I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren't any exact matches, which is the whole point.
Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?
I hope Kagi introduces an anonymous access feature. For instance, it could incorporate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). These are cryptographic techniques where one party (the prover) can confirm to another (the verifier) that a claim is accurate without disclosing any additional information. This is especially beneficial for authentication scenarios where it's essential to avoid sharing extra details.
To implement zero-knowledge authentication for quota API access:
1. Token Creation:
- Each month, users receive a token tied to their identity and quota.
- The token can be split for use on multiple devices using cryptographic methods.
2. API Access:
- Clients present a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to confirm they have a valid token and haven't used up their quota. The server verifies this without seeing the exact details.
3. Client Synchronization:
- Each client tracks its quota usage.
- Synchronization can be peer-to-peer or through a centralized, encrypted server to prevent double spending of the quota.
4. Quota Renewal:
- Monthly, old tokens expire, and new tokens are issued.
Challenges:
- ZKPs can be resource-intensive.
- Token security is crucial; there should be a way to handle lost or compromised tokens.
- The system should prevent quota "double-spending" across devices.
- If a centralized server is used for synchronization, it should operate with encrypted data.
This way Kagi would only know who their customers are but not what kind of searches they make.
Since you are interested in cryptography, there is a discussion on Kagi feedback site along the same lines as your idea, about possible ways to achieve this without the need for cryptocurrency. [2]
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
[2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-anonymous-searches...
There's only one solution, and that is that you need to put a bit of trust in Kagi. Compared to the major one, Google, you can chose between one that promises to not store data, and one that promises it does (and does a lot).
It's always a bit sad that here on HN, when companies try to do better than bigger players, there's always people who think it isn't enough. It has to be absolutely impossibly perfect.
You have to understand that most of us aren't fighting some battle for "perfect privacy," I just want a search engine that works for me, rather than advertisers, at the level of the search results themselves.
This reads and smells like ChatGPT / AI.
There are sooooo many other ways to fingerprint than an account.
Oh look, this MacBook with X by Y resolution from this IP address has had 100 searches for the past 2 hours. Oh no! He switched to incognito.
The Google search algorithm from 5 years ago was amazing, why they decided to change it for the worse is something I will never understand! And no I do not blame SEO entirely since that existed 5 years ago, what I am often looking for but can no longer find is information that has nothing to do with any products. It's not ads that I need to page through, but unrelated and bad results that are limited. I do not want to see the same results from page 1 on page 3.
When you make your account, you're given the option to customize. When you do, you can pick things like color theme and how URLs are displayed. On the right hand side of the page there is a preview of what your Kagi searches will look like.
In my example, the demo Kagi search is Magic The Gathering. I play a lot of Magic The Gathering. I spend most of my time online searching for things related to MtG or brewing decks, second only to things related to software development.
I imagine it's coincidence. MtG is a pretty nerdy hobby and Kagi seems like a pretty nerdy product. However, it made me uncomfortable enough to ask:
Is that what it shows for everyone? Or is there some tracking going on already that is being demoed? It's almost certainly the former given the positioning of Kagi in the search market, but I'd like to be sure.
Kagi is incredible and worth every penny simply for being able to remove the SEO scam and tire fire that is Pinterest from all image search results.
I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist
everything else I use google for are just addresses
so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed
For example:
nyt crossword
cheap iem reddit
starbucks near me
M7FFALP
Likely, a good search product in the future will be a combnation of both.
You should know by now that LLMs will and do lie in subtle ways that are not apparent to non-experts. Using them to understand complicated concepts is a great way to "learn" incorrect information. To be fair, the same can be said for humans, but humans are worse at bullshitting.
I use search a lot in my workflow and my usage is showing 2k/month. I expected it would have been 3-4k.
Signed up for Kagi today and have been looking for a permanent gmail solution.
Had this bundle been available today I'd have jumped on it.
For recipes and stuff it was fine.
But could you not just pay for a month and try it? I don’t think their plans bind you for a longer than a month.
Fuck google, I have work to do. Thanks for the tip! Nice realizing that they've basically been wasting my time for a while now and that there's a decent alternative available.
The ability to essentially "weight" particular domains (pin, block, or anywhere in between) has saved me so much time. There are certain searches I do (music-related in particular) where I always want particular sites (metal-archives, bandcamp, etc) to be the first results, and having that as an option is great. It means that searches that I perform often have a result within the first 1-5 results that is exactly what I want.
No ads, way less SEO spam, and the ability to completely remove domains from results if I think I need to tweak it further. For most of my searches I previously used Google for- Kagi makes Google's results look laughably bad.
I've also been using it at work for tech searches (linux, redhat, etc) and it has saved me time there too.
