DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results(github.com)
github.com
DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/commit/d35d03e532c7618bcdd2be10ea67e9e1f021dd96
340 comments
I’ve been using Kagi for multiple months and due to advocacy I made few people pay for it too, but I’m completely disheartened by their business model.
The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird, unexpected (price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?). I felt like it was written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - made sense but also very abstract and shifting responsibility to the customer.
In the end I ran stats how many of Kagi results were on spot (i.e. weren’t repeated in other search engines). It was around half, probably ones that I “didn’t pay for”.
I was ready to move back to DDG but an acquaintance recommended Brave search to me (which has its own index). I was reluctant to use it due controversial opinions about them. Not only I found it more pleasant to use, but also the results are (in my opinion) slightly better than Kagis.
Edit: To provide additional context - I was using Kagi as daily driver, and I make 200-500 searches per day (that includes duplicate queries to other search engines)
The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird, unexpected (price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?). I felt like it was written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - made sense but also very abstract and shifting responsibility to the customer.
In the end I ran stats how many of Kagi results were on spot (i.e. weren’t repeated in other search engines). It was around half, probably ones that I “didn’t pay for”.
I was ready to move back to DDG but an acquaintance recommended Brave search to me (which has its own index). I was reluctant to use it due controversial opinions about them. Not only I found it more pleasant to use, but also the results are (in my opinion) slightly better than Kagis.
Edit: To provide additional context - I was using Kagi as daily driver, and I make 200-500 searches per day (that includes duplicate queries to other search engines)
> The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird
I didn't find that weird at all: They were overly optimistic, both on how many people they'd be able to recruit for a paid service, and on the economics of how many searches these people do.
I'd be willing to bet that those skew heavily in the direction of power users and knowledge workers using search professionally, so they probably do a lot of searches. I was really surprised when I read my own numbers. In the survey they asked me to fill out, I wrote that I'd expect I'd be doing maybe five searches a day. Turns out the number is actually in the range of 30-70 most days.
One data point that seems to support that is that Kagi previously didn't take any outside investment, with the whole thing being bankrolled by the founder who had had a prior successful exit. But at the same time when they announced the pricing, they also announced they'd be willing to take on board small investments from enthusiast users. So it's looking like they really are starting to get worried about money.
I also indicated in the survey, that, for a really good search engine, the amount of money I'd be willing to pay would be a multiple of what their actual pricing is now. A good search engine is an investment that could pay phenomenal dividends for me, allowing me to make better decisions for my business by having better information as input. It allows me to waste less time, when searching for solutions to technical problems. It allows me to connect to the right people. So, I don't want to think of search as a commodity, like electricity. I think that, as a knowledge worker, I'm really only ever as good as the search engine I'm using, and I just want to hand somebody a pile of money to make me the Ferrari of search engines so I can have a competitive advantage against all those people still riding the bus. (The bus is full of billboards and paid for by people who never want the bus to reach its destination, so they can keep the passengers' eyeballs focused on the advertising).
I didn't find that weird at all: They were overly optimistic, both on how many people they'd be able to recruit for a paid service, and on the economics of how many searches these people do.
I'd be willing to bet that those skew heavily in the direction of power users and knowledge workers using search professionally, so they probably do a lot of searches. I was really surprised when I read my own numbers. In the survey they asked me to fill out, I wrote that I'd expect I'd be doing maybe five searches a day. Turns out the number is actually in the range of 30-70 most days.
One data point that seems to support that is that Kagi previously didn't take any outside investment, with the whole thing being bankrolled by the founder who had had a prior successful exit. But at the same time when they announced the pricing, they also announced they'd be willing to take on board small investments from enthusiast users. So it's looking like they really are starting to get worried about money.
I also indicated in the survey, that, for a really good search engine, the amount of money I'd be willing to pay would be a multiple of what their actual pricing is now. A good search engine is an investment that could pay phenomenal dividends for me, allowing me to make better decisions for my business by having better information as input. It allows me to waste less time, when searching for solutions to technical problems. It allows me to connect to the right people. So, I don't want to think of search as a commodity, like electricity. I think that, as a knowledge worker, I'm really only ever as good as the search engine I'm using, and I just want to hand somebody a pile of money to make me the Ferrari of search engines so I can have a competitive advantage against all those people still riding the bus. (The bus is full of billboards and paid for by people who never want the bus to reach its destination, so they can keep the passengers' eyeballs focused on the advertising).
> [...] A good search engine is an investment that could pay phenomenal dividends for me, allowing me to make better decisions for my business by having better information as input. [...]
It sounds a bit like the use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. Depending on your specific use case it might be the wrong fit - especially if you want to look up PI - however it is excellent as a rubberduck/idea provider.
It sounds a bit like the use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. Depending on your specific use case it might be the wrong fit - especially if you want to look up PI - however it is excellent as a rubberduck/idea provider.
It's precisely the antithesis of a use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. I want sourced information, and the opportunity to read the source in its original form, make a critical judgment about it, and draw my own conclusions. Giving me the opportunity to ask a question and get an answer, when I have no way of knowing whether the answer is a hallucination is less than useless. It's a waste of time.
At least BingAI does provide its sources and ChatGPT/BingAI are made to be conversational, so you get the opportunity to ask actual questions and get an answer. As with everything on the internet take the answers with a couple of grains of salt.
You can also directly ask for the sources btw. In the end LLMs with access to the internet can be an abstraction to search engines. If it is good can only be assessed once you actually tried as it heavily depends on your use case and your approach.
LLMs are just a tool like everything else.
You can also directly ask for the sources btw. In the end LLMs with access to the internet can be an abstraction to search engines. If it is good can only be assessed once you actually tried as it heavily depends on your use case and your approach.
LLMs are just a tool like everything else.
If you ask for the source, don't you just get the most likely source?
The other thing I'm wondering, even though this is veering quite far off the original topic, but: I don't just want all the sources that the AI used in responding to my question, I also want all the other sources that seemed relevant to my question but were for some reason not used.
I want completeness (i.e. if source material is being skipped, I want to be the one to make the decision that it can safely be skipped), and I want consistency (i.e. I want to be able to double-check that the same set of sources wouldn't also support drawing conclusions that contradict those drawn by the AI).
In other words: I'd still want to use search as a product, and I'd still want someone to solve the search problem for me, even if question answering were a solved problem.
I want completeness (i.e. if source material is being skipped, I want to be the one to make the decision that it can safely be skipped), and I want consistency (i.e. I want to be able to double-check that the same set of sources wouldn't also support drawing conclusions that contradict those drawn by the AI).
In other words: I'd still want to use search as a product, and I'd still want someone to solve the search problem for me, even if question answering were a solved problem.
Not saying you're wrong, but they grandfathered me on the $10/mo plan with the new pricing changes, and that would cover your usage. I think on the new plans 30 searches a day would come out to $13/month.
I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.
I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.
I've tried Kagi as primary search for a few months and used DDG as primary for a long time before that. Recently I default to using phind.com. Don't think they'll be able to stay free forever, but as it is the mix of free access to GPT-4 and the focus on being developer-friendly makes it feel much better than alternatives (perplexity.ai being the closest competitor, but not feeling quite right for me).
For developers, I should also mention Bing Chat seems to be in the lead for asking questions like, "In this <github repo link>, can you tell me what this function does <function name>?" (or insert your own question you might ask another developer about some repo). I suspect this is because Microsoft has already done the chunking/embedding/vector-storage for all of Github and Bing Chat is querying a vector database for info about the repo, whereas the other GPT-search-chat offerings aren't there yet.
Curious can you 'grep the web' with it and how do you handle shopping, image/videos/news/maps types of searches?
> What AI model are you?
> ANSWER
> I am an AI language model powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo. My primary purpose is to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I can perform various tasks, such as answering questions, providing explanations, and even writing code snippets.
Looks like it's not on v4 yet.
> ANSWER
> I am an AI language model powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo. My primary purpose is to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I can perform various tasks, such as answering questions, providing explanations, and even writing code snippets.
Looks like it's not on v4 yet.
The "Expert" toggle switches it to GPT-4. You can tell by how slow it responds then (note that I've seen it switch over to turbo when you ask followup questions recently).
It's worth pointing out that the "window to a huge amount of knowledge" feature isn't really what you're paying for. The question isn't "is access to a search engine worth $10 a month to me?" (probably yes), it's "Is the delta in functionality with DDG/Google/Bing/Ask Jeeves worth $10 a month to me?" (maybe).
It's a pretty big problem in internet tech, actually. Ad revenue has poisoned the well, creating a situation where it's really, really hard to create a compelling product that isn't based on advertising, because you end up having to compete with "free" alternatives. Thus from a consumer's perspective the cost of the product needs to be in the added functionality over the alternatives, since they see your base functionality's perceived value as $0.
It's gotten to a point where I don't think it's fixable at a grassroots level.
It's a pretty big problem in internet tech, actually. Ad revenue has poisoned the well, creating a situation where it's really, really hard to create a compelling product that isn't based on advertising, because you end up having to compete with "free" alternatives. Thus from a consumer's perspective the cost of the product needs to be in the added functionality over the alternatives, since they see your base functionality's perceived value as $0.
It's gotten to a point where I don't think it's fixable at a grassroots level.
- "(price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?)"
It's like anti-marketing. Target the paying customers most likely to talk a lot about your product – power users with heavy search workloads – and do stuff that makes them unhappy. And that's you, I guess: I'm reading your comment because you're the sort of person who *would* write HN comments reviewing their new search engine. And now I'm unhappy with it too, by contagion.
(30 searches/day is for illiterate gibbons)
It's like anti-marketing. Target the paying customers most likely to talk a lot about your product – power users with heavy search workloads – and do stuff that makes them unhappy. And that's you, I guess: I'm reading your comment because you're the sort of person who *would* write HN comments reviewing their new search engine. And now I'm unhappy with it too, by contagion.
(30 searches/day is for illiterate gibbons)
They grandfathered me in, and in their announcement said that they would do that for all their early users. So, I don't quite understand what happened to the parent commenter there.
They also made it very clear on that early-days pricing that it was essentially arbitrary as they just had no idea of how the economics of their business would develop, and that they'd need to revisit it. So it really seems unfair to use that as an anchor.
They're also being extremely open about everything. Anyone can join their Discord, and there is a channel there about pricing that had been going for months, prior to the change, where people could contribute to discussions and meaningfully get their grievances heard if they had any.
They also made it very clear on that early-days pricing that it was essentially arbitrary as they just had no idea of how the economics of their business would develop, and that they'd need to revisit it. So it really seems unfair to use that as an anchor.
They're also being extremely open about everything. Anyone can join their Discord, and there is a channel there about pricing that had been going for months, prior to the change, where people could contribute to discussions and meaningfully get their grievances heard if they had any.
It depends on your usage. With 200 searches/workday (25/hour) - Kagi set as default search engine - I got following options:
- Stay at Professional - $10 + $49.5 query cost = $59.5 total (495% price increase)
- Use grandfathered - $10 + $37.5 query cost = $47.5 total (375% price increase)
- Use Ultimate plan - $25 + $0 query cost = $25 total (150% price increase)
With absolutely 0 guarantee ultimate plan will be ultimate. Would I pay for search engine 25$? Of course. Does Kagi delivers 25$ of search quality - no. As I mentioned I did metrics. 50% of the queries had to be moved to other search engines, so Kagi simply didn't deliver.
- Stay at Professional - $10 + $49.5 query cost = $59.5 total (495% price increase)
- Use grandfathered - $10 + $37.5 query cost = $47.5 total (375% price increase)
- Use Ultimate plan - $25 + $0 query cost = $25 total (150% price increase)
With absolutely 0 guarantee ultimate plan will be ultimate. Would I pay for search engine 25$? Of course. Does Kagi delivers 25$ of search quality - no. As I mentioned I did metrics. 50% of the queries had to be moved to other search engines, so Kagi simply didn't deliver.
I've been using Brave Search as my main search engine for months, and the only issue I have with it is that it takes longer to revisit smaller sites. Depending on your queries, you may stumble upon a bunch of dead links. However, this shouldn't be a problem for most users since results for major sites are constantly updated.
Brave Search also allows you to customize your search results with "Goggles". These are plain-text files that you can host on Github or Gitlab and use to boost or remove specific sites from your search results. For example, you could create a Goggle that removes "quora.com" from your results while giving priority to StackExchange sites and Reddit. You could also create another Goggle that shows results only from a predefined set of cooking sites.
Finally, multilingual users may find it helpful to create different search shortcuts with the `country=` parameter appended to them. For instance, if you add `&country=fr` to a search URL, you'll get French results.
