@pluralistic yes! kagi is one of the best things on the Internet now. Pray that big tech does not acquire kagi. (other good things on the Internet include mastodon, archive.org and personal fave, syncthing.)
@pluralistic Google search still works very well if they don't know who you are. Just use a computer and delete all cookies and you will find out. This is what kagi essentially does, so the results are the same.
It will not work on an Android phone, of course. Android is designed by Google to track its users, so deleting cookies is not enough.
Why people use Chrome, log in their Google account and expect Google not to taint the search results is beyond me.
@pluralistic Hey Cory, while I understand the excitement for Kagi, I ask you to reevaluate Kagi w.r.t. its blatant queerphobic devs, a good summary can be found here:
Basically they are totally in love with the tech-bro "meritocracy" idea and that inclusivity would hurt innovation, that politics should be completely be separate from professional life and that queerphobic comments are good free speech (but calling them out is not, because that's political).
@myx AFAICT Perplexity is AI-based. That makes it a nonstarter for me - I don't want hallucinated results, and I want a web made out of websites that I look at, not summaries of website.
@pluralistic@myx Unfortunately Kagi started as an AI startup and the vast majority of their focus right now is integrating like five separate AI tools into their search. They're true believers in AI, they just don't have a lot of it rolled out outside of beta testing yet. They had no interest in listening to users who told them they didn't want AI in their search. https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search
@lori@myx Luckily my sub is month-to-month so I'll quit when that happens. Ideally someone less stupid will have replicated their feat by then and will be willing to take my money.
@pluralistic@lori ah, that's pretty sad news :( I'm enjoying perplexity so far FWIW, specifically for the relatively low-stakes kinds of searches where I'm going to be pretty lazy about how many of the links I read and how closely. I figure some AI hallucination thrown in isn't likely to give outcomes too much worse than my own laziness.
@pluralistic"When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave"
I have my doubts about the reliability of this approach. How long before Google et al close access to those APIs, the same way Reddit did?
@omegaprobe@pluralistic honestly this is a constant potential threat for all of these alternative search engines: if Kagi or DDG or whatever became an actual threat to Google or Bing, they'd just rip the API away. They can never kill Google or Bing because in a way they are Google or Bing
Might mean that I have to let the Ahrefs crawler back into my sites again, as it seems to be used to power the Yep search engine, which looks quite good.
It's past time that we figured out a way to do an end-run around Google: they've just become too predatory and too useless. That's a bad combo.
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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12) and beyond!
@pluralistic Sorry for the offtopic but have you considered setting the visibility of your replies in a thread as "unlisted" so they are publicly available but not automatically shown in public feeds ?