I've noticed that the quality of search results has dropped precipitously in the past few months. Now, almost every search ends with "g!". I'm wondering if it is just me or are others noticing this?
I'm pretty sure DDG used to use Yandex... which in turn used Bing. Now DDG uses Bing directly.
The world of search engines is nearly as frustrating as the world of web browsers, or dare I say Linux distros; on the srface, a lot of choice. But, underneath, much of it is just the same old thing, with a different front end.
I've noticed something similar, DDG has been increasingly ignoring my keywords, especially when I put quotes around them, and returning irrelevant results. It used to be that if you had two words with quotes around them it would tend to return results with both keywords, now it seems to return results with only one of the keywords. I think the scope of searches has declined also, I can search for things I know exist and DDG won't find them. The more marginal the search, on the fringes outside of what is most popular, the less capable DDG seems to be in finding results. Maybe they shrank the size of their database or excluded a lot of the less connected sites from their search?
DDG has always been crap in my experience. It's one of those companies who seems to be a media darling, in spite of having a mediocre product. About the only thing I miss from my brief period of using it as my default search engine was the bangs. Now those were a good feature!
As soon as gaming a search engine becomes financially profitable, the hoards of “SEO”s develop methods to do so.
On plus side, this means ddg is finally getting noticed, on the minus side, this means they need to react fast or lose ground to the competition that’s relatively better able to fend off spam.
Btw, this is also why search engines only grow big (or go home). Fending off spam is very very expensive and thankless job!
This is a popular notion, but I'm not sure how well founded it actually is, since we really only have one search engine that's really been struggling with SEO spam, and that is a search engine that is also in an uniquely tricky bind where they're primarily an advertisement broker, and thus extremely limited in what they can do about search engine spam without hurting their own bottom line.
As long as you put Pinterest filter in your unlock filter, ddg image search is usable. I tried brave image search and it was pathetic, same as google or ddg without fiters.
Yeah it surprises me that 10 euros seems to be the minimum for pretty much every online service now.
For 10 euro you can get Netflix, Spotify. My Ring security subscription is also a tenner. Pretty much everything that has a subscription model targets 10 euro as a minimum. I don't really know why, all these tenners add up a lot. I'm even dropping Spotify now some months (especially because when I drop it, the next month they offer me 3 months for a tenner to come back, which I find a lot more reasonable as I don't use it much).
Kagi does really sound like it is easier to provide and should not cost as much. It feels like they are expecting super-heavy users. Their 50 free searches a month is not enough for me but I could probably do with 100 or 200. But there is no intermediate subscription, it's just 50 free or unlimited for a tenner.
I read that they calculate the subscription price based on average searches per user and something else. I see the main problem which occurs here is that they're not large scale enough hence the unoptimized subscription cost.
> They are expecting suepr heavy users.
They probably should be as most of thier users would be tech savy which by itself means a lot of searching so probably pricing is right according to the maintenance costs.
I read that the cost (to them) for Kagi to perform searches is on the order of $1 per 80 searches. This seems incredible to me. How could it possibly cost that much?
The Kagi founder believes only criminals need privacy:
> I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc) are:
Thank you for this heads up. I stumbled across Kagi a lot in recent months looking for better search results, but with this statement from the founder the case is settled.
Unless I’m mistaken that’s literally the opposite of what he’s saying?
He says: there are a class of people, criminals, who need x/y/z properties of a search engine… and that’s not what we provide.
He makes the difference between Privacy (which Kagi apparently provides) and true anonymity (which appears to be out of scope for them). Sounds a lot like DDG vs, say, Tor. The former is very privacy conscious, the latter is attempting to be provably anonymous to a level sufficient for life-or-death personal safety.
He setting up a strawman: only criminals(specifically terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers) would care more about privacy than what their vague promises provide.
There are endless scenarios where a person may not want their searches being individually identifiable where they aren't a terrorists, drug dealers or trafficker.
Imagine the scenario where 13 US states banned women eating Fuji apples and a new administration takes over and is really motivated to enforce that ban. Kagi is absolutely able to report the identity of users who search for specific keywords, "mail order Fuji apples", etc.
A malicious Kagi engineer could track someone's searches, for example as part of a campaign of stalking or harassment.
He says that Kagi doesn’t keep any identifying logs, so I think your example would not be possible.
He makes a useful distinction between designing for privacy, and being unable to report on what users are doing, and building a system that is anonymous at a level of something like Tor.
He could certainly have added in another example to his list, perhaps a dissident under a dangerous regime, but the meaning was clear to me.
Personally, I think the comment is a fair one, and that it’s unreasonable to take offence to it, although I can see why some at the fringes of privacy advocacy, perhaps those already using Tor for all their web usage, or only paying with cash, might consider Kagi to be beneath them.
English is my second language and looking back I agree what I wrote may sound clumsy. I am also an active HNer and do not miss a chance to contribute to a discussion!
Not sure why you misinterpreted what I said while having my quote right in front of you ? Note that I used the word "anonymity" in that sentence, and not the word "privacy" like you interpreted (perhaps you took the two as synonyms, but these are two very different things and are often conflated).
I am not sure that true discrete anonymity is possible on the web and if it is, it would be very expensive to get. Kagi is definetely not pretending to be offering anything of the kind (mostly due to paid nature of the service, although there are steps that can be taken like near-anonoymous email addresses and payment cards to achieve a solid level of anonymity with Kagi).
On the other hand, I do believe that privacy online should be a right of every single person on this planet. We are 100% commited to user-privacy. Our products - both search and browser - have zero tracking and zero telemetry (this is easilly verifiable). User private information is only a liability for us and is not something we need or want. We are in the business of selling search as a product, not selling ads or data.
Happy that clarifies it, happy to answer any questions.
> I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc)
Hard nope, that guy's trouble. He's not one of us.
See my reply to the other comment here, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t condoning those things, and are suggesting that Kagi is unsuitable for those uses.
Again, that’s not what the comment said. He says those looking to use it for criminal purposes are not the target market, and he clarifies the level of privacy granted by the product, which is extensive.
It sounds like you’ve misread, or at least misinterpreted, and I do agree the wording is a little clumsy. I’d urge you to re-read it without assuming intent and see what it actually says.
I used this exclusively for around a year and I’m back on google. I hope it’s improved since I stopped using it but I had trouble finding relevant blogs and stack overflow posts for the somewhat obscure language I use at work. Kagi does have a nice pdf filter though.
I've been using Startpage for a while now and am quite content. It's essentially a privacy-preserving frontend for Google, so you get the result quality without the data trace.
I've noticed the same with the search results from Brave. It started about 3 months ago and it's really frustrating. But apparently they don't use Bing. It's a strange coincidence.
Every time I give DDG a try with a search it only gives me unrelevant results. Even unpersonalized Google results kind of suck for any specialized searches for me. I primarily use DDG for its bangs which I make heavy use of.
Still a great shot stopper, but there are much better goalkeepers than him around now. Goalkeeping isn’t all about stopping shots, the top teams want to build from the back and a goalkeeper who can actually play football with their feet is paramount to that. Keepers like Allison and Ederson are miles ahead of DDG in that regard.