Brave Search also allows you to customize your search results with "Goggles". These are plain-text files that you can host on Github or Gitlab and use to boost or remove specific sites from your search results. For example, you could create a Goggle that removes "quora.com" from your results while giving priority to StackExchange sites and Reddit. You could also create another Goggle that shows results only from a predefined set of cooking sites.
Finally, multilingual users may find it helpful to create different search shortcuts with the `country=` parameter appended to them. For instance, if you add `&country=fr` to a search URL, you'll get French results.
I like Brave Search as well. Goggles are super easy to create and manage. Brave's customizable Search Engines are also a helpful feature to further personalize the search experience.
+1 to Brave as an alternative. From the search results I get the impression that they are much more aggressive in weeding out SEO-optimised sites that do nothing but:
1. Force you to signup to see the content (pinterest, I'm looking at you).
2. Copy-n-paste SO threads onto a page that is 90% ads.
I expect that ChatGPT written content for sites that are 90% ads will soon make it difficult to determine the useful sites.
1. Force you to signup to see the content (pinterest, I'm looking at you).
2. Copy-n-paste SO threads onto a page that is 90% ads.
I expect that ChatGPT written content for sites that are 90% ads will soon make it difficult to determine the useful sites.
I think this is why advertising will remain the default business model of the mainstream internet and search.
HN might possibly be the wealthiest collection of people on the internet. And if we’re complaining about $10-20/month here, there’s certainly no hope for the mass market.
HN might possibly be the wealthiest collection of people on the internet. And if we’re complaining about $10-20/month here, there’s certainly no hope for the mass market.
I can't pay $20/month for EVERY site and tool.
I'm happy to pay the current $120 I do for Kagi, but that's my upper limit.
I do have some web tools I pay $250 a year for, and they are significantly more complicated than kagi.
With Kagi's new pricing, I will be paying >$300 a year. That is too much. They aren't THAT much better. That is literally more than my beefy dedicated gaming server in a datacenter!
I'm happy to pay the current $120 I do for Kagi, but that's my upper limit.
I do have some web tools I pay $250 a year for, and they are significantly more complicated than kagi.
With Kagi's new pricing, I will be paying >$300 a year. That is too much. They aren't THAT much better. That is literally more than my beefy dedicated gaming server in a datacenter!
That's basically my point. HN people are wealthy and spend most of their working hours and free time on the internet. They also vehemently hate ad-supported business models.
Hell, I probably built my entire career off internet searches.
In theory, HN people should have the most to gain from a better search engine, and be the most likely to pay for one. Yet, to your point, the alternatives are free and good enough.
The problem is, what the mob moralistically claims they want on HN (when upvotes/downvotes are a concern), vs. what those same people actually do in the real world on an individual level, are two separate things.
The lesson is, things evolved the way they have on the internet for a reason. It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars, and will continue to do so. We get exactly the products we deserve.
Hell, I probably built my entire career off internet searches.
In theory, HN people should have the most to gain from a better search engine, and be the most likely to pay for one. Yet, to your point, the alternatives are free and good enough.
The problem is, what the mob moralistically claims they want on HN (when upvotes/downvotes are a concern), vs. what those same people actually do in the real world on an individual level, are two separate things.
The lesson is, things evolved the way they have on the internet for a reason. It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars, and will continue to do so. We get exactly the products we deserve.
These are the early days of paid search. Kagi laucnhed less than a year ago, after 25 years of humanity being "massaged" with the idea that it is OK for your searches (arguable both the most important and most intimate thing you do online) to be paid by someone else, an unknown 3rd party, usually an advertiser.
The early resistance towards a paid model is to be expected. But if we can learn from the example of YouTube Premium (25M+ subscribers for a product available for free), there are millions of people ready to pay for search today, we just haven't reached them.
The early resistance towards a paid model is to be expected. But if we can learn from the example of YouTube Premium (25M+ subscribers for a product available for free), there are millions of people ready to pay for search today, we just haven't reached them.
> It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars
No reason both can't be true. evil companies can shovel ad-supported business models down our throats while the few paid options which have emerged haven't offered users enough value to justify the fees, being forced to be logged into an account, or having to worry about how many searches you make in a day.
No reason both can't be true. evil companies can shovel ad-supported business models down our throats while the few paid options which have emerged haven't offered users enough value to justify the fees, being forced to be logged into an account, or having to worry about how many searches you make in a day.
High earning does not necessarily mean wealthy. Rich people in my eyes don't even need to work. People also often gain more money by not spending everything all nilly willy. Someone inheriting a lot of money is more likely to spend it on something superfluous than someone that meticulously grew it over their lifetime.
Saying you aren’t a trust fund baby therefore you aren’t rich is just plain silly.
Your point is totally valid, but I think the folks over at r/fatfire are probably wealthier than us peasants here.
you're talking circles in circles, in a venn-diagram sense. probably a non-trivial overlap there with HN users.
if you know what an SRE III is, and where those exist, chances are you're in the global 1%, and top 25% of US earners.
and yah i get not everyone on HN is STEM, and not all STEM is super-lucrative, but the parent poster is directionally correct.
if you know what an SRE III is, and where those exist, chances are you're in the global 1%, and top 25% of US earners.
and yah i get not everyone on HN is STEM, and not all STEM is super-lucrative, but the parent poster is directionally correct.
> I make 200-500 searches per day
That's a lot compared to my modest 20 searches a day on average. So I'd guess you're an outlier, since I do sit within their "30 searches a day" claim. I use Kagi on desktop while working, and on mobile outside of work. I've never hit my 1k searches/mo limit, but was honestly worried I would (and set hard limits to not exceed my limits). I guess I don't search as much as I thought I did. I really like Kagi and think it's well worth the $10/mo.
(I'd really like to hear how you're hitting that search volume, if you're open to share? I can't imagine hitting a search engine that many times a day, so I'm quite curious.)
That's a lot compared to my modest 20 searches a day on average. So I'd guess you're an outlier, since I do sit within their "30 searches a day" claim. I use Kagi on desktop while working, and on mobile outside of work. I've never hit my 1k searches/mo limit, but was honestly worried I would (and set hard limits to not exceed my limits). I guess I don't search as much as I thought I did. I really like Kagi and think it's well worth the $10/mo.
(I'd really like to hear how you're hitting that search volume, if you're open to share? I can't imagine hitting a search engine that many times a day, so I'm quite curious.)
I'm also really curious how you manage having 20 searches a day :)
An leisure example - I was checking various fidget toys. My ~10 minutes "research" took 15 queries like: "spring toy", "fidget stick", "worry beads", "kendama", "baoding balls" etc. (on topic: infinity cube is quite cool)
Another one would be preparing instrument study sheet with around 20 music instrument where I searched both for images & audio (~50 searches) - e.g. "acoustic guitar sound sample" & "acoustic guitar".
Those are simple, professionally I sometimes go quite wide to find hook point and then dig from there. 20-40 queries spread across various search engines.
I am aware that I'm outlier, yet thinking about usage in this case is a mistake for me.
An leisure example - I was checking various fidget toys. My ~10 minutes "research" took 15 queries like: "spring toy", "fidget stick", "worry beads", "kendama", "baoding balls" etc. (on topic: infinity cube is quite cool)
Another one would be preparing instrument study sheet with around 20 music instrument where I searched both for images & audio (~50 searches) - e.g. "acoustic guitar sound sample" & "acoustic guitar".
Those are simple, professionally I sometimes go quite wide to find hook point and then dig from there. 20-40 queries spread across various search engines.
I am aware that I'm outlier, yet thinking about usage in this case is a mistake for me.
> ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?
I suspect there's a big difference between an ordinary user and an ordinary Kagi user.
I suspect there's a big difference between an ordinary user and an ordinary Kagi user.
I've been using Kagi for the last year or so. I average about 20 searches per day, including on my mobile after work. Well under my 1k monthly limit.
I guess I don't search nearly as much as I thought I did. Still worth the $10/mo to me.
I guess I don't search nearly as much as I thought I did. Still worth the $10/mo to me.
The best thing about Kagi I've found from trying it recently is that it's results are actually really good.
Every time I'd tried DuckDuckGo over the years I found myself having to switch back to Google because I was never sure that there weren't better results going missing. Whereas Kagi often ends up with better rankings than Google—eg. Goodreads, which is great for real reviews, gets placed above all the random booksellers websites.
Every time I'd tried DuckDuckGo over the years I found myself having to switch back to Google because I was never sure that there weren't better results going missing. Whereas Kagi often ends up with better rankings than Google—eg. Goodreads, which is great for real reviews, gets placed above all the random booksellers websites.
I think Kagi is great, but I’m paying on the order of €10 per month and was suddenly told yesterday that I exceeded my 1k requests quota. That’s not a great way of dealing with paying customers. Google warned me multiple times before they hiked my Workspace price.
I’m _this_ close to going back to DDG with the occasional Google drilldown.
I’m _this_ close to going back to DDG with the occasional Google drilldown.
1000 searches are included in the $10 plan. Currently you are offered the option to pay for additional searches at 1.5 cents per search. Not ideal we know, but someone needs to pay for those, and the notice you received is courtesy (you can also remove it). How would you handle this differently?
At least my render of the pricing page gives that 700 searches per day are included in the $10 plan, with additional searches priced at ¢1.5. So 1000 searches would be $14.5 plus conversion fee if you don't have a dollar account.
I'd like to be warned before hitting a hard limit, in whichever way. E.g. warning emails ("You've reached 80% of your quota"), or a meter on the search page.
From a higher POV, I like GPT-4's smaller time windows way better (x queries within 4 hour window). I hate to be "locked out" of search for a whole week. A few hours wouldn't feel that bad.
From a higher POV, I like GPT-4's smaller time windows way better (x queries within 4 hour window). I hate to be "locked out" of search for a whole week. A few hours wouldn't feel that bad.
Kagi are very open about their policy to submit feedback, bugs, and feature requests at https://kagifeedback.org/. I've not submitted anything Kagi Search, but I've submitted a few features and performance issues/bugs to their Orion feedback. I got replies from Vlad and Kagi employees within 12 hours. Feel free to suggest this as feedback I'd say...
Maybe some kind of warning when getting close to the existing tier limit?
eg "You're getting close to your 1000 search limit at your current pricing (800/1000)".
I'm trying to think of better wording, but having a hard time of it. ;)
eg "You're getting close to your 1000 search limit at your current pricing (800/1000)".
I'm trying to think of better wording, but having a hard time of it. ;)
As they said, give multiple notices in advance.
I’m tired of all these “do no evil” organisations, that we back but once they succeed they give us the middle finger and harm us. Is search engine that hard to self host? Assuming I don’t want to index most of the web, such as non English sites, porn, most news sites. Surely there’s an open source solution someone has written to do that I can run from home!
You can run YaCy from home https://yacy.net/
On a more general note I wonder why everybody is so convinced a paid service will cater to what they want? I can't imagine for my 10$ a month they would implement my bugfix or add that feature I'd love. I'm paying for MS Office or my car as well and boy do I have complaints about them... why would Kagi be any different? The only advantage I can think of is they would be less motivated to search alternative financing - aka advertising. But not even that is a guarantee in the long run...
It's about their business model. If their business is to profit off of satisfying customers then they are going to be motivated to satisfy customers. If their business is to profit off of selling advertisements, then they're going to profit off of selling advertisements.
Volkswagen business model is to profit off satisfying customers, yet their menu navigation is censored and they were never bothered to change it. How's that working differently for Kagi? Paying Kagi users just got hit with a new price model which judging by the reactions around here was not very welcome. Yet they all keep selling products, both Kagi and Volkswagen, against customer complaints. Can we agree that there's a lot of gray area in the "customer is king" saying?
Not every customer is going to be happy. And few, if any, companies are purely motivated by customer satisfaction. There are limits, especially legally, of what companies can do to satisfy customers.
> I can't imagine for my 10$ a month they would implement my bugfix or add that feature I'd love.
That is exactly what you can expect from Kagi. Here is user submitted feedback marked as 'Done'.
https://kagifeedback.org/?secondaryTag=done
That is exactly what you can expect from Kagi. Here is user submitted feedback marked as 'Done'.
https://kagifeedback.org/?secondaryTag=done
You need to realize that you like Kagi exactly because it has NOT been "succeeded", and you start to dislike DDG because it finally picks up popularity.
Anything in the world that's used by large amount of users are guaranteed to piss off some portion of them, because they can only focus on limited amount of features. Google had been like that. Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive. Then the rest 30% vocal techies all start to protest and saying Mozilla has lost its direction and hope to regain market share.
