alt Hacker NewsI really really really really want to love Kagi, but every time I try it (and I just spent a month trying it, ending a week or so ago), I end up back at Google, finding that my search results are better.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
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I find that both fail to find matches on anything long tail, but with Google/Bing/DDG I quickly start getting results that don't follow my search criteria. Probably one of the more useful features I wish all engines did was to acknowledge when they simply don't have results.
I'd say about 1 in 5 searches for me is apparently "long tail" and I've never been more aware of how dead the internet is. I regularly still compare to DDG and Google, and spend about 300% more time on the others trying to find a match and discovering I have more results only because they made my quotes terms optional or ignored my time restrictions.
> my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches
any chance you have an example of such searches off the top of your head that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Recently even searching for things like best xyz on Kagi has been nothing but ai sites in the results. Seems their stop slop project failed.
I still use and recommend Kagi but the results have gotten worse, but I also think that’s just an indicator of the health of the web as a whole.
Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.
The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.