do some things with the link, e.g. right click to open it in a new tab, it swaps the URL to the indirect one. The idea is that initially you see a normal link, with a normal URL which will be displayed correctly when you hover the mouse over it, but right before you click it, it's swapped for the indirect one.
So, they have been doing stuff like this for a while and it has been somewhat fluid, because the swapping can occur on different events and I have also seen it load with all the links pre-swapped to the indirect ones, sometimes.
So, yes, what you see may be different and you may get the indirect URLs swapped at different stages.
I ran the same search in an incognito window and it showed the /goto links.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665572
PS: I do not understand why people keep using Google search, the results turned biased and mediocre.
Maybe Google is observing this?
Google has been encoding the target url for years.
and trying to protect your moat isn't automatically a bad thing. they clearly feel it's helping competition, so they're closing a hole. competition is good doesn't mean help your competitors.
- coming from someone who's been using fastmail as my personal for ~10 years because i don't want my emails to be backprop fodder
Removing this made google search horrible to use. I often use command+f to quickly identify relevant search results, but doing it on 10 results at a time is so laborious that I just don't bother using Google search, resulting in less searches and use of other tools instead.
I genuinely forget I’m not using Google until I come across articles like this
I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.
There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.
It's really not free. You're paying with your data.
Google's strong position in AI gives them bragging right to attract more companies and get them to actually pay, subsidizing your use. It also lowers competitors position as you're not touching them while we're on Gemini. It also fortifies their position in the future ad market.
Being second or third in AI usage is worth a lot, one's private data matters very little in comparison.
what does this even mean
I won't be first, second or third in the AI race. I'm not even participating in that race. I don't care who wins. However my private data are mine and I do care about them.
It's Google and those other companies that may not care about my privacy, because the AI race is more important to them.
If AI is going to cost too much, I will use a cheaper one (Ferrari or FIAT?) or if every AI will cost too much, no AI all and there will be billions of people like me.
Parent was pointing at the value exchange, and I argued that users' privacy is not the currency Google deals with.
Your privacy can be valuable to you, it just has no weight on the exchange.
However when I run an adblocker and Blockada on Android, when I use alternatives to the YouTube app (and Google is technologically fighting them) when I don't log into Google, then those exchanges happen with very little of the currency Google is interested in.
It's now possible to put a complex spin/bias on whatever the system shows (or whatever it chooses to bury) in a really easy and scalable way.
Dairy Association pays, and now everything about bones looks for a plausible way to work in the importance of milk for calcium.
But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google:
https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr...
(Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')
The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.
Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.
They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
That is interesting, which LLMs? Asking as someone paying monthly Claude subscription.
You can even choose a model for each turn.
I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.
When i do actually use it for search; it's amazing... assuming I've not already burnt my quota.
https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
Also, super cool link, thanks for the share.
That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.
I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.
(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)
And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.
Kagi has limitations like not showing sites with ads which many people with ad blockers don't mind.
Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.
Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web
I still support the use of Kagi though, as a market signal to Google that we'd even pay them for their product if it wasn't dogshit.
Advertisers are sold the idea that 1000 clicks/impression is X dollars. The average impression might be priced at 1000/X$.
But you are worth much more than that for two reasons.
- you are a person willing to pay 5$
- Google can sell a “collectivized” product. The same way that eg collective farmer crop insurance creates actual value.
and the third reason (as consequence of the second) they dont want people to think about: it gives them more opportunity to fudge the value by making it all very complicated.
The more money you're willing to pay to avoid ads the more you're worth to advertisers.
That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.
Yes, but if you are so against ads that you spend $20 to not see ads (I am definitely in this group) and then see an ad for a "cool product" anyway, then that product is no longer cool. Any time something like this happens, I legitimately develop a grudge against that company and their products.
I might have bought that product before seeing the ad, but there is no chance of that after seeing the ad.
Before the ad, you didn't even know the product existed. Now you know it exists, making you infinitely more likely to buy it.
Did those studies have any outliers that DID have a negative reaction to ads? I am 100% certain I'd react EXTREMELY negatively in a situation like that.
The same way I wanted to buy a Tesla and rented one a couple of times in the past. Now I would NEVER AGAIN even go into a Tesla. Fuck that company.
And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.
This is silly. The economy doesn't work if no one is willing to pay for goods. The content you're consuming won't be made if theres no market value to create it in the first place. Pirating is not a solution to our data privacy problem.
In other words, you owe me $1000 as a condition of reading this comment. Your options are to unread the comment, pay me $1000, or pay me nothing to incentivize me to charge a price you'll actually pay (likely $0.00 for comments but not for everything)
Natural next step of the ad lobby is obviously to pay the lobby to make it illegal to bypass the money making machine if they haven't done so yet. I don't doubt that capitalism still works, it just takes time to "boil the frogs" dead [enough] to stop them from buying such crappy products.
