this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
526 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
59086 readers
4493 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While Kagi does have a very specific audience in mind, I’m not convinced specialization vs generalization is a reason for a difference. Google also tailors ads for the audience, using information they have collected on you, people similar to you, as well as general time of day, current events, etc. It’s more that google wants you on their site for longer, Kagi wants you to find your result and move on, since the more you search the more it costs them.
As somebody that's a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.
While I'd say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it's also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.
Of course, that's because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don't even use your general location to prioritize results. It's an interesting balancing act and I'm not quite sure they've hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I'm happy with the overall experience currently.
Yep, I have Kagi set as my default, but if I’m searching for places nearby or current events, I usually end up back on google. But 90+% of my search queries stay on Kagi which is impressive enough. In the past I’ve tried DuckDuckGo and always switched back in part because the results quality was very bad.