The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email
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As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith I...
Can I sincerely ask what we're supposed to use instead?
Kagi has given me the best search experience ive had in at least a decade, I'm not going back to the enshittification engine, and everything else is just bing in fancy wrapping paper. Is there something else like Kagi? Is there something like DDG or Searx that arent just slightly better bing?
Apologies, my question wasn't rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don't want to use kagi if this is who is running it... BUT all the alternatives that I'm personally aware of are not options for replacement.
ok but for real... it's not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It's the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012..2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014..2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008..2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed
I can't remember the names of the projects, but there are actually some self hosted search engines that I keep meaning to get around to actually installing on "Ullr"