To anyone who didn’t find Kagi useful in the past, I strongly recommend you try it again, as they have made huge strides in usability and quality of surfaced data in just the past year…. Huge strides since even a few months ago too, with more adaptive curation, data labeling, and UI/UX
It's not. In addition to their own indexes the results include calls to "all major search result providers worldwide"[1].
There are independent search engines that only use their own index, like Mojeek[1]. Kagi is explicitly something like a search engine aggregator.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... [2]: https://www.mojeek.com/
But Kagi’s SERP API provider is going to have to adapt, I guess.
>Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide
There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.
So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.
I believe they are building their own index but targeted towards useful results not included in the others
>You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:
It definitely is. The extension-based redirect in Safari is also unreliable. Furthermore, many of my searches (and others', apparently) unexplainably defaulted to Groningen in the Netherlands, even though I'm nowhere near the place.
I ended up not renewing my annual subscription. Since then, I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates domain ranking for DuckDuckGo – plus DDG already lets you turn off ads natively.
Also Google AI mode is accessible on google.com/ai.
But yeah I'd switch to Kagi if I had any more forcing function. Maybe without LLM's but google continously getting worse, that'd been the actual thing for me
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I hate the very idea that destination location is opaque, and user can't verify if you are funneled toward malvertizing.
I hate even base64 encoded links in the results.
Don't forget cached pages.
Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
It’s somewhat similar with AI today, only the competitive landscape has majorly shifted with the Chinese models, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. All the sudden you no longer have a closed system of American models that can all be contained and managed as good enough to make people believe are “the best”; they actually have to compete in a far more competitive arena with the tension of the best model being the most competent model, and the most competent model, by virtue of AI, will be the least restricted, the least censored, the least guardrailed, the least controlled to present a telescreen and Hollywood type fantasy world where the good guys always win and … wouldn’t you know it … the good guys is always us, the people controlled by a psychopathic, narcissistic cabal that also controls what AI will tell you, the false truth.
Google is making it harder for people to game the index, working in your favor.
These periodic astroturfing campaigns for a Russian product on HN are annoying, and appaling if you have any morals.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
How about topics that USA censors?
Of course you should not search Ukraine info on yandex. But you are only showing the worst case scenario. What's the average and best case?
How is Yandex more morally-bankrupt than Google in your analysis?
Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.
Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.
Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?
Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).
> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away
Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.
It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.
Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)
Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.
Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days.
(For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)
Just like Russia doesn’t care about online criminals being located within their borders - as long as they target outside.
Ok, maybe not the neighbor (yet), but US has an open war with Iran (and has bombed a few others also) but it also threathens to annex its neigbor to the north plus another island country.
Sure, americans might consider themselves to be "the good guys", but the rest of the world doesn't.
Sure not everyone benefitted from US but a ton of people/countries did and still do.
US never felt a need to build walls to prevent their citizens/allies from leaving. Russia and the others very much so.
With US the track record may be mixed, but a ton of countries from Europe and Asia benefitted tremendously. Russia otoh doesn’t have a concept of win-win, they tend to exploit even their closest allies, which anyone living in Baltics/East-Central Europe can tell you.
I'm from the border of central europe and balkans, I don't benefit at all, it just costs me money to pay for a van full of soldiers every time americans decide to occupy some country half the planet away.
You might want to reconsider this.
https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
It's the usual "I prefer censorship not targeted at/tailor made for me".
Also, if you try to search for "download Chrome" (in Russian) then the first result in Yandex leads to a scammy website: https://ibb.co/HDRJGgZD The real link is the second one, but I remember a year ago or so there was no official link at all.
Yandex has also been caught "accidentally" removing the site of Ekaterina Duntsova who was planning to nominate for presidential election in 2024, and showed fake/phishing sites instead.
So, Yandex is only good for searching torrents/pirated movies (which you can watch on rutube) and nothing more.
Re-read the comment you replied to, and the one above
I use Kagi as my daily driver. But there are some kinds of queries where my interests and Yandex's interests happen to align. Mostly anything corporate America wouldn't like, like evil copyright-infringing websites
For everyone to make the search themselves
So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise.
I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.
It hasn’t replaced Kagi as my daily driver but the UX is fun.
I refuse to use a search engine that sees me as cattle to be steered towards “preferred” information sources. I specifically enjoy reading fringe material and will continue to seek and find it, thank you very much.
I get it, but at 9–10% error rate, you’re basically gambling with the results.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...