DDG to the rescue! It’s astounding how in this day and age, duckduckgo gives much more meaningful results than google. Exception made for local businesses, but for technical info and issues, DDG is way better.
I have noticed this too, DDG is giving me more of what i want, google always disappoints with random an unrerlated resutls, Some of the resultso of DDG are not even visible in first page of google results.
Mmm, but what’s their plan to resist enshittification? After all, Google started out as “fundamentally different, user-centric.” What will Kagi do when their market penetration peaks and the business managers demand more growth?
Exactly. The simple fact is, people need to get more willing to pay for things with money instead of personal data. Nothing is free, but we like the idea that things don’t cost money, and instead we’ve allowed corporations to literally buy and monetize our very selves.
Problem is, a lot of people don't have a lot of money because of how the world has been allowed to go. Everything is funnelled towards the worst people who go unpunished somehow. There needs to be an uprising or something.
Just curious, in the hypothetical situation that 100% of users on the web used Kagi how is it any different? They’ll demand more growth at that point but how would they achieve it?
Well, if your argument is: “any company that becomes a monopoly will abuse monopoly power”, then sure I agree with you. You got me there!
My argument is: “given a reliable financial alternative to advertising, a company will be able to resist enshitification for a long time, as long as there is no absolute tyrannical monopoly.”
I assumed the last part was implied and I’m sorry for the confusion!
Makes sense, but yea it didn’t really answer the overall question of “if it hits peak market penetration how will it avoid going the Google route” since google also started with the same premise. I suppose the answer is hope it doesn’t become a monopoly
While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it’s always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That’s why all of us are even here to begin with
The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.
We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though – kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.
It’s $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.
It’s also certainly possible for a privately owned company (even one owned by a single individual) to undergo enshitification, it is only (if anything) less likely.
I’ve used it this month a bit for the free 100 searches, but found it rather similar to my Google results. Can someone enlighten me in how they provide a better service?
I find the results to be cleaner and more relevant at least. With Kagi the relevant link is usually first or second link (like Google used to be) and the same search on Google I sometimes have to scroll down about 3-4 pages till I get to something relevant. Worse some of the ads Google is pushing to the top are misleading or completely contrary to what I’m looking for.
Kagi allowing me to ban domains (bye bye pinterest) and boost others has also been pretty helpful.
Unfortunately DDG has gone downhill quite a lot in the last year or two.
Exception made for local businesses,
It’s funny you say that, because in the last year or so suddenly my search results are being polluted with completely unrelated links to local businesses that don’t even contain a single one of my search terms.
They’ve obviously struck some deal where they’re shoehorning these ads into search results now. Very frustrating because they serve them as regular links so they bypass adblockers.
Really scummy move on their part, and it’s made their service worse to boot.
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
No, that’s the advertising that did that, the search results made a whole field of “SEO” possible which aimed to make the least useful page show up first in the results,
I heard lot of complaints of google search and seen the decline, but it’s like it got significantly worse in the last 1-2 years. I read it’s not just ads and clickbait/seo “articles”, but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.
It’s mostly unusable now if you want to search for smg new, I just use it to jump to already known pages (e.g. google “vodafone” to jump to the page with a few clicks an pay my bills, often simpler than typing/bookmarking).
At the risk of sounding like a shill sure! (I’m not, just a happy user)
Kagi is a paid search engine. They just introduced a 10/month plan that made the news which led me to their trial. I signed up a day later.
Because I’m paying money I have the feeling that I’m not the product unlike other free search engines. There’s likely no nefarious manipulation of search results and it’s refreshing to see new features rolling out.
It’s not all roses tho. Your searches are now tied to you and who really knows what’s going on with your data behind the scenes. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their priorities.
It’s not all roses tho. Your searches are now tied to you and who really knows what’s going on with your data behind the scenes. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their priorities.
Exactly. It feels like we aren’t the product but we don’t actually know what it costs to run Kagi and whether the $10/mo is sustainable or just a way to reduce the losses till they get sufficient market share. Upon which they might start doing things to recover the losses. I’m also paying for it but this has been at the back of my head. Until they’re a non-profit with similar transparency to Wikimedia, it won’t rest. Speaking of, if one of the established, reputable internet non-profits like Wikimedia or Mozilla starts a paid search engine, I’d be all over it. I’d pay for it for as long as I can afford it.
but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.