I use a "family" account- and have one work account and one home account that way I can have different settings for different environments (would be neat if this could be built into non-family accounts though... like "personas" or "profiles" or something...) because I'm overpaying a bit to have the two account setup and don't reach the search cap. I think I'm okay with that though, because having the cap so high means I've removed the "running out of searches" anxiety from my usage of the service.
Search engines should be able to support even those who are not SEO experts and not the first ones to arrive and sit on specific keywords. What I mean under that, if you have multiple good, exhaustive answers for a query, why not offer varying/random good results, so every link would have a chance? Let people break out of their bubbles.
Same power pyramid scheme. Yukk.
Fingers crossed, but I have a good feeling about it. If it goes well the pricing seems fair.
I'm considering signing up; it would be one fewer service I'm relying on google for.
Kagi is also working on removing the 1000 limit on the 10$ subscription and offering unlimited searches.
Switching from the 5 $ plan to 10 $ was super smooth by the way, so if you want to try for less $, the 5 $ for a month is enough so you can get used to the product and know if you like it or not (and that's besides the 100 free you get while signing up for a trial).
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Second, I just looked up when this feature was introduced (assuming it was fairly new), and it was in... November 2011. It's been there for the past twelve years. See:
https://www.wired.com/2011/11/google-verbatim-search-back/
https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/11/18/google-introduc...
Thanks for letting us know! It's been right under our noses the whole time -- and it's not like the Tools menu is even particularly hidden, at least on desktop.
Every time I tried it, it didn't work.
It certainly changed a lot on those years, but the reason nobody acknowledges it is probably because it's a coin-toss if Google wants "verbatim" to mean verbatim today.
Quotes actually stopped working (they became a hint, instead of filtering the results) a long time ago, and many people insisted for years that the verbatim search worked. Probably because those tried it on the days when Google decided to use a standard dictionary. Nowadays even those people gave-up.
I think I also mentioned it a couple of times when the same complaint came up.
The problem I think is that "verbatim" is not a word that one thinks of, so nobody searches for that. Plus it's hidden in a generic "Tools" menu. Sometime you get a link to search for the exact phrase at the bottom of results, but that too is subtle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36618104
I actually use that, but it has its faults. You get more spam results and iffy sites (e.g. Wikipedia clones). It's also missing some of Google's convenient features (like doing unit conversions and arithmetic).
IIRC, Verbatim mode is closer to the raw results of Google's underlying search engine, before some of the massaging they do. Some of that massaging is bad, but some of it's all right.
I swear that it used to work for certain strings I'm trying to find now which I was able to find information on and now it isn't even returning, with "verbatim" set, something that is in a very well-known program's documentation. Bing finds like three results. Google has dropped the ball so hard it's embarrassing
1 - By interpreting your search, it leads to better "search quality" by having one model say "i think this is what they want" and another execute the search. P90 accuracy is increased at the cost of P99 accuracy.
2 - If you search for a literal string you know exists, you expect to find it. By interpreting, fewer search inputs with literal strings make it to the search function.
3 - Since Google is interpreting more searches, this gives ad-placement a route in to favorably interpret "they want to buy something" even when this isn't the case. This makes Google money.
4 - People that used to use literal searches either stop, learn how, or switch search engines.
5 - After a couple years, business metrics show that literal searches represent 0.1% of queries and make less money, is it really worth investing in? When it was a P99 issue it fell off the radar and now the P999 is lost.
So a series or rational decisions by rational actors leads to a decline of a used feature because of business incentives and chasing P90s at the cost of P99s.
I wonder if there is now a gap in the market for some kind of "literal" search engine that makes no attempt to infer meaning on your search terms and simply gives you the closest results? In other words Google ca 2012.
We did make an update last year to better reflect where quoted content appears on a page in the snippets we show. We did this because sometimes it's hard to find the quoted material on the page itself, leading to the "quotes don't work" issues.
This post explains more about this: https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...
The post also explains things like how with punctuation, we'll ignore that -- which leads to the "example.com" type of issue you might be having. If you're quoting a domain name, we're likely seeing that as "name com" rather than a request to just search within the domain. If you want to just search within the domain, that's what site: is for such as [site:example.com whatever you want to search for]
I use Google as a fallback but these days it happens perhaps once every couple months, and mostly I don't get anything out of it.
Google remained better for programming questions for significantly longer (I speculate this may be because Google's own programmers used it, and complained when the results sucked :-)), but now it's not. Not really.
Like you, I still use Google as a long shot, but that's become quite rare.
I sometimes use Bing for Microsoft-specific questions, if DDG doesn't give me what I want. I have the sense that Bing covers Microsoft a little better than the others do. I have no real solid evidence for this, but it seems plausible on the surface.
Verbatim really highlights how almost useless the default mode has become.
https://serpapi.com/playground?q=The+most+popular+fruit+in+t...
Other useful parameters, you can use nfpr to force it to not correct your search terms
https://serpapi.com/blog/filtering-google-search-and-google-...