When Kagi starts to gain popularity, I guarantee you they will start to polarize on their features, some of which you won't like, regardless of their business model, because the (majority) users they are catering to are also paid users, same as you. Only when they have only small amount of users could all of such be homogeneous enough so that every single feature they dish out is something you like.
Anything in the world that's used by large amount of users are guaranteed to piss off some portion of them, because they can only focus on limited amount of features. Google had been like that. Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive. Then the rest 30% vocal techies all start to protest and saying Mozilla has lost its direction and hope to regain market share.
When Kagi starts to gain popularity, I guarantee you they will start to polarize on their features, some of which you won't like, regardless of their business model, because the (majority) users they are catering to are also paid users, same as you. Only when they have only small amount of users could all of such be homogeneous enough so that every single feature they dish out is something you like.
Not the previous poster, but I'm a paid subscriber of Kagi and was previously a heavy user of DDG.
The key difference that the previous poster outlined and you're missing is that with Kagi, you're the customer, while with DDG, you're the product. Kagi is thus incentivized to improve their offering to better fit your needs as a user, while DDG is incentivized to better serve their customers the advertisers.
The key difference that the previous poster outlined and you're missing is that with Kagi, you're the customer, while with DDG, you're the product. Kagi is thus incentivized to improve their offering to better fit your needs as a user, while DDG is incentivized to better serve their customers the advertisers.
neither the previous poster, but I'm not missing what was said, but are you missing that paying a subscription for something, if it becomes popular, becomes an irresistible audience to also advertise to? Have you seen Amazon Prime video lately? it becomes more and more festooned with ads, like happened to cable TV. Pay a subscription, and watch ads, or promotions, or product placements. They're drunk on it.
Kagi doesn't have any ads, and serves an audience that is so opposed to ads that they'll pay for the privilege. Sure, in 10 or 20 years that may change, but for now I don't seem them changing that and taking away their single biggest differentiator.
If Kagi adds ads I'll leave it.
There is a level of ad I'm willing to tolerate.
20 seconds before a YT vid -- yeah maybe. Every 2 minutes during the vid? Not so happy.
ditto for a paid search. something on the side of the page, or something that's in the middle of results but still clearly an ad... maybe.
20 seconds before a YT vid -- yeah maybe. Every 2 minutes during the vid? Not so happy.
ditto for a paid search. something on the side of the page, or something that's in the middle of results but still clearly an ad... maybe.
if Kagi becomes popular, losing the early subscribers is just a drop from their bucket
I reject the premise that OP dislikes the product because it succeeded, instead of their stated reasons.
Also, saying 'no, this is why you think what you do' is not cool.
Also, saying 'no, this is why you think what you do' is not cool.
DDG is just Bing. nobody wants evil microsoft search
>Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive.
Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
This is simply not true. I say this based on direct research, with users of our no-tracking search engine.
Non-techies use Microsoft, Apple, and Google accounts.
Non-techies use Chrome over Firefox.
Non-techies use Windows and MacOS over Linux.
Non-techies use smartphones over phones.
Non-techies use smart TVs over TVs.
Non-techies use social media and have accounts using their real names.
I reiterate: Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
Non-techies use Chrome over Firefox.
Non-techies use Windows and MacOS over Linux.
Non-techies use smartphones over phones.
Non-techies use smart TVs over TVs.
Non-techies use social media and have accounts using their real names.
I reiterate: Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
You're wrong, they do care about privacy, just at a superficial level. This means that advertising a service as "privacy-oriented" is a positive feature for the normies, but only if it's convenient.
It's kinda like the cruelty-free labels on shampoo.
It's kinda like the cruelty-free labels on shampoo.
Non-techies have a poor understanding of the risks, little awareness of privacy protecting alternatives, and a lack of confidence in installing and using new software. It's not that they don't care about their privacy.
Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?
I'm very much interested in a high-quality search engine, and certainly willing to pay for it, but unless the above condition is satisfied, it's a non-starter for me.
I'm very much interested in a high-quality search engine, and certainly willing to pay for it, but unless the above condition is satisfied, it's a non-starter for me.
Their privacy policy is here: https://kagi.com/privacy
The short answer to your question is: yes, you can use it without linking any real-world identifiers to your search queries. That is explicitly stated in the linked privacy policy. With that said, I guess it's possible that they are violating their own privacy policy. That seems like a bad idea from a legal perspective, and I don't have any reason to suspect they're lying, so I'm not too worried about it.
The short answer to your question is: yes, you can use it without linking any real-world identifiers to your search queries. That is explicitly stated in the linked privacy policy. With that said, I guess it's possible that they are violating their own privacy policy. That seems like a bad idea from a legal perspective, and I don't have any reason to suspect they're lying, so I'm not too worried about it.
Yeah I was actually hoping for an answer that doesn't require blind trust.
So the correct answer seems to be "we absolutely could link your searches to your identity, but we promise that we won't; however, you cannot verify that we are keeping that promise".
Which I'm afraid is not good enough. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are lying, and indeed I have no reason to suspect they are. But I'm looking for technological privacy, not contractual privacy.
So the correct answer seems to be "we absolutely could link your searches to your identity, but we promise that we won't; however, you cannot verify that we are keeping that promise".
Which I'm afraid is not good enough. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are lying, and indeed I have no reason to suspect they are. But I'm looking for technological privacy, not contractual privacy.
Any promises made by a company can disappear with a change of management/ownership.
Don't rely on company promises if you can avoid it.
Don't rely on company promises if you can avoid it.
In that case, you really can't use any hosted search engine because they could be logging all your queries, the time you made them, and associating them with your IP and any other information they can get their hands on. Are you familiar with any search engine that is technically incapable of logging your IP???
You can use a privacy-focused VPN like Mullvad to conceal your identity from the search engine. In most markets having a credit/debit card requires personal information so there's nothing you can do if they don't provide a privacy-friendly payment alternative.
Anyway, GP's question was simply:
"Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?"
And the correct answer is no.
Anyway, GP's question was simply:
"Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?"
And the correct answer is no.
If you're going to use Mullvad to conceal parts of your identity, why not use prepaid cards or a service like Privacy.com for your payment details?
For the record, I'm signed up for Kagi with a disposable email, though I didn't bother to anonymize my payment.
For the record, I'm signed up for Kagi with a disposable email, though I didn't bother to anonymize my payment.
Why not just have a payment method that isn't linked to you?
How do you realistically do that online, short of getting into crypto ?
I wonder if they'd even accept crypto, but their FAQ has nothing on their accepted payment and so it seems it needs an account even to just see that.
I wonder if they'd even accept crypto, but their FAQ has nothing on their accepted payment and so it seems it needs an account even to just see that.
There are pre-paid credit cards you can buy in Safeway and such for a small premium. I'm not sure how to use them for paying online though (i.e. how to provide name/address/phone that match).
Well, they could do it like Mulvad VPN and allow cash payments + whatever your account number is. (Account number isn't tied to you)
This is not unrealistic at all. For curious people, here's how the Posteo email service does it:
https://posteo.de/en/site/privacy#anonymisedpayment
https://posteo.de/en/site/privacy#anonymisedpayment
Posteo relies on you trusting them to remove your identifying data after payment. There is no way to make sure they actually do
Do they support any such payment methods? Only Monero and cash come to mind.
No, just debit/credit cards, handled via Stripe IIRC.
I know HN is against Bitcoin by design (it’s destroying the planet!11), but I really miss the opportunity to pay with Lightning TBH.
It’s fine for me having an account, but not using a credit card linked to my name.
I found a 2022 thread where someone asked to pay with BTC or Monero, but still. No news.
Privacy.com might help
Privacy.com is US only. And of course, Privacy.com "virtual cards" are still linked to your real-world identity.
How would it get tied to you from the search engine perspective? You can fill in fake information with a Privacy card. They'd have to do some pretty intense investigation to somehow tie the card number back to you...just to sell your information. Seems unproductive.
A single leak could ruin your social relationships. Extortion bots are untiring and neverending. Just a moment ago our countries largest mental health institution had an IT-catastrophe, and thousands of influental people immediately got automatically extorted by bots.
I also use Kagi and I can confirm that it’s great. I am using Google now maybe still several times a week and most of the time the results are not even better.
I still think it’s too expensive though and I wish prices would come down.
I still think it’s too expensive though and I wish prices would come down.
> They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme
You mean being way too expensive? I appreciate them wanting to stay afloat but they need to bring the cost per search down drastically. They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization.
You mean being way too expensive? I appreciate them wanting to stay afloat but they need to bring the cost per search down drastically. They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization.
> They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization...
I disagree. You have to remember how disadvantaged the online ad market actually is. Many of those ad networks also are simply legitimizing fraud on the advertisers, but because the networks aren't big enough at competitors, and all existing implementations suffer the same issues you really don't get what you pay for as Uber found out years ago.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
I disagree. You have to remember how disadvantaged the online ad market actually is. Many of those ad networks also are simply legitimizing fraud on the advertisers, but because the networks aren't big enough at competitors, and all existing implementations suffer the same issues you really don't get what you pay for as Uber found out years ago.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
This is what has been holding me back from trying out Kagi. I will probably jump over to Kagi at some point because I've noticed the quality of DDG searches going downhill as well. However, I'm firmly in Kagi's idea of 1% of Internet users. I search for anything at the drop of a hat. I just checked my history in Firefox for duckduckgo.com for "This Month" and it came back with 704 individual searches (DDG likes to add on a =web and generate a new request so I filtered for just those). My phone is an island all on its own, and I probably have another 100-150 searches on there. March and February are right around the same numbers. For fun'sies lets just say 1000 searches per month. $10/month for the 700 searches plan + 300 * 0.015 for the overages = $14.50/month.
Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.
I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.
Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.
Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.
Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.
I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.
Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.
Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.
Thanks for doing the analysis!
> so they make $2 per month from me
That would be roughly right.
> I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx
It does cover only the search and infrastructure cost, not salaries and other operations.
According to my calculations, Google is making $5.60 on those same 80 searches from ads (roughly 7 cents per search), so $1 cost from Kagi is a bargain! :)
> so they make $2 per month from me
That would be roughly right.
> I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx
It does cover only the search and infrastructure cost, not salaries and other operations.
According to my calculations, Google is making $5.60 on those same 80 searches from ads (roughly 7 cents per search), so $1 cost from Kagi is a bargain! :)
yea, the tool tip says "200 searches is enough for 99% of Internet users", but I doubt their target demographic is the 99% that don't need more.
Just a datapoint, but I feel like I do a lot of searches… I’m always looking stuff up, and I’m also in the habit of using my search engine as a lazy form of autocomplete for urls. I apparently do about 700 searches a month according to Kagi. If I were on the basic plan, I think that would mean I’d be paying $5/mo. + $0.015/search * (700-200) searches/mo. = $12.50/mo.
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
Yeah, I similarly felt like I did a lot of searches every day... and if I had estimated my search usage I would have said easily thousands a month. But I'm also actually in the 600–800 range it turns out.
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
> That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
I agree, we will get there.
I agree, we will get there.
Then it would be better take the professional plan including 700 searches for 10$/mo.
You are correct, Kagi current users are mostly from the remaining 1%. However that plan was made to attract the remaining 99% Internet users to Kagi (and the plan is more than sufficient for their needs).
I'm skeptical that those 99% would ever be interested in Kagi's value proposition at all. Kagi is a niche product in the contemporary context of ad funded free search engines, and it would have to survive until the other side of the adoption curve before it can reliably sell itself to the average person.
You may be right, but there was only one way for us to find out :)
Why do you think their prices are unreasonable? Just curious.
1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...
1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...
45 USD per month is more than what most people in advanced countries pay for their mobile phone service or broadband connection. Frankly, it's crazy to me. Anything more than 10 USD per month for better search is hard to defend. And yes, I know that Kagi is targeting a _very_ picky audience! B2C is a brutal business.
Why would you pay that? You’d subscribe to the unlimited plan for 25$/mo.
I easily do dozens of searches per day, occasionally hundreds, especially when debugging obscure issues. It shouldn't be the most expensive subscription I've got by far. Well it could be, but I better not have to go to google or something else to get answers, and it's not quite there yet.
It looks like they do some fair margin on top of the Microsoft Bing API:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...
Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...
Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.
Actually Bing API will be $28 per 1000 searches from May 1st [1]
Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update
Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update
It is never more than $25/month (Ultimate plan with unlimited searches)
I would use them if you could pay anonymously. Using a search engine where every query is tied to my credit card is not for me.
Searches are not tied to an account, Kagi does not even log searches. [1]
What would be the point when your search history would just be a liability? That is the whole point of the paid search business model.
[1] https://kagi.com/privacy
What would be the point when your search history would just be a liability? That is the whole point of the paid search business model.
