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171 votes
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Bringing back the minimal web
112 votes -
Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
96 votes -
After two decades the dominance of Google Search comes into question
85 votes -
The man who killed Google Search
82 votes -
The people who ruined the internet
73 votes -
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
71 votes -
DuckDuckGo usage is growing fast
63 votes -
How Google is killing independent sites like ours
59 votes -
Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal
58 votes -
Google user data has become a favorite police shortcut
54 votes -
You can tell how bad Google Searches are now when you try to search for "Baldur's Gate 3 Wiki" and it pushes you a single outdated wiki and a bunch of posts telling you to use bg3.wiki
54 votes -
Google is killing Retro Dodo and other independent sites
47 votes -
How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT.
47 votes -
A glitch in the SEO matrix
47 votes -
While Google is attacked over privacy concerns and perceived bias, DuckDuckGo raised $10M
44 votes -
Kagi + Wolfram
43 votes -
Scientists explain why ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies
42 votes -
DuckDuckGo has acquired ownership of duck.com from Google
42 votes -
Robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers for over thirty years; AI vendors are ignoring it or proliferating too fast to block
41 votes -
Google search is dying: Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface.
41 votes -
Google testimony confirms paying billions to lock in default search engine status
33 votes -
Google goes to trial in biggest US challenge to tech power in decades
32 votes -
Trump accuses Google of rigging search results to show mostly negative stories about him
32 votes -
Alternatives to Google as a Search Engine?
Looking for something along the lines of DuckDuckGo and other privacy focused search engines. Any Tildoes have a go-to, non-censored, privacy focused search engine?
30 votes -
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
29 votes -
Microsoft to forcibly install Bing search extension in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users
29 votes -
Big Tech won’t let you leave. Here’s a way out.
28 votes -
Has DuckDuckGo recently started giving you significantly worse results?
Over the last week or so, I have been noticing that the majority of my searches in DuckDuckGo have been completely failing. For example, I was searching for a specific Firefox extension api and it...
Over the last week or so, I have been noticing that the majority of my searches in DuckDuckGo have been completely failing. For example, I was searching for a specific Firefox extension api and it only brings up a list of Firefox extension. If I put the exact same query into Google, the second result is exactly what I wanted. Before this last week, I have being using DDG almost exclusively, but know I am need to add the Google bang before nearly every query. Am I the only person that is having this experience? I really prefer using DDG to Google, but I can't if the results stay this way.
28 votes -
I got paid $0.33 for confirming with Google that I got a haircut where I did and paid with a card
Who got the better end of that deal? It was in Google rewards. They were already involved in that transaction. How much is me matching their phone records really worth?
27 votes -
DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps in search results
27 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 -
A look at search engines with their own indexes
26 votes -
Google sued by US Department of Justice in antitrust case over search dominance
26 votes -
Apple showing signs it may soon launch a search engine to compete against Google Search
26 votes -
China's censorship is far reaching. Searching for "tank man" on some image search engines brings up zero results.
For example: Bing DuckDuckGo Baidu obviously doesn't show tank man, but rather an assortment of random tank images Yandex and Google seem to show the results no problem. Would be curious to know...
For example:
Baidu obviously doesn't show tank man, but rather an assortment of random tank images
Yandex and Google seem to show the results no problem. Would be curious to know for you Tilderinos outside the US if the same results apply to you?
25 votes -
Popular pirate sites disappear from DuckDuckGo top results
25 votes -
How sixteen companies are dominating the world’s Google search results (2024 Edition)
24 votes -
DuckDuckGo goes carbon negative
24 votes -
Neeva.com is shutting down
22 votes -
Update to Kagi Search pricing
22 votes -
Google shut out privacy and security teams from secret China project
22 votes -
Google announces major update to combat AI-generated spam in search results
21 votes -
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...
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
21 votes -
An analysis of over 15,000 popular Google searches found that the first organic result is now usually almost halfway down the page, and requires scrolling multiple screen-lengths on mobile to reach
21 votes -
DuckDuckGo now crawls the web regularly to create a free list of trackers to block
21 votes -
Google has quietly added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users in ~sixty markets
21 votes -
I spent a year deleting my address online, then it popped up on Bing
20 votes -
Google is trying to convince Congress that there's competition in the search industry, but recent statistics show it owns 92% of the market
20 votes -
Same Energy, a visual search engine
19 votes