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4 votes
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The immoral design of Diablo Immortal
6 votes -
What do microwaves hum?
3 votes -
A historian's perspective on the Battle of Helms Deep
13 votes -
Recommend chill/background games for my second monitor?
Sometimes I like to multitask while I'm having a chill. Basically I'm looking for a game that doesn't require my full attention so that I can play while I'm watching youtube or a stream. Lately...
Sometimes I like to multitask while I'm having a chill. Basically I'm looking for a game that doesn't require my full attention so that I can play while I'm watching youtube or a stream. Lately I've been playing Stellaris on easier difficulties to scratch this itch, but even on minimum time settings a Stellaris game takes multiple hours. Something with a 30-60 minute gameplay loop would be perfect.
Thanks for your suggestions!
14 votes -
Clues to the near-future behaviour of a warming Greenland, and perhaps even a warming Antarctic, buried under the North Sea
5 votes -
Hollywood says farewell to Chinese investment bonanza
9 votes -
Kotka, in southeastern Finland, removed the country's last publicly displayed statue of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin
5 votes -
*shels - Journey to the Plains (2011)
5 votes -
Phenaki - generating videos from text with prompts that can change over time
6 votes -
The amazing power of "machine eyes"
6 votes -
Magnus Carlsen withdraws from Sinquefield Cup
24 votes -
This man is allowed to starve himself to death, but not to eat some biscuits
9 votes -
Switzerland has 'systemic' racism issues, UN experts say
8 votes -
Danish general election called after PM faces mink cull ultimatum – Mette Frederiksen bypasses vote of no confidence by calling 1 November ballot
3 votes -
Ukraine to bid for 2030 men’s football World Cup with Spain and Portugal
5 votes -
Taiwan vows to respond to China’s military flight incursions
6 votes -
Planet of Lana | Xbox Game Pass trailer
6 votes -
Ethiopia, Tigrayan forces accept African Union-led peace talks
4 votes -
Why did Billy Eichner’s ‘Bros’ bomb at the box office? Straight people aren’t entirely to blame
12 votes -
Fever Ray – What They Call Us (2022)
2 votes -
One month with Kagi search
Toward the end of August, I signed up for a trial of Kagi -- a privacy-focused search engine. You get 50 free searches, and then, if you want to continue, you can convert to a paid account at $10...
Toward the end of August, I signed up for a trial of Kagi -- a privacy-focused search engine.
You get 50 free searches, and then, if you want to continue, you can convert to a paid account at $10 a month.
I mentioned here that I wasn't planning on converting to paid, as $10/month felt very steep and I didn't think I could make it my default search on my iOS phone, but @pallas's comment here ultimately made me want to give it a try.
Thus, I dropped the $10 bucks to turn the free trial into a paid one-month trial.
I'm very glad that I did.
The free trial itself was actually not very convincing to me. Knowing that I had limited searches and not wanting to run through them more than I needed, my searches were in the single digits each day. I was very judicious about what I searched and how I typed it. Furthermore, I kicked myself if I instinctively typed something like "imdb everything everywhere all at once" into Firefox's search bar instead of going to imdb.com and then typing in the movie title, as that meant I'd wasted 2% of my allotment on what wasn't technically a search but more of an internet navigation optimization.
On the searches I did I felt like I got good results, but I wasn't sure if that was because of the quality of the service or if it was because I'd simply thought more about what I was actually typing in. Also, the trial made me way too aware that I was searching with limited queries to really make me feel at ease about actually using the service.
Now that I've paid for a month, however, I've just used it as a stand-in for how I used to use DuckDuckGo -- "wikipedia steam deck"-style searches and all.
Kagi doesn't track your search contents, but they do track your number of searches. I have completed roughly 400 searches this month, which Kagi says costs roughly $5.00 out of the $10.00 that I paid them. I don't know nearly enough about any of this to know whether this is an accurate accounting of actual costs or overstating things, but I will say that the $10 price that I initially felt was steep has looked a lot more worth spending after a month on the service.
Kagi generally finds what I'm looking for within the first link. If it's not the top link, it's in the top 3. Furthermore, it seems to dredge up less junk. With DuckDuckGo, I loved that I wasn't being tracked for the purposes of advertising, but it felt like DDG had no problem serving me pages that were built specifically for that purpose. I'd often look up product reviews and get re-routed to sites that appeared to be nothing more than machine-generated lists of recommendations with Amazon affiliate links. I've had to deal with less of these while on Kagi. Some of them still come up, but they're either further down the rankings or they're put into their own "Listicles" section.