[1] https://kagi.com/privacy
How would Kagi enforce quotas if they can't link searches to the account paying for them?
IP address. The classic example is scholarly/academic journals. Access by subscribing university libraries and corporations is still generally dependent on IP address. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. Early 90s at least.
An expected retort might be "But consumer IP addresses are subject to change." True, but sometimes a "static" IP is non-negotiable. For example, in the past if one subscribed to ICANN's zone file access program, which is public information open to access by anyone, not only university libraries or corporations, a static IP address had to be provided. Of course one could use a consumer IP address because those can change infrequently, sometimes on a timescale of years. If it ever changed then one had to execute a new agreement. Perhaps the requirement for a static IP has been dropped but I honestly doubt it.
Rate-limiting/access control by IP address is common and straightforward.
However so-called "tech" companies have shown they cannot be trusted when collecting information from users. For example, Twitter and Facebook each claimed they were requesting phone numbers from users for "security" reasons but it turned out they were using them for commercial purposes.
An expected retort might be "But consumer IP addresses are subject to change." True, but sometimes a "static" IP is non-negotiable. For example, in the past if one subscribed to ICANN's zone file access program, which is public information open to access by anyone, not only university libraries or corporations, a static IP address had to be provided. Of course one could use a consumer IP address because those can change infrequently, sometimes on a timescale of years. If it ever changed then one had to execute a new agreement. Perhaps the requirement for a static IP has been dropped but I honestly doubt it.
Rate-limiting/access control by IP address is common and straightforward.
However so-called "tech" companies have shown they cannot be trusted when collecting information from users. For example, Twitter and Facebook each claimed they were requesting phone numbers from users for "security" reasons but it turned out they were using them for commercial purposes.
Wouldn't they have to validate a paying customer to tie it to an IP aswell? If there is a point where a user is identifiable, it can't be rolled back with a "trust us" in my opinion if the focus is privacy.
Sometimes service providers on the internet try to accomodate "anonymous" payment via wire transfer or other non-credit card payment methods. VPNs are one example. Whether this is significantly "anonymous" is debatable. An obvious question is whether the service provider retains payment information after payment is made and if so, why. To provide service, arguably the provider only needs to know "this IP address is paid up through [date]". It does not need to know "this IP address is associated with [user]". It does not need to collect or retain any information about [user].
We just increase search counter by one.
200 searches a month and then having to pay extra per search is a hilariously bad offering.
This isn’t 2008 mobile contracts, I don’t want usage caps for basic functionality.
This isn’t 2008 mobile contracts, I don’t want usage caps for basic functionality.
I recently gave Kagi a try after using DDG, and signed up for their $10/month plan. However, I found myself running out of searches within the first 20 days, which left me feeling hesitant about making any additional searches due to the extra cost. While I do want to support Kagi's success, I personally found the cost of $10-15 per month for search to be a bit steep. Perhaps I have unrealistic expectations on how cheap search should be, but for now, I'm not sure if the cost is worth it for me.
I search ~1000 queries/month, and I tried using Google, DDG, and Kagi side by side for the last six months. At this point I'm 100% on Kagi. My last holdout was work using Google, but it's just so frustrating now after using Kagi, I finally switched over.
Yeah it's paid, but I am getting the best results and experience. Not everyone needs great search, but I do and I'm willing to pay for it.
I just recently got my brother to sign up, he's also gotten so tired of Google and DDG. Already a few days later he's really digging Kagi.
I think a lot of the pricing sticker shock is just because we've been price anchored to $0/month for the last twenty years. The $15/month for Kagi is what most people pay for a single coffee and sandwich, which saves them like ~5 minutes making by hand. Kagi probably saves me at least an hour a month, so from an ROI it's at least 12x better than a coffee and sandwich at the shop.
Yeah it's paid, but I am getting the best results and experience. Not everyone needs great search, but I do and I'm willing to pay for it.
I just recently got my brother to sign up, he's also gotten so tired of Google and DDG. Already a few days later he's really digging Kagi.
I think a lot of the pricing sticker shock is just because we've been price anchored to $0/month for the last twenty years. The $15/month for Kagi is what most people pay for a single coffee and sandwich, which saves them like ~5 minutes making by hand. Kagi probably saves me at least an hour a month, so from an ROI it's at least 12x better than a coffee and sandwich at the shop.
I agree. I was skeptical to use Kagi at first, but since making the jump a few months ago, I'm never looking back.
Kagi gives you so much power over your search experience. I don't even have to use site:Reddit.com anymore to find non-SEO-optimized content. It's like using Google in the early 2000s!
Kagi gives you so much power over your search experience. I don't even have to use site:Reddit.com anymore to find non-SEO-optimized content. It's like using Google in the early 2000s!
I don't want them to fail but I have 0 support for Kagi after trying them out. Main reason is they collect PII and have no privacy friendly payment options. They should have gone the way if Mullvad with that. Another reason is requiring an account for search is begging to be tracked but even if that is not an issue, it is sooo annoying having to sign in to search and even more annoying when auto complete for a search takes me to kagi but I no longer have that account so I have to face a login page and then navigate away and redo the search.
They made the critical mistake of not keeping it simple. If they wanted profits, why make it hard for people to pay them? If they wanted market share, why not have a free tier so people can try before they buy. They're only staying afloat in tech-circle hype imo.
They made the critical mistake of not keeping it simple. If they wanted profits, why make it hard for people to pay them? If they wanted market share, why not have a free tier so people can try before they buy. They're only staying afloat in tech-circle hype imo.
Kagi does not collect PII. You can register with a fake email if you want to. Payment information (if any) is collected by Stripe, not Kagi.
How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?
How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?
As someone with high privacy focus, just having a user id given by stripe, that stripe then can connect to a real person is a liability. Mullvad allows payments in crypto and their site is accessible as an onion service. I know it definitely adds overhead to do both of those things, though personally I wouldn't mind paying a lot of extra for it. I'm not sure which fraction of users are like me though, I might just be an unviable customer
Sure, but also note that it took 14 years for Mullvad to reach the point where it can support all those billing methods. Kagi launched less than a year ago with a small bootstrapped team, building a much more complex product.
Kagi can listen to its users and learn from other pro-privacy companies. Imagine if proton requires a paid account for everything for everyone.
> For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension.
I moved to Kagi for this feature. I think that if a search engine does not offer this kind of feature, it does not have the user experience as a priority.
This was after getting tired of using "!g" in all my DDG searches because the results were so bad (and with so many "junk" sites).
I moved to Kagi for this feature. I think that if a search engine does not offer this kind of feature, it does not have the user experience as a priority.
This was after getting tired of using "!g" in all my DDG searches because the results were so bad (and with so many "junk" sites).
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Haven't tried Kagi, but I can highly recommend you.com. It allows quite a bit of customization and has been really solid for the last year+ that I have been using it, I only ever go back to Google for thesaurus/dictionary lookup searches.
"Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs."
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html
If many users all send their search queries through a proxy that forwwards them to, say, Google, then one can argue these queries are "anonymised" to some extent.
This has been tried. But AFAIK, no one has ever tried to charge money for it.
In 2003, there was Scroogle which lasted for almost 10 years and was reputedly forwarding hundreds of thousands of searches per day.
Scroogle used to have its own Wikipedia page before it was deleted then merged into the "Criticisms_of_Google" Wikipedia page.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/privacy-what-should-google...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AScroogle
In 2010, there was GoogleSharing, a Firefox plugin. It did not last very long and unlike Scroogle I cannot recall any explanation was ever given why it was shut down.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/04/a-bett...
Criticisms of Scroogle or GoogleSharing might include having to trust the people operating the proxy servers. With respect to continuation of ad-free, no BS service and with respect to privacy.
For example, if operator gets a strongly-worded letter on law firm letterhead then will he share a user's search results. What if he receives a directive from some legal authority demanding that a user's queries be monitored and/or preserved. Will he notify the user. Will he fight such requests. How good are his lawyers. Does he even have any that are prepared to handle these matters.
The same issues apply to Kagi.
Being a paid service might actually improve these trust problems, assuming there is a contract with the user. The last time I looked for Kagi's terms, it was not reassuring. What does Kagi promise to do or refrain from doing. If Kagi agrees to zero liability for almost anything, then to me that's a red flag. Why would anyone trust him. At the very least, users should be able to sue for up to the amount of the fees they have paid if Kagi breaches the agreement.
NB. I am not for or against Kagi. I like the proxy server idea and wish there were more options to use proxies. However I do not agree that merely paying for web search solves all the problems. I wrote scripts for own use that search multiple indexes, filter out garbage and combine results into a simple, minimalist SERP with unprefixed URLs suitable for a text-only browser. For me, that addresses the paid placement ads and ranking algorithm problems. As for the privacy problems, I cannot find anything that promises Kagi will not collect data about users. The same problem of trust as in 2003 through 2012 exists today. Arguably things have gotten worse. As we've seen from so-called "tech" companies offering "pay to stop the ads" subscriptions, paying fees does not stop the data collection. It does not solve the privacy problems. Perhaps if the search engine operator was actually bound by an agreement or laws that prohibited it from collecting data or restricted its use of data. But even with that, how does one detect non-compliance.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html
If many users all send their search queries through a proxy that forwwards them to, say, Google, then one can argue these queries are "anonymised" to some extent.
This has been tried. But AFAIK, no one has ever tried to charge money for it.
In 2003, there was Scroogle which lasted for almost 10 years and was reputedly forwarding hundreds of thousands of searches per day.
Scroogle used to have its own Wikipedia page before it was deleted then merged into the "Criticisms_of_Google" Wikipedia page.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/privacy-what-should-google...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AScroogle
In 2010, there was GoogleSharing, a Firefox plugin. It did not last very long and unlike Scroogle I cannot recall any explanation was ever given why it was shut down.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/04/a-bett...
Criticisms of Scroogle or GoogleSharing might include having to trust the people operating the proxy servers. With respect to continuation of ad-free, no BS service and with respect to privacy.
For example, if operator gets a strongly-worded letter on law firm letterhead then will he share a user's search results. What if he receives a directive from some legal authority demanding that a user's queries be monitored and/or preserved. Will he notify the user. Will he fight such requests. How good are his lawyers. Does he even have any that are prepared to handle these matters.
The same issues apply to Kagi.
Being a paid service might actually improve these trust problems, assuming there is a contract with the user. The last time I looked for Kagi's terms, it was not reassuring. What does Kagi promise to do or refrain from doing. If Kagi agrees to zero liability for almost anything, then to me that's a red flag. Why would anyone trust him. At the very least, users should be able to sue for up to the amount of the fees they have paid if Kagi breaches the agreement.
NB. I am not for or against Kagi. I like the proxy server idea and wish there were more options to use proxies. However I do not agree that merely paying for web search solves all the problems. I wrote scripts for own use that search multiple indexes, filter out garbage and combine results into a simple, minimalist SERP with unprefixed URLs suitable for a text-only browser. For me, that addresses the paid placement ads and ranking algorithm problems. As for the privacy problems, I cannot find anything that promises Kagi will not collect data about users. The same problem of trust as in 2003 through 2012 exists today. Arguably things have gotten worse. As we've seen from so-called "tech" companies offering "pay to stop the ads" subscriptions, paying fees does not stop the data collection. It does not solve the privacy problems. Perhaps if the search engine operator was actually bound by an agreement or laws that prohibited it from collecting data or restricted its use of data. But even with that, how does one detect non-compliance.
[deleted]
Hi all, Founder/CEO DuckDuckGo here and I hope I can help clear this up. Search syntax filters are still available on DuckDuckGo and we’ve re-updated the help page to reflect that. Nothing has actually recently changed with the way they work in terms of removing any functionality. In fact, we actually recently added functionality to make site exclusion work better as described in https://duckduckgo.com/updates
What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.
Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.
Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
You ignore quotes. You ignore -modifiers Your search is near useless these days and after evangelizing, I now tell people to avoid ddg.
The site exclusion very much does _not_ work for images, just FYI.
For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest
It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.
For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest
It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.
Thanks for the update! I did notice they were flaky and maybe it's my queries that were more flaky than others that it stuck out at me more than when they possibly worked.
Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.
Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.
I’ve also noticed that “”’s stopped working as expected there recently.
Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example:
https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/
And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons.
Thirty seven spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, thirty seven?!? Who thought that was a good number?
That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!
Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example:
https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/
And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons.
Thirty seven spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, thirty seven?!? Who thought that was a good number?
That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!
I tried
graphics card -"nvidia"
graphics card -"radeon"
Since DDG is (or was last I knew) primary using bing under the hood i wonder if this is less a DDG Change and more a Bing Change?
The quotation marks work for me:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22lowes+pet+bedding%22&atb...
