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Asking advice re search engines, search technique
So, in the past, I have been able to find new poems I enjoy by reading a critical essay about poetry and taking the referenced poem and author and typing the information into Google search. It used to be that that technique turned up a copy of the text of the poem and typically more poems by the author 95 percent of the time for me.
This year, when I try that same technique, Google gives me general reference articles about the life of the poet, or news about celebrities with similar names (not the same name at all), or just no search results. Does anyone know what happened? Can anyone help me use the internet to find new poems again?
Thanks very much
I wish I had answers for you, but Google's search has been going downhill for a while now. At this point it's so fouled up with removed features, SEO, and ad placements it's practically useless. I'm debating paying for Kagi, which is $25/month for unlimited (which I'd need).
+1 for Kagi, a user has suggested it to me and its def. worth it. Maybe try the 1k requests subscription first, you can upgrade next month.
I havent missed Google even once, and I like how you can limit your searches to certain categories such as programming, research, etc. I have the feeling that it brought me better results especially in the programming category.
They dont sell your data which alone would make it worth it for me. We use search engines almost every day and its an integral part of browsing the web, so the money is justified (for me).
I reached the 1k searches in around 14 days, so I also had to upgrade. :)
How would you say Kagi compares to DuckDuckGo? What makes it premium?
The answers are pretty biased, but I havent used DDG for at least 7 years, so I cant speak out of experience. I remember that DDG results were mediocre though and I often had to revert back to Google.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html
I regularily blacklist web pages. Its a pretty cool feature that cleans a lot up. No more odd seo optimized ai generated blog posts, or websites that copy stack overflow and makes it appear as a different forum.
Regarding ddg Ive started using ddg more lately as google has degraded. Im not sure it's gotten better, just that Google's gotten worse.
Still, the major limitation of ddg is that it doesn't interpret hyphens as a boolean operator to omit the following term. This is a massive pain at times.
Thanks. I'd never actually heard of Kagi before and it looks pretty interesting. I really don't search that much apart from Stack Overflow at work, but since subscribing to Copilot even my Stack Overflow searching has gone down. So I could probably get by on the cheap tier. I really like the privacy-focus and don't mind paying a little bit of money to protect myself from snoops.
I switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi about a year ago and haven't regretted it one second. The main benefit for me is that I am the paying customer. No tricks needed to avoid advertisements. You really are the user they want to service, instead of them tricking you in numerous ways to earn more ad money. I have the ability to tweak search results to my taste. Others have talked about blocking and boosting different sites, but you can also do tricks like rewriting urls on the result page. For instance, I have it set up so that all links to reddit point to old.reddit.com.
It might be a weird way to describe it, but altogether this gives me a much more peaceful search experience. It just works how I want it to work and nothing else. Occasionally I still end up on Google because someone else linked to it and I am surprised by how noisy the page is and how much irrelevant stuff it contains.
That’s a cool feature. Like you, the biggest draw for me is the lack of tracking and advertising. I’ve signed up for the trial and I’m going to see how long it takes me to hit the 100 searches. I won’t be using it at work, though, where I search the most, mostly because I don’t sign in to personal accounts on my work computer. I do like the layout of the results page already, and the speed was unexpected. I’m enjoying it so far.
Something not obvious with Kagi's pricing is that once you reach the limit of your plan, you can pay 1.5cent for any additional search: with a $10/month plan, you can do a total of 2.000 searches before reaching the price of their ultimate plan ($25).
So if you do fewer than 2.000 searches/month, the $10/month plan has more value than the $25/month.
For what it's worth, my job (web developer) requires doing many searches, and I have an average of 1.150 searches/month for the last 6 months. That's $12.25/month, half of the ultimate plan.
I’ve been enjoying Kagi, but I pay $5/month only for 300 searches.
That’s not been an issue because I only use Kagi for non-obvious searches. Most of my searches are just typing the name of a site and getting the first result. Basically instead of typing the url. Any search engine works for this.
I set up another search engine as default, and a Kagi search if I start with “k “, so I can do it quickly too.
General search advice (not sure about searching for poems since I am not too into poetry):
-tech -tipsto avoid a certain other well-known Linus.There's a ton of great material on the Internet Archive, you might try there. Skip the Wayback Machine search bar near the top of the page and try the one below it. Your search will cover lots of scanned books and uploaded files. From the results page you can refine your search to include archived website content that may include sites Google no longer steers you toward, or even ones that are no longer online.
One thing I would recommend for finding poems is going through established poetry websites. The poetry foundation website has a great archive of poems and if the poets you're looking for are well established (and I assume they are if you're reading critical essays about them) they will most likely be on there. Google might take you to a biographical page about the poet but if scroll down to the bottom there should be links to some of their poems. It can also be a great resourse for finding new poets - they have a poem of the day and lots of writing about poetry.
Another site I like is the Scottish poetry library. It's obviously a bit more specialised but it can also be a great way to find new and interesting poems.
If you're looking to find new poetry, I would also recommend getting hold of an anthology. A couple I recommend are:
The Rattle Bag - edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, two greats of the poetry world.
Staying Alive, and the follow-up book Being Alive. More tightly focused on contemporary poetry and also with lots of poems in translation.
There are obviously a lot more out there, some very focused on a particular era or theme and some very broad but they can be a lovely way to discover new writers.
The Rattlebag is an amazing collection, yes.
I recently finished Subjects in Poetry by Daniel Brown. It's a pretty good essay, but it references some amazing poems I was unfamiliar with.
I can think of a few ways I refine my searching, but I don't know if they'd work in the same way for finding poems.
Can you give an example of a poem name + author that you would have searched for?
There’s a search engine called kagi that might be something of interest. It’s paid for, but gives you much greater control over your search. You get a free trial so it’s worth a shot.