That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.
What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords “baby pajamas”. And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"…
Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn’t have broad keyword matching.
There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn’t replacing keywords to maximize value.
Except for the fact that they aren’t replacing keywords on the user end, simply matching advertiser keywords to a broader range of keywords specifically for the ad results.
Claiming they are replacing user keywords for higher value ones is absolutely incorrect, which is what the article they got that info from specifically claimed before it was retracted.
They aren’t taking watch searches and showing only luxury brand results, they are taking luxury watch searches and showing generic ads for “watches” alongside the relevant search results through the normal Algorithm which ties to find what it thinks is most relevant to those keywords.
That latter one is something all search engines do and without doing so they wouldn’t be very useful to the average person who doesn’t know about search operators and advanced search refining tools.
Compare to Amazon.com. Same thing. Ever less relevant searches in favor of who paid most to promote their products (usually random Chinese company with super cheap low quality products). Nowadays even if you search for a specific brand and model, it will often be buried by crap. And there is no way around it with advanced search parameters or filters.
It’s a shame, I remember when Google literally revolutionized how we search the web, and Amazon did the same with ecommerce.
Amazon was for a long time not available in my east EU country, first time I checked it a few years ago, I was baffled how people could find this useful. Now I live in west EU, so not many alternatives, I hate it for the same reasons you list. Unless you specifically look for smg and know the details, you get all the seless shit pushed forward in your search.
Goolag went completely off the rails when they decided to drop the “Don’t Be Evil” pledge. There were whole projects dropped on a dime the moment anyone questioned if a certain project or action was “evil”. Now nobody at Goolag even cares anymore. It’s all about that $earch For More $$$; anyway they can get it.
“Don’t be evil” is still the last line of Google’s corporate conduct. Seemingly not many people understand that Alphabet is Google’s parent company, not their direct replacement, and all they did was change it to “Do the right thing”, because generally when you’re broken up in anti-trust measures, you don’t want to just rename your company.
Note: I am not arguing that Google is a “Good” company. It’s just nonsensical to point to a completely arbitrary “Evil” in their policy and say that without that they would, y’know, be evil. Particularly when Google itself still has that policy.
My feeling is that the US as a nation will have to adapt its expectations around international success in women’s football. It is not that the team are necessarily failing, and it is not just about this team or this coach. For the US, there needs to be a bigger conversation about their collegiate system and youth development as well as the NWSL.
And also
There’s still a huge amount of talent in this US team but with so many of the squad playing solely in the NWSL, it doesn’t offer enough diversity to their squad in terms of playing against different styles. Here in Europe, where you’re playing in different competitions, Champions League or cups, players aren’t going to be fazed by other things because they come up against different football week in, week out.
Should instead be on the device and/or carrier side of things. Allow to set limits on mobile/wifi data and screen usage on the OS level for parental controls. Should definitely not be enforced by governments, but rather easily enforceable by parents.
I can’t help but think Chinese parents are as reasonable as US or EU parents. Letting your teen drive a car risks joyriding but also means they run errands and pick up groceries for you. Limiting a teen’s phone time means they’re going to prioritize friends and mischief over responding to parents or researching for schoolwork given their 120 minutes.
If you no longer need an audience, then why hang out with them?
Oof, I hope you don’t really believe that. Aside from “attention” that you get with friends, you should also get compassion, empathy, and love. And sometimes it’s just nice to have companionship.
This is such a fucking stupid statement and I’ve seen it in every thread discussing this shit.
Just because its obvious doesn’t make finding more evidence of it not news. This sort of “well duh” attitude plays right into normalizing the idea that hostile foreign governments are spying on us so effectively that im convinced it was started by 50 cent army posters who convinced regular dipshits that it was some brilliant and hilarious response.
Its not funny. Its not clever. It basically derails any discussion because “so obvious, I already like, knew that.” Honestly shut the fuck up if you have nothing to contribute and take your low effort bullshit back to reddit.
No, I had my breakfast. In the form of a shitty meme tier sandwich supplied by unoriginal assholes while I’m trying to get additional insights into the articles I’m reading.
telegraph.co.uk
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