I notice in your HN post, you're using fancy quotation marks; I assume you're not using the same while searching DDG.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22lowes+pet+bedding%22&atb...
I notice in your HN post, you're using fancy quotation marks; I assume you're not using the same while searching DDG.
Doesn't work for me. Like the GP, I get results unrelated to Lowes, bedding or even pets.
DDG for more than a year when there's nothing to show for the phrase, it dumps some unrelated stuff but somehow tied to my location.
Out of curiosity, I noticed (as I mentioned in a reply to your sibling) I could produce unrelated results by fiddling with the region; does changing region do anything for you?
Just tried to test it out and I'm now seeing correct results when I set the region to 'US' and an empty list of results when using my own region. This is not at all what I was seeing earlier.
Perhaps they're A/B testing or something?
Perhaps they're A/B testing or something?
That isn't how the quote feature is supposed to work. I just tried putting the individual keywords in quotes ("lowes" "pet" "bedding") and it works exactly like you would expect.
How is it supposed to work? I expect to see only those results that contain an exact match on the entire phrase between the quotes but perhaps I've misunderstood?
I get 2 good result, then oddly I get
https://www.bizseek.co.uk/simons-books-01458-272313
https://www.bizseek.co.uk/simons-books-01458-272313
I normally use "Denmark" as a region, but turning it on and off did not change my search results much (three zazzle links and a copysite of this HN thread, but not HN itself).
Changing the region to "USA" really confused me. Suddenly a lot of unrelated results turn up, but a lot of the results are Danish or Denmark-related. Including the Wikipedia page for Ringsted. What does that have to do with "lowes pet bedding"?
I am honestly not entirely sure what the region parameter on DDG does, but it appears not to be working for "USA".
Changing the region to "USA" really confused me. Suddenly a lot of unrelated results turn up, but a lot of the results are Danish or Denmark-related. Including the Wikipedia page for Ringsted. What does that have to do with "lowes pet bedding"?
I am honestly not entirely sure what the region parameter on DDG does, but it appears not to be working for "USA".
Yeah I feel all search engines have had declining quality for some time now. Not sure if it's unintended consequence of fighting bots. Or unintended consequence of trying to remove some content from the results. I'm assuming it's unintentional.
It's hard to see how removing the ability for the user to be more specific could be a result of fighting bots. That shouldn't have to add anything spammy to the search results, it should only remove things that would otherwise be there.
I have to assume it's something along the lines of, they found that a lot of people would put things in quotes when they didn't actually want an exact match, and so changed what it did to better serve the wider audience. But there is no excuse for doing this without replacing it with some other way to specify exact match for the people who know how to RTFM.
I have to assume it's something along the lines of, they found that a lot of people would put things in quotes when they didn't actually want an exact match, and so changed what it did to better serve the wider audience. But there is no excuse for doing this without replacing it with some other way to specify exact match for the people who know how to RTFM.
From my experiences nowadays it feels like it's all about pumping SEO positioning with very little actual content you look for.
If I try to look for IT related stuff I'm getting trapped around these obnoxious blogs and "sites" that shamelessly rip off someone else's content. Then, for a while looking for anything related to Windows was filling top most results with Microsoft forums, with threads that have all these generic "have you tried turning it off and on again" diagnostic solutions.
If I try to look for IT related stuff I'm getting trapped around these obnoxious blogs and "sites" that shamelessly rip off someone else's content. Then, for a while looking for anything related to Windows was filling top most results with Microsoft forums, with threads that have all these generic "have you tried turning it off and on again" diagnostic solutions.
[deleted]
it's intentional as a result of them making money off showing you bad results (ads)
after all, you aren't paying them
after all, you aren't paying them
I feel like this is a big reason for people wanting to using ChatGPT (LLM's in general) for search results.
Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful.
The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.
Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful.
The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.
In a recent Google, the first non-ad result was accessible only after scrolling through two pages (phone height) of ads. At least they're marked "Sponsored"...
Reported it a number of times to DDG a few years ago, then just gave up because they clearly don't care.
Stuck with DDG until Kagi though since Google is almost equally bad at this, equally non responsive when we report it[1] since Google has managed to fight their way from product I loved to use and company I'd love to work at down to products I actively avoid and company I went to one interview with and didn't care to follow through :-/
[1]: except the nifty trick someone mentioned about throwing you out of your current experiment and into another so it sometimes seems they have fixed it in 15 minutes)
Stuck with DDG until Kagi though since Google is almost equally bad at this, equally non responsive when we report it[1] since Google has managed to fight their way from product I loved to use and company I'd love to work at down to products I actively avoid and company I went to one interview with and didn't care to follow through :-/
[1]: except the nifty trick someone mentioned about throwing you out of your current experiment and into another so it sometimes seems they have fixed it in 15 minutes)
This post is now a search result, so it seems to be working (i.e catching sites with the exact phrase).
My experience with both DDG, which I use as default, and Google, which I use as backup has been steadily deteriorating over time.
That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.
If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?
Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.
We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.
At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.
If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?
Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.
We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.
At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
the capacity of a community for content generation grows faster than the capacity for self moderation, putting a limit on group-size in regards to the level of 'unwanted' content (spam, hate, porn ...).
automated moderation or more tolerance are needed to extend the group further; one of those can be bought with money.
automated moderation or more tolerance are needed to extend the group further; one of those can be bought with money.
Money is not a dirty word when people work for it (using it to keep count of who contributes valuable time and skill). Unfortunately what is happening - ever so frequently - is various digital cartels finding ways to extract permanent rents and use them to exercise undue and unaccountable control and influence instead of working for the money.
Decades of apathy and bad policy means that is not a trivial problem to crack, but in contrast with all prior technology revolutions, what we have is an entirely social, organizational challenge - disruptive change of behaviors can happen overnight.
We need to think boldly about these new "professions" (open source developers, online platform moderators, creative commons content generators, etc) and how they might become sustainable and purposeful options for people. The dividend we will reap collectively if we succeed is enormous.
Decades of apathy and bad policy means that is not a trivial problem to crack, but in contrast with all prior technology revolutions, what we have is an entirely social, organizational challenge - disruptive change of behaviors can happen overnight.
We need to think boldly about these new "professions" (open source developers, online platform moderators, creative commons content generators, etc) and how they might become sustainable and purposeful options for people. The dividend we will reap collectively if we succeed is enormous.
> If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
The size of a billion scale web search index like ours, is approaching 3 orders of the magintude the size of the Wikipedia and OSM databases we need to provide Wikipedia infoboxes and Map search.
Added to which it's very far from straightforward to provide search across billions of results in around 200ms.
The size of a billion scale web search index like ours, is approaching 3 orders of the magintude the size of the Wikipedia and OSM databases we need to provide Wikipedia infoboxes and Map search.
Added to which it's very far from straightforward to provide search across billions of results in around 200ms.
> Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries
Kinda is like that already
Kinda is like that already
This might be related to the bing API. I'm pretty sure Bing hiked their API access prices, effective may 1st 2023. Custom search is way more expensive than regular search too.
But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more...
Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).
But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more...
Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).
DDG is absolutely affected by Bing price hikes. Because M$ has raised the price here, DDG has had to lower the quality of their service. This will shift a (small) portion of those DDG users to Bing (lol).
They'be been in the search game for a long time. Its time they stop relying on bing and build their own search tech instead. Or mix and match atleast.
Didn't they used to have their own search index infrastructure?
I think they only use their own crawler/index for smart search results. (maybe because those cost a LOT to source from Bing)
Only for cards/knowledge graphs
After more research, I'm almost certain that they use the syndicated bing search instead of just using the API. Meaning they earn revenue for pure search, but I'm not sure if they still have to pay for some advanced parts of the API (filtering, autocomplete, etc). There's also no way to check if the revenue share dropped, which could be make sense considering how the price hike for the API. So take my comment with a grain of salt!
Do the paid search results also include paid adverts? If not, I can understand why MSFT raised the prices so much. The initial costs were probably way too low, but they wanted to gauge market interest. After finding firm interest, raise the prices to ensure that no one will use the API to build their own search engine without adverts! The people who work on Bing must be very expensive. Not to mention hardware/network costs.
Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?
There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers.
I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.
I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.
I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results
but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
I take it you don't have real world experience with product management?
Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.
And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.
That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.
Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.
And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.
That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.
I hear you, and yet DDG takes this to the extreme by maintaining completely separate frontends for those who don't want to run JS or want to sidestep the getting-started hand-holding (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html and https://start.duckduckgo.com/ respectively; while digging into that, I also learned they have https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite too for whatever that does)
So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them
I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page
So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them
I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page
Or add a button, etc.
I think with a "privacy focused" search engine that isn't the default on virtually any device or browser, you get a pretty savvy subset of the general population. The 10x probably use whatever the default search is.
> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators
The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.
People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.
The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.
People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.
> The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products
How many people read these pages?
How many people read these pages?
Sites like DDG explicitly require opting out of the 'Google economy' which is going to bias their userbase disproportionately towards higher information users. I can even give a specific example how this changes things. In March 2022 DDG decided to start downranking "Russian disinformation." You might reasonably claim that the average response to this would be no worse than neutral.
But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.
Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...
But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.
Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...
The same people who use such features are also on average
- more likely to use ad blockers.
- more likely to critically evaluate any advertising/propaganda they encounter.
- more likely to use VPNs and other technology that makes them more difficult to track.
- more likely to be "power users" of the service, thus consuming more resources than the average user.
Many more points like these apply, but the bottom line is that the ROI for such users, from the service provider's point of view, is terrible, so alienating them makes perfect business sense. And since competition has almost disappeared from the technology industry, there are no unintended consequences to be expected in most cases.
- more likely to use ad blockers.
- more likely to critically evaluate any advertising/propaganda they encounter.
- more likely to use VPNs and other technology that makes them more difficult to track.
- more likely to be "power users" of the service, thus consuming more resources than the average user.
Many more points like these apply, but the bottom line is that the ROI for such users, from the service provider's point of view, is terrible, so alienating them makes perfect business sense. And since competition has almost disappeared from the technology industry, there are no unintended consequences to be expected in most cases.
You forgot
- more likely to recommend your service to friends and family when they ask their power user friend which service to use.
A move like that is shortsighted at best, not good business sense.
- more likely to recommend your service to friends and family when they ask their power user friend which service to use.
A move like that is shortsighted at best, not good business sense.
I think this one is really overrated. My family never asks my input on what to use; they always buy Apple stuff, inkjet printers with expensive ink subscription services, etc. If I try to talk to them about, for instance, getting a laser printer instead, it goes nowhere. Heck, just getting them to use Facebook Messenger to talk to me since I'm living on another continent is almost too much apparently.
In my experience, non-technical people don't ask power users what to use, because they'll get answers they don't want and conflict with all the slick marketing they've been brainwashed with. So instead, they'll frequently try to coerce their technical family members into buying the mass-market stuff they like instead, particularly iPhones.
In my experience, non-technical people don't ask power users what to use, because they'll get answers they don't want and conflict with all the slick marketing they've been brainwashed with. So instead, they'll frequently try to coerce their technical family members into buying the mass-market stuff they like instead, particularly iPhones.
This isn't because they don't want advice, it's because there isn't enough competition for the advice to be useful. It's not like Google spies on you and Microsoft doesn't. It doesn't really matter to them whether the Windows PC they buy is from Dell or Lenovo and they don't want to hear how to build one out of parts from Newegg and install Linux on it if it can't play the games they want to play.
Companies are then safe to ignore you recommending against their products when the users have no other viable options. Until they do. Then they become Kodak or Blockbuster Video because someone else makes a better product than theirs and they're so unaccustomed to customers having a choice that they lose the market.
Companies are then safe to ignore you recommending against their products when the users have no other viable options. Until they do. Then they become Kodak or Blockbuster Video because someone else makes a better product than theirs and they're so unaccustomed to customers having a choice that they lose the market.
There is competition, sometimes far better competition, but people don't want it. Laser printers are the big example here IMO: people spend a fortune on inkjet ink, but try to get them to buy a laser printer and they'll refuse because the up-front cost is higher, even though the long-term cost is much, much lower for most users.
Certainly if you print thousands of pages it is. If you only print something once a month it's not. But most of the people printing thousands of pages will quickly notice this when they're paying unreasonable sums for gallons of ink sold by the thimble.
Then you have the people at the margin, who would be better off with a laser printer, but only by something like tens of dollars a year. At which point the opportunity cost of the time to evaluate whether they would actually be saving money is on par with the money they would be saving.
Whereas if there was actually more competition, someone would be selling a cheap printer that takes cheap cartridges instead of your options being a cheap printer with expensive cartridges or an expensive printer with cheap cartridges.
