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   13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 18:51:58 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

   Just ran out of Kagi searches on the $5/300 search tier.

   To give it a proper try, I switched to using it as my main search engine on the 7th. It's not been a very search-heavy month for me at all, and even so I've used up 300 searches in 13 days.

   Pros:

   • Almost no search engine chum (trash content, AI generated features, stolen articles) - this is its main advantage over DDG
   • Clean, accurate, on-topic results
   • No fucking ads or tracking or search history or any such bullshit.

   Cons:

   • Having trouble finding the right mode for me. International searches skew too US American, French searches cut out international content entirely.
   • It's fequently just a search engine for reddit, per its top results. I've turned on the Small Web lens to see if this helps.
   • Eh, I have uncomfortable feelings about Kagi AI, which attempts to extract useful answers from documents. That said, if the forthcoming video question answering service means I don't have to watch a 15 minute video to find a 20 second answer that could have been one line of text, I may warm to it.

   I was hyper-aware of only having 300 searches, and didn't like that at all. It affected my search habits and make me less likely to just casually look stuff up.

   I'll upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan for the rest of the month, given that being able to research stuff is key to my professions.

   #Kagi #SearchEngines #DeGoogleing

   • Embed this notice
     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 00:03:19 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     • berserk du soleil

     @aetataureate There is a switch to turn off the AI summariser! I found it earlier today!

     I'm finding myself immediately more comfortable with an unlimited sub, so I think my discomfort about "wasting" search credits was definitely a Tangible Thing.

   • Embed this notice
     berserk du soleil (aetataureate@dosgame.club)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 00:03:22 JST berserk du soleil

     in reply to

     @HauntedOwlbear I'm using the unlimited one, also for work, and the experience is so much better than Google has been for the last two to five years at least. I also wish they'd turn off any AI stuff. I just want to search what is actually on the page without any suggestions, ahaha.

   • Embed this notice
     Horen, Zien & Zwijgen (horenzienzwijgen@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 18:43:48 JST Horen, Zien & Zwijgen

     in reply to

     @HauntedOwlbear Thanks for sharing, this is very useful. I am particularly interested in the quality of search results in other languages than English (mostly interested in Dutch) or where you want localized result.

   • Embed this notice
     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 18:43:48 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     • Horen, Zien & Zwijgen

     @horenzienzwijgen Localised stuff does pretty well. For example, with the region set to France, when I search for "Laval", a nearby city, the first result is actually about the French city of Laval, rather than the more famous Canadian place of the same name.

     It's not perfect, though. A sidebar still shows information about Laval in Quebec, which I'm about to report as a bug.

     They've previously be very good about errors, and you can also manually downtrack low-quality or unwanted search result domains.

     Searching for pizza in my village or the neighbouring town gives me places to get pizza locally, rather than generic dominos or pizza hut ads (we do not have those here).

     Looking for factual information in french also gives me good quality results.

     Can't help on Dutch, I'm afraid, but there's a free trial with 100 searches so you can test it.