Where Kagi really shines though, is local searches. Pretty much the only time I would bang through to Google from DDG was for local stuff. I don't know if it's my location in particular, but DDG is not great about giving me things that are specific to my area, often preferring to give me a smattering of things that are from similarly named locales from elsewhere around the world. Kagi, on the other hand, gives me the kind of local results I get from Google.
Most local searches of that type tend to come from my phone, and this also helped me understand that better search on a phone matters WAY more than better search on desktop. The smaller screen and limited view means that it's significantly more important for the top result to be the one I want on my phone than it is on desktop. As such, Kagi is winning me over because it's made mobile searching frictionless -- something I couldn't say for DDG. That aspect alone is probably going to be what keeps me on the service. I'm planning on paying for at least another month, though after that I might go back to DDG for a month to see how I feel in comparison.
I mentioned earlier that I didn't think I could make it a default search on iOS. I mistakenly thought Apple had that locked down? Turns out it's actually possible through an app. Also, Kagi apparently has an entire browser for macOS/iOS. I tried it out and it works quite nicely, though AdGuard+Safari seemed to do a bit better ad-blocking than the stuff they'd built into Orion, so I've stayed on Safari.
There's actually a whole lot of cool looking power-user stuff on offer from Kagi (you can individually prioritize and de-prioritize specific domains across your searches, for example), but I'm not the kind of user that needs significant search depth, so I can't really speak to anything other than the standard search experience.
What I can say is that I've been very happy with that experience so far.
Also, it should hopefully go without saying, but this post isn't sponsored in any way nor was I requested to post it by Kagi. This is me choosing to give my own experiences with the service because I thought people here might be interested.
26 votes -
Norway's digital currency experiment – what is it and how does it work?
6 votes -
Burlesque in crisis: Hanging on by a g-string
5 votes -
Moral clauses: Why a red scare tactic revived in the #MeToo era could lead to a fight with the guilds
3 votes -
After Ukraine – The great clean energy acceleration
3 votes -
heating up some macking cheese in the michael wave
5 votes -
What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was...
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
3 votes -
The smartest website you havent heard of
11 votes -
UK scraps tax cut for wealthy that sparked market turmoil
11 votes -
Australia to set aside at least 30% of its land mass to protect endangered species
11 votes -
The dangers of A/B testing and "funnel hacking": How we made things worse by making them better
8 votes -
The visual effects crisis
4 votes -
Stadia is shutting down
38 votes -
Russia smuggling Ukrainian grain to help pay for Putin's war
5 votes -
Jair Bolsonaro, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva headed to runoff after tight Brazil election
11 votes -
Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - September 29
This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic,...
This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.
If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.
16 votes -
What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do...
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
8 votes -
Activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who declined Brando's Oscar on his behalf, dead at 75
6 votes -
Defective altruism - the repugnant philosophy of “Effective Altruism” offers nothing to movements for global justice
18 votes -
Bros fails at the box office as Smile arrives at No. 1
8 votes -
What is a good "eternal" Linux distribution?
I need to put Linux on a laptop, but I'm afraid I may not be around to upgrade to major versions (which usually means reinstalling everything) and maintaining the machine. Something like Arch or...
I need to put Linux on a laptop, but I'm afraid I may not be around to upgrade to major versions (which usually means reinstalling everything) and maintaining the machine. Something like Arch or Manjaro (which I use) might be good because I wouldn't ever need to reinstall the OS, but stability leaves a lot to be desired for a non-technical user. So I was thinking of getting something with an enormous support lifecycle, like Rocky Linux (10 years). Is that a terrible idea?
16 votes -
#MeToo, five years later: Why Time’s Up imploded
8 votes -
What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
4 votes -
Emancipation | Official teaser
4 votes -
The search for the perfect sound
5 votes -
The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't just for social media. It helped fund a new ALS drug.
6 votes -
Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo has won this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research into how human beings evolved
12 votes -
Food Theory explains the issue of media-induced panic around NyQuil Chicken
4 votes -
SEA 48 - 45 DET - That's Scorigami!!
@Scorigami: SEA 48 - 45 DETFinalThat's Scorigami!! It's the 1073rd unique final score in NFL history.
3 votes