Then you have the people at the margin, who would be better off with a laser printer, but only by something like tens of dollars a year. At which point the opportunity cost of the time to evaluate whether they would actually be saving money is on par with the money they would be saving.
Whereas if there was actually more competition, someone would be selling a cheap printer that takes cheap cartridges instead of your options being a cheap printer with expensive cartridges or an expensive printer with cheap cartridges.
No, printing once a month is FAR more expensive for inkjets, because you have to replace the ink cartridges every time you print, because the print heads dry out and get clogged. That doesn't happen with lasers.
If that was the case then it would be another thing people would notice, having to replace the ink cartridge every time they use the printer.
Unless they live in a place with the right level of humidity where once a month is exactly the right interval to print so they don't dry out. Or they print once a week, but still not enough pages to justify a more expensive printer. Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit, so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
Unless they live in a place with the right level of humidity where once a month is exactly the right interval to print so they don't dry out. Or they print once a week, but still not enough pages to justify a more expensive printer. Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit, so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
>Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
Usually, they are.
>Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Such as here. Doing this is stupid, because buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a set of cartridges for the same printer.
>Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit,
Or here, because they couldn't manage money and earned themselves a bad credit score.
>so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
If you have credit that bad, you don't need a printer at all. Plus, you can get a B&W laser for $100; less than the cost of an inkjet + a set of cartridges.
Sorry, but every way I look at it, inkjets are nothing more than a scam designed to prey on people who aren't good at long-term thinking or money management.
Usually, they are.
>Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Such as here. Doing this is stupid, because buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a set of cartridges for the same printer.
>Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit,
Or here, because they couldn't manage money and earned themselves a bad credit score.
>so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
If you have credit that bad, you don't need a printer at all. Plus, you can get a B&W laser for $100; less than the cost of an inkjet + a set of cartridges.
Sorry, but every way I look at it, inkjets are nothing more than a scam designed to prey on people who aren't good at long-term thinking or money management.
People are just stubborn and creatures of habit, and they dont want to expend energy on a change that is difficult and unimportant. That is the crux of it.
I have family that wont tolerate any changes on their smartphone, wont create or use an email account and such... they arent even very old. But it kinda reinforces your point: they dont really take power user advice either, especially if it conflicts with something they already know.
Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
I have family that wont tolerate any changes on their smartphone, wont create or use an email account and such... they arent even very old. But it kinda reinforces your point: they dont really take power user advice either, especially if it conflicts with something they already know.
Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
>Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
Exactly. They can go to the Apple store and talk to one of the "geniuses" there.
Exactly. They can go to the Apple store and talk to one of the "geniuses" there.
It is very, very, exceedingly rare where I am put into a conversation to recommend a search engine. I can recall about twice ever. While it’s true both times I did recommend DDG, my trusted recommendation to friends/family can’t be worth it to them alone.
I actively put myself in these conversations multiple times a year, both here on HN but also IRL.
The age of that being a differentiator has long gone. Most people I know either just use the default in their browser, or they type Google (sometimes into literally into Google!!!) because that’s what they’ve always done.
The last time someone asked me about search engines was probably 20 years ago.
The last time someone asked me about search engines was probably 20 years ago.
This is a bit cynical but not wrong. Twice now I have ended up in conversations about how I would "re do" search if I could that talked about whether or not you could sell people the value.
When I was at Blekko we had a tremendously enthusiastic librarian user base who loved being able to curate the sites searched. But product was so focused on ads, nobody seriously considered a paid service. (Libraries subscribe to all kinds of services for example)
Most users however would not even provide an email address which would allow them to elide spammy sites from their searches.
It was an interesting thing to observe.
When I was at Blekko we had a tremendously enthusiastic librarian user base who loved being able to curate the sites searched. But product was so focused on ads, nobody seriously considered a paid service. (Libraries subscribe to all kinds of services for example)
Most users however would not even provide an email address which would allow them to elide spammy sites from their searches.
It was an interesting thing to observe.
My site always had the highest CTR for Ads from traffic coming from DuckDuckGo. One of the easiest traffic referral that neatly fits into an advertising bucket.
VPNs, privacy tools. You name it. These so called self-proclaimed smart people were trained like a sheeple to buy stuff.
VPNs, privacy tools. You name it. These so called self-proclaimed smart people were trained like a sheeple to buy stuff.
Ah yes, the classic corporate footgun. I am sure power users who are alienated will most definitely stay quiet and not complain to their peers, damaging the reputation of a once reliable tool. This has never happened before after all. :')
There is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter.
Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam?
There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam?
There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
>There is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter.
>Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index?
>Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Why so dramatic? It isn't really that big a deal if DDG starts to suck.
I use 3 or 4 different engines myself ATM just to see what's going on, DDG being one of them. To say DDG can do whatever they want is only true on the macro, in the short term. It is true me saying 'please don't' will not stop them from doing this right now, and will not affect their bottom line right now.
But this news is going to stop me recommending DDG to tech peers, and to change the default on my family's computers. That is STILL a drop in the pond, assuming I am the only one who is going to take this course of action. However, I am very confident that I will not be the only one to make such a switch.
Now regarding the idea that DDG is the only good modern search, I refer you to Searx, Librex, Kagi, and Startpage.
Now regarding your comment about "random individuals hobby search engine with a crappy index", that would be true if I wasn't satisfied with the indexes of the ones I recommend. I am satisfied with them, so that's not an issue. Unless you don't like hobby projects, in which case that's weird but you do you.
With regards to the "shady startup that wraps bing" point, Startpage is a Google wrapper but I assume the real issue is the shadiness. Which, sure, start page is not a perfect track record, but its good enough.
To close, I really don't think tech doomerism is productive. There are alternatives available. Making excuses to not try them is just lazy, not "realistic".
>Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index?
>Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Why so dramatic? It isn't really that big a deal if DDG starts to suck.
I use 3 or 4 different engines myself ATM just to see what's going on, DDG being one of them. To say DDG can do whatever they want is only true on the macro, in the short term. It is true me saying 'please don't' will not stop them from doing this right now, and will not affect their bottom line right now.
But this news is going to stop me recommending DDG to tech peers, and to change the default on my family's computers. That is STILL a drop in the pond, assuming I am the only one who is going to take this course of action. However, I am very confident that I will not be the only one to make such a switch.
Now regarding the idea that DDG is the only good modern search, I refer you to Searx, Librex, Kagi, and Startpage.
Now regarding your comment about "random individuals hobby search engine with a crappy index", that would be true if I wasn't satisfied with the indexes of the ones I recommend. I am satisfied with them, so that's not an issue. Unless you don't like hobby projects, in which case that's weird but you do you.
With regards to the "shady startup that wraps bing" point, Startpage is a Google wrapper but I assume the real issue is the shadiness. Which, sure, start page is not a perfect track record, but its good enough.
To close, I really don't think tech doomerism is productive. There are alternatives available. Making excuses to not try them is just lazy, not "realistic".
>There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...).
This is factually untrue. There's plenty of competition in social media and OSes, and Firefox still exists. For social media, there's Diaspora (yeah, I know, no one uses it), and for OSes you've got to be kidding: there's dozens of Linux distros out there or you can easily roll your own with various tools that are easily found. And despite its poor marketshare, Firefox still works quite well for me on Linux.
You have a valid complaint about search and email though, but for email it's understandable: the underlying protocol is broken beyond repair because its designers never anticipated spam so the current state is really unavoidable. Luckily, people have found alternatives to email and just don't use it much any more.
This is factually untrue. There's plenty of competition in social media and OSes, and Firefox still exists. For social media, there's Diaspora (yeah, I know, no one uses it), and for OSes you've got to be kidding: there's dozens of Linux distros out there or you can easily roll your own with various tools that are easily found. And despite its poor marketshare, Firefox still works quite well for me on Linux.
You have a valid complaint about search and email though, but for email it's understandable: the underlying protocol is broken beyond repair because its designers never anticipated spam so the current state is really unavoidable. Luckily, people have found alternatives to email and just don't use it much any more.
Firefox is near the lowest market share in its history, and declining further.
Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
That's not competition. That's "some geeks built some stuff and a couple of people use it occasionally". If there were just two car manufacturers, and one of them had 98% market share and the other 2%, I doubt you'd call that market "competitive". Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
That's not competition. That's "some geeks built some stuff and a couple of people use it occasionally". If there were just two car manufacturers, and one of them had 98% market share and the other 2%, I doubt you'd call that market "competitive". Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
>Firefox is near the lowest market share in its history, and declining further.
Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
>Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Why does this matter? It works fine for countless people and companies. I'm using it at work right now, and have been using it exclusively at work for many years. Marketshare is meaningless with Linux anyway because almost no one pays for it, so of course it doesn't show up in marketshare surveys.
>Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
But they exist and work. If people don't like Facebook et al, they're free to switch, and they have no right to complain.
>Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Yes, it really does. Those things are all viable alternatives. That's the definition of competition.
Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
>Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Why does this matter? It works fine for countless people and companies. I'm using it at work right now, and have been using it exclusively at work for many years. Marketshare is meaningless with Linux anyway because almost no one pays for it, so of course it doesn't show up in marketshare surveys.
>Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
But they exist and work. If people don't like Facebook et al, they're free to switch, and they have no right to complain.
>Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Yes, it really does. Those things are all viable alternatives. That's the definition of competition.
> Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
It has gotten worse. And mostly Cloudflare is fo blame.
Many sites are relying to Clouldflare and the human verification seems to work only in Chrome or Safari.
It breaks so many important pages and they don’t seem to care to fix it.
It has gotten worse. And mostly Cloudflare is fo blame.
Many sites are relying to Clouldflare and the human verification seems to work only in Chrome or Safari.
It breaks so many important pages and they don’t seem to care to fix it.
I am not aware of any that stopped using google search completely in favor of DDG,
For me DDG was better results, as Google has tried to read my mind and be "smart" about what i am "really" looking for instead of just giving me the results for the words I put in the box. I most often encounter this when looking for technical solutions to a technical problem. Google tends to be better for search results on non-technical items, current events, political topics etc
DDG has made their search less useful, is it less useful than google's trash when it comes to technical search results time will tell
For me DDG was better results, as Google has tried to read my mind and be "smart" about what i am "really" looking for instead of just giving me the results for the words I put in the box. I most often encounter this when looking for technical solutions to a technical problem. Google tends to be better for search results on non-technical items, current events, political topics etc
DDG has made their search less useful, is it less useful than google's trash when it comes to technical search results time will tell
> Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now?
Back to Google?
Back to Google?
Kagi, Brave, you.com, Phind.
Been using Brave search since they released it. I used to fallback to Google but I've stopped using it recently, it has turned to absoulte crap always returning random spam or nothing at all unless I'm searching for something basic. Been falling back to Phind on dev stuff now if Brave doesnt have anything. Phind is something I would absolutely pay for when the time comes.
Phind is still a bit slow.
By the time it finishes writing, I have found the solution with other search engine.
As the top thread in this thread testifies, a lot of people including me moved from DDG to Kagi.
> There is no real competition in search
Related, and after reading some of the comments in this thread talking about knowledge and knowledge workers, but maybe this would be the perfect time to bring back ontologies and OWL/RDF?
Related, and after reading some of the comments in this thread talking about knowledge and knowledge workers, but maybe this would be the perfect time to bring back ontologies and OWL/RDF?
DDG does not have a search engine, they have a frontend UI to Bing. Search API pricing from Microsoft is going up, so they either have to cut the complexity of queries or just not be in business.
This is an interesting detail - I was not aware Microsoft's pricing increased. That said, would this really increase complexity substantially?
And as a nitpicky aside, if this was done in response to Microsoft's cuts, I should really have found out about this from DDG themselves, rather than a github repo commit. Though it does change the intent quite a bit.
And as a nitpicky aside, if this was done in response to Microsoft's cuts, I should really have found out about this from DDG themselves, rather than a github repo commit. Though it does change the intent quite a bit.
Bing buckets queries into pricing tiers based on complexity.
Why on earth would DDG have any obligation or interest in telling you about their supplier pricing? You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
Why on earth would DDG have any obligation or interest in telling you about their supplier pricing? You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
>Why on earth would DDG have any obligation or interest in telling you about their supplier pricing?
Because I used the feature.
>You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
It has an impact on me, because I used the feature.
Because I used the feature.
>You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
It has an impact on me, because I used the feature.
Transparency would be in a self-proclaimed privacy oriented businesses interest. Hiding changes and being found out is really bad PR
I've been keeping a directory of screenshots of poor DDG results for the past couple years and there have been many conspicuously broken results. It's a damn shame since 2+ years ago DDG was better.
Some examples:
- Double quoted strings ignored, continuing to return results without the quoted string.
- Adding the exclusion parameter doing nothing, continuing to return results with the string.
- Various queries return non-legit sites in the majority top 10 results or more—sometimes being all results. By non-legit, meaning: these are randomized named domains that have scraped other sites' content or are doing word salad query matching. Example query from December last year: `google "oauth" "api" "thunderbird"` returned all non-legit sites.
- Using `site:` parameter to restrict a query to specific site can return fewer results for that domain (eg: two results vs dozens) than just searching for the site name and query without the `site:` parameter.
- Using `site:` parameter to limit to TLD only sometimes returns only single result or nothing despite knowing there are domains that contain the query. Eg: last year when searching `opnsense site:.se` there should have been tons of results from teklager.se but there were none (I have the screenshots), but searching `opnsense site:teklager.se` returned results.
In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
Some examples:
- Double quoted strings ignored, continuing to return results without the quoted string.
- Adding the exclusion parameter doing nothing, continuing to return results with the string.
- Various queries return non-legit sites in the majority top 10 results or more—sometimes being all results. By non-legit, meaning: these are randomized named domains that have scraped other sites' content or are doing word salad query matching. Example query from December last year: `google "oauth" "api" "thunderbird"` returned all non-legit sites.
- Using `site:` parameter to restrict a query to specific site can return fewer results for that domain (eg: two results vs dozens) than just searching for the site name and query without the `site:` parameter.
- Using `site:` parameter to limit to TLD only sometimes returns only single result or nothing despite knowing there are domains that contain the query. Eg: last year when searching `opnsense site:.se` there should have been tons of results from teklager.se but there were none (I have the screenshots), but searching `opnsense site:teklager.se` returned results.
In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
> In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
I once had a Ducker(? Goer?) reply to me here on HN saying that a human does in fact read the feedback, and yet this indescribably terrible change aligns with your conclusion: they read them, and then cheerfully "put them on the backlog"
I once had a Ducker(? Goer?) reply to me here on HN saying that a human does in fact read the feedback, and yet this indescribably terrible change aligns with your conclusion: they read them, and then cheerfully "put them on the backlog"
Ugh, i just thought something was wrong with me, my queries or something in the last few days - the results have kinda turned to bleep..
My results have been looking like the code for Google Ads had some error and was stuck in a loop - resulting in page after page of advertisements :(
Example: roborock s8 disassembly (variants tried: roborock s8 teardown)
Same goes for Youtube - not a single disassembly video / teardown could be found, only reviews with cringy thumbnails..
This is after a number of years of using DDG and considering "good enough" most of the time, i seldomly had to result to !g - and like 50% of the time i had was to find other interesting content to augment what i had found so far...
My results have been looking like the code for Google Ads had some error and was stuck in a loop - resulting in page after page of advertisements :(
Example: roborock s8 disassembly (variants tried: roborock s8 teardown)
Same goes for Youtube - not a single disassembly video / teardown could be found, only reviews with cringy thumbnails..
This is after a number of years of using DDG and considering "good enough" most of the time, i seldomly had to result to !g - and like 50% of the time i had was to find other interesting content to augment what i had found so far...
Looks like they just rewrote the markdown file and the exclusion looks is still there in the additions?
Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...
Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...
I went looking for the reason why searches weren't filtering properly. So I'm not sure what's going on but filtering by site only (which seems to be the only option left) doesn't help at all.
It looks like it never worked and the docs were wrong or out of date.
How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now?
Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously
How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now?
Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously
I've never had problems adding operators until recently. I couldn't say when the change happened but I've been successfully using them since I moved to duckgo many years ago. I've been increasingly frustrated with duckgo and finally decided to find out what was going on and found this page.
In long search routines or deep research I often use quotes to find pages with specific language.
DDG has been my default engine for years now, but by the time I am searching at this level I often have added a !g along the way and am working in Google at that point.
Frankly, these changes don’t alarm me much because I am presuming most Q&A I’m going to be doing going forward will be in chatgpt or a similar service.
In the last few weeks, I’ve taken more and more questions, sometimes spanning a wide but related context to chat gpt.
There are no keyword-stuffed greyhat websites and long serps to dig through with varying formats, styles and recency.
It is just information. And while I am keenly aware chatgpt will spit back complete BS, I have found this problem is not bigger than the problems I face for information seeking via DDG or Google.
DDG has been my default engine for years now, but by the time I am searching at this level I often have added a !g along the way and am working in Google at that point.
Frankly, these changes don’t alarm me much because I am presuming most Q&A I’m going to be doing going forward will be in chatgpt or a similar service.
In the last few weeks, I’ve taken more and more questions, sometimes spanning a wide but related context to chat gpt.
There are no keyword-stuffed greyhat websites and long serps to dig through with varying formats, styles and recency.
It is just information. And while I am keenly aware chatgpt will spit back complete BS, I have found this problem is not bigger than the problems I face for information seeking via DDG or Google.
I noticed it (only knew of site filter). But could not understand why it worked the way it did. In the end I used it seldom.
The other filters are cool.
The other filters are cool.
It seems duckduckgo removed all the operators like
-, +, and, intitle, inurl
Seems to have been a while ago.
Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign.
Search term:
Fucking useless. :( :( :(
Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.
Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign.
Search term:
solar panel array concrete flat -roof -roofs
Fucking useless. :( :( :(
Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.
I'm not keen on paying for search, but this kind of behavior is exactly the marketing Kagi needs to sway me over.
Web search might be the most valuable single tool I use outside of my computer itself, or my vehicle.
If the only good option was paid, I would pay a lot. I think most other people would, too. But they'll keep using worse free options so long as those are passable.
If the only good option was paid, I would pay a lot. I think most other people would, too. But they'll keep using worse free options so long as those are passable.
I'm actually tremendously keen on paying for search, since it means (at least in theory and currently in practice) that I don't have to worry about a paid search engine catering to advertisers instead of me.
Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.
Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.
Please tell me this is an accident. How can you find anything when you can't filter out results you don't want?
[deleted]
Wait, so it's not a bug? Is it some new limitation from the bing API they use?!
I noticed similar on Ecosia so this could be shanigans on Microsoft's end.
dogs -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com
i mean, the search works but the first result I get is "Cute Dogs and Adorable Babies", so the something is weird. If change the search to
dogs -babies -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com
Then I no longer get that as the top result but the fifth result mentions babies.
dogs -babies -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com
Then I no longer get that as the top result but the fifth result mentions babies.
Yes, but its filters were always iffy. It will filter cute but not CUTE and eventually filtered duckduckgo results eventually get repeated or the exclusions get added with a little bit of filtering.
but why?
So that ignorant internet duckers don't know any good. Its for their own benefit.
With the rise of ai, you don't need to feed search operators like a caveman, you just use NLP
I'm hoping that this is a commit that is reverted back, after some amount of backlash from the community, if at all this was intentional.
Else, it evokes the sentiment of riskynacho on the comment, "It's almost like DuckDuckGo wants to eliminate itself from being a safe useful alternative in the search engine competition."
Else, it evokes the sentiment of riskynacho on the comment, "It's almost like DuckDuckGo wants to eliminate itself from being a safe useful alternative in the search engine competition."
Backlash won't matter since this is most likely due to a change in the underlying Bing API they are getting their search results from.
I actually just switched back to google yesterday after a really frustrating time trying to get double quotes working for filtering.
I'm super disappointed in DDGs changes the last few months. I wish them the best but I'm on the hunt for a new search engine.
I'm super disappointed in DDGs changes the last few months. I wish them the best but I'm on the hunt for a new search engine.
Is there a decent search engine which still has filtering like this?
Kagi. See:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html
I've been a big advocate of them, but they broke their promise to grandfather in users on original plans, they doubled their prices, and have everyone counting the number of searches they make. Until they get a reasonable unlimited price plan I wouldn't use them.
As the founder of Kagi, I want to address the recent changes and challenges we have faced.
When we made our initial plans, we believed they were both realistic and sustainable. However, the search market has experienced dramatic changes in the past six months, far more than in the previous 16 years. Additionally, we've been confronted with an economic downturn. As a small, bootstrapped business, Kagi has had to make some difficult decisions to adapt.
We were left with two options:
- Stick to the original plan, which would result in significant financial losses and potentially lead to bankruptcy within a few months.
- Adjust our strategy to ensure the survival and growth of the business.
While we are not pleased with having to alter our plans, we have done our utmost to adapt to these new circumstances. It's important to understand that there are only three ways to fund search services - through advertisers, venture capital, and in Kagi's case, users. That is the reality we must face.
We acknowledge that the rollout of these changes could have been executed more effectively. However, as a small bootstrapped team without a dedicated communications department, we have limited resources. I personally oversee crucial business decisions, manage a fully remote team, and supervise the development of complex software products such as search, browser, and AI solutions. There is only so much one person can do.
We would love to offer unlimited searches for $5, but the reality of the search market dictates otherwise. That said, we are continuously evaluating our pricing structure, and we may update it again as some costs, such as AI, have not been as high as anticipated.
We are determined to navigate these challenging times and maintain a high level of professionalism. We appreciate your understanding and support as we work towards a sustainable future for Kagi.
When we made our initial plans, we believed they were both realistic and sustainable. However, the search market has experienced dramatic changes in the past six months, far more than in the previous 16 years. Additionally, we've been confronted with an economic downturn. As a small, bootstrapped business, Kagi has had to make some difficult decisions to adapt.
We were left with two options:
- Stick to the original plan, which would result in significant financial losses and potentially lead to bankruptcy within a few months.
- Adjust our strategy to ensure the survival and growth of the business.
While we are not pleased with having to alter our plans, we have done our utmost to adapt to these new circumstances. It's important to understand that there are only three ways to fund search services - through advertisers, venture capital, and in Kagi's case, users. That is the reality we must face.
We acknowledge that the rollout of these changes could have been executed more effectively. However, as a small bootstrapped team without a dedicated communications department, we have limited resources. I personally oversee crucial business decisions, manage a fully remote team, and supervise the development of complex software products such as search, browser, and AI solutions. There is only so much one person can do.
We would love to offer unlimited searches for $5, but the reality of the search market dictates otherwise. That said, we are continuously evaluating our pricing structure, and we may update it again as some costs, such as AI, have not been as high as anticipated.
We are determined to navigate these challenging times and maintain a high level of professionalism. We appreciate your understanding and support as we work towards a sustainable future for Kagi.
Thank you for building Kagi. I've been using it for some time and I really appreciate the product and your transparency. I wish I could use Orion too but the last time I tried I ran into a bug, and although we did interact over support I didn't have time to continue. I'm not convinced the world needs another WebKit browser but I can understand the frustration a search service would have with the existing browsers directing to competitors.
I've never used Kagi (only heard of it in this thread) and I'm writing to say, "I believe you." Business models are hard. I can also understand the feelings of the disgruntled; it always sucks to feel like something has been 'taken away'.
Thanks for making paid search for the masses (with funtioning filters, apparently) a reality. By the testimony of many here, your results aren't bad. I'll be giving Kagi a try.
Thanks for making paid search for the masses (with funtioning filters, apparently) a reality. By the testimony of many here, your results aren't bad. I'll be giving Kagi a try.
Based on this thread I signed up for Kagi and migrated my devices to it a couple days ago.
I’m one that’s ardently against subscription culture in most cases but I have to say im quite impressed.
Im currently on the $10 plan. Not sure if im gonna moved to the unlimited but im definately on pace to hit my limit this month. I never realized how much I search. I do wish the 10 dollar plan had annual options. Even without a discount.
I’ve used ddg for a long time. But even still haven’t been a huge fan of changes and I am one that’s happy to support a project in any way that I can get behind and gain something from from. Either via contribution or in a case like this cash.
I hope you all find a path to sustainability.
I’m one that’s ardently against subscription culture in most cases but I have to say im quite impressed.
Im currently on the $10 plan. Not sure if im gonna moved to the unlimited but im definately on pace to hit my limit this month. I never realized how much I search. I do wish the 10 dollar plan had annual options. Even without a discount.
I’ve used ddg for a long time. But even still haven’t been a huge fan of changes and I am one that’s happy to support a project in any way that I can get behind and gain something from from. Either via contribution or in a case like this cash.
I hope you all find a path to sustainability.
By the changes in the search market, I'm assuming you mean the introduction of ChatGPT and the higher prices Bing is able to command due to bundling it, or rather the brand boost and raise of profit expectations at this time. Which would spell further trouble ahead for kagi and ddg going forward, wouldn't it?
You are correct, the ascent of ChatGPT and its impact on the search industry has been substantial. Fortunately, the swift commoditization of models (and rising pressure from open-source) is reducing their potential influence to pricing, quicker than we initially anticipated.
On the other handm, we were forced to reassess our approach due to the situation with Bing, which led us to invest further in alternative partnerships and strengthen our own infrastructure. And despite the challenges this transition presented, it ultimately instilled a renewed sense of optimism in our team.
The most difficult aspect of this process has been receiving emails from customers who felt let down by the way we managed the change. We are committed to learning from this experience and improving our communication and execution in the future.
On the other handm, we were forced to reassess our approach due to the situation with Bing, which led us to invest further in alternative partnerships and strengthen our own infrastructure. And despite the challenges this transition presented, it ultimately instilled a renewed sense of optimism in our team.
The most difficult aspect of this process has been receiving emails from customers who felt let down by the way we managed the change. We are committed to learning from this experience and improving our communication and execution in the future.
Have you considered or are you working on building your own index?
I'm not in the space, but that seems to me like the natural way to avoid having your company brought down on a whim by Microsoft, in the long term.
I'm not in the space, but that seems to me like the natural way to avoid having your company brought down on a whim by Microsoft, in the long term.
... or even partnering with someone like search.marginalia.nu?
I'm actually serious. At least I think I check Marginalia more often than bing or ddg or google.
I'm actually serious. At least I think I check Marginalia more often than bing or ddg or google.
We actually do partner with Marginalia, through our Teclis index. Marginalia is an amazing project and I hope it continues to grow.
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I guess you can't have it all. Either you are the product, or you pay for it.
I'm willing to pay but not $25/month.
Well if you wanted to support the idea of paying for your product, you could totally decide to limit Kagi to 10$/month, and switching back to a free (as in "you are the product") alternative when your credit is finished.
Now I'm expecting you to potentially say "I would pay 10$, but I refuse to have to go through the trouble of changing my default search engine twice a month", which brings me an idea:
Actually Kagi should maybe offer that option: after you're done with your monthly credit, they redirect everything to the free engine of your choice. That would provide an easy way for people to support them with the amount they are willing to pay, without having to change anything in their setup.
EDIT: already suggested: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...
Now I'm expecting you to potentially say "I would pay 10$, but I refuse to have to go through the trouble of changing my default search engine twice a month", which brings me an idea:
Actually Kagi should maybe offer that option: after you're done with your monthly credit, they redirect everything to the free engine of your choice. That would provide an easy way for people to support them with the amount they are willing to pay, without having to change anything in their setup.
EDIT: already suggested: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...
$5/mo for 200 searches, $25/mo for unlimited? Loading more pages count as new search?
Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.
Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.
> Loading more pages count as new search?
I have not ever loaded a new page with Kagi.
I generally need fewer searches than with other search engines, between their general features, and customized ranking, they are just that much better.
That said, I’m also in the early adopter plan ($10 for 1000 searches) which is enough for me (unlike the non-early one, as I sometimes go over 700 searches).
I have not ever loaded a new page with Kagi.
I generally need fewer searches than with other search engines, between their general features, and customized ranking, they are just that much better.
That said, I’m also in the early adopter plan ($10 for 1000 searches) which is enough for me (unlike the non-early one, as I sometimes go over 700 searches).
Search has a cost. You can either pay for your searches and own your results or have someone else, a complete stranger, pay for your searches and have the results be in their best interest.
Also check: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/why-pay-for-search.html
Also check: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/why-pay-for-search.html
I think it was Mark Twain who said about Web 2.0, "In every transaction where money changes hands there is a buyer, a seller, and a product. If you are not the buyer or the seller, then you are the product."
Unfortunately usually you are the buyer and the product these days even when companies say otherwise (e.g. Apple)
$25 per month for a service you use every day. Sounds fair.
If you save 1-2 hours per month not having to use a search engine that tries to trip you, that's a net win.
However, personally I use Google with a browser plugin that lets me hide unwanted results, and I find it works quite well.
Although I don't do much elaborate searching using operators etc.
If you save 1-2 hours per month not having to use a search engine that tries to trip you, that's a net win.
However, personally I use Google with a browser plugin that lets me hide unwanted results, and I find it works quite well.
Although I don't do much elaborate searching using operators etc.
The results I get with Kagi for researching technical topics are significantly better than I get from Google, so I can justify it as a professional expense.
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200 searches per month at $5? Holy christ I might do that in a single day! I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.
> I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.
Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/
Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/
Have you ever tried counting your searches? You may be surprised. I'm slightly above the 500/month.
Not the OP but I just checked my 3 months history and I'm at 800, 469, and 682 searches on DuckDuckGo and 466, 535, and 482 on Google. I feel like I'm a heavy search engine user and I'd have guessed more than this.
I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.
For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.
I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.
For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.
I completely agree with the fact that not everyone can afford paying for Kagi. However, I seem to read from a lot of people who could afford it, but find it too expensive.
The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.
So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.
The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.
So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.
I'm approximately in the 900-1100/month range.
Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...
Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...
I agree with the anxiety, that's also something I hate with clouds (AWS and similar). Though for Kagi it's counting my searches, so it's not like a bot on the other side of the world will raise my bill.
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
You can do that with Kagi, there is both a soft limit and hard limit you can set. Although we would like to go towards the future with no limits as soon as economics allow it.
Actually I just saw this suggestion which I think is very nice: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...
The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.
Wouldn't that make sense?
The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.
Wouldn't that make sense?
Oh I did not know that. I have the "legacy premium" (not sure if that's the right name) left for a few months, I guess I'll see that when I transition to the newer pricing plan.
But it's great that Kagi has that feature!
But it's great that Kagi has that feature!
I personally have 519 in the last 30 days just on my work PC. I search way more at home, so I'd estimate that I do at least 1000 per month in total. And this is not counting the searches I do on my phone either.
If your browser tries to prefetch search results from the address or search bar then it might add up very, very quickly.
AFAICT Chrome (and hence other Chromium browsers) don't do this, and if you auto complete straight to a result from your history that doesn't count as a search engine hit either.
I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.
I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.
https://www.mojeek.com/ even has its own crawler
searx needs a shout out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://github.com/searx/searx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://github.com/searx/searx
For what it’s worth: I have been using Ecosia as my preferred search engine. Basically it just forwards requests to Bing in exchange for ad revenue which is used to plant trees.
Have been able to use the advanced keywords and operators to filter results with Ecosia
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-ke... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-op...
Sometimes the search results can be irrelevant especially for programming queries. But in those cases I just fallback to G
Have been able to use the advanced keywords and operators to filter results with Ecosia
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-ke... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-op...
Sometimes the search results can be irrelevant especially for programming queries. But in those cases I just fallback to G
If the DDG changes are caused by Bing pricing changes, won't that also affect Ecosia sooner or later?
It seems like it sometimes works on ecosia, but not for everyone. Ddg also seems to have a similar issue, where it sometimes works depending on location (?). I guess even if it is not related to api pricing, it still shows that search engines that depend on reselling or vendoring an API aren't much of an alternative to the big guys (though ecosia is awesome, and it doesn't pretend to compete on the search offering itself ).
And hopefully I'm totally wrong about the whole situation being related to pricing!
And hopefully I'm totally wrong about the whole situation being related to pricing!
It's garbage lately. no better than Google. they are all shit now a days. they just promote their results. search is a misnomer these days.....it's an engine....for ads
I'm not entirely sure what market DuckDuckGo is trying to serve.
- Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google.
- Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address".
Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
- Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google.
- Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address".
Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
> Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
They recently down-ranked Russian propaganda-linked sites (like RT). I can't remember if that change has remained in place or they reversed it.
They recently down-ranked Russian propaganda-linked sites (like RT). I can't remember if that change has remained in place or they reversed it.
Oh right I remember now - I guess the point I'd make about that is I'd think there's a large overlap between those that are privacy-conscious and those that are conscious to those kinds of algorithmic manipulations.
I don't think toeing the line is a viable business strategy when your competition blows your search result quality out of the water. There's no benefit in that case.
I don't think toeing the line is a viable business strategy when your competition blows your search result quality out of the water. There's no benefit in that case.
I agree. There are cases where I appreciate this sort of thing, like when it's a child performing the search. When it's me doing it, I would prefer to not have sources artificially de-ranked because they're government-affiliated and/or propaganda. However, I could also see having some sort of visual indicator like Twitter used to use being useful. I don't always know in advance whether a particular source has a background conflict of interest I should be aware of...but it's still a bit of a slippery slope.
ExpressVPN is still good for hiding your IP if you torrent.
I noticed that and it is infuriating. Adding `-term` now seems to be the opposite and show only results containing the term you didn’t want in the first place. I seriously wonder who thought this was a good idea…
Can anyone explain why Google and DuckDuckGo made this change? I don't see how this impacts them selling ads. My only thought is its technically expensive to support?
You mean Google and Bing. Must really suck to be DDG, being under the mercy of Bing but can't publicly blame these changes on them since they want to downplay their dependency.
Boolean search is pretty expensive computationally. Maybe they are so far disconnected from that initial implementation that there is no semblance of support anymore?
I'm not convinced this is true. It's more likely they're moving away from a keyword model of search toward a more natural language model because the AI hypetrain goes choo-choo.
It's genuinely difficult to do both of these at the same time. You can do keyword search well, you can do natural language search well, you can't do both at the same time. What you get in a mixed paradigm is confusing and unpredictable results.
This is mostly a limitation in query understanding. The traditional boolean index is still there.
Natural language search engines typically first do a series of traditional keyword searches to identify candidate results, and then re-score them using a natural language understanding of the query.
It's genuinely difficult to do both of these at the same time. You can do keyword search well, you can do natural language search well, you can't do both at the same time. What you get in a mixed paradigm is confusing and unpredictable results.
This is mostly a limitation in query understanding. The traditional boolean index is still there.
Natural language search engines typically first do a series of traditional keyword searches to identify candidate results, and then re-score them using a natural language understanding of the query.
It’s getting to the point where I’m thinking about downloading the Wikipedia archive, mirroring all of archive.org, downloading Common Crawl, etc., and then setting up some kind of super-powered offline query machine.
Brave search is quite good for development. I have +1 year using it and it's ok.
Brave Search is the best one I've used so far. Super clean search results, really helpful widgets and independently indexed unlike DDG.
Look into the Goggles feature. It lets you create your own search engines with different lists of excluded or boosted sites.
I don't see anything like that using this feature.
I'm talking about https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover
You need to check out the guide on how to create a new Goggle.
You need to check out the guide on how to create a new Goggle.
Nice. Thanks!
Curious how people use search these days.
For me, I'm less and less using a single search engine for all my needs, rather using a plethora of engines for different tasks.
I use DDG as my default engine to ensure I get privacy by default, and if the results aren't to my liking, I use a bang to re-run the search in a different engine.
I also like to set up custom search engines in my browser with shortcuts, so if I need to search a specific GitHub org or something I can quickly run a search there from my URL bar.
A lot of the comments here saying "DDG is dead, switch to xxx instead!" strike me as not particularly relevant with my usage patterns, but I'm wondering whether I'm just in a minority.
For me, I'm less and less using a single search engine for all my needs, rather using a plethora of engines for different tasks.
I use DDG as my default engine to ensure I get privacy by default, and if the results aren't to my liking, I use a bang to re-run the search in a different engine.
I also like to set up custom search engines in my browser with shortcuts, so if I need to search a specific GitHub org or something I can quickly run a search there from my URL bar.
A lot of the comments here saying "DDG is dead, switch to xxx instead!" strike me as not particularly relevant with my usage patterns, but I'm wondering whether I'm just in a minority.
There are good reasons why the next generation just looks up videos.
The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.
The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.
YouTube's search is now so bad I've been using DDG's video search to find videos on YouTube. I'll have to keep an eye on whether DDG's video search goes south as well.
It's ironic that one of the best search engines for technical searches we have today has become yandex (which still fully supports filters) and the only reason why is because their devs didn't go out of their way to ruin their service like the rest.
I mean even searching for a literal string (part number) doesn't give me results on Google/DDG anymore. I'd be happy to use yandex as my main search engine if I didn't have to (re)solve a captcha every couple of searches.
Are there other search engines that still allow us to run powerful search queries?
I mean even searching for a literal string (part number) doesn't give me results on Google/DDG anymore. I'd be happy to use yandex as my main search engine if I didn't have to (re)solve a captcha every couple of searches.
Are there other search engines that still allow us to run powerful search queries?
I personally feel like negative filters are important because they create an incentive for advertisers/SEO/etc people to not spam every keyword into their product.
If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as well.
Unfortunately, people just don't use the negative search terms enough, so it is up to the search engines themselves to detect metadata bloat, and that ends up being a cat-and-mouse game.
If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as well.
Unfortunately, people just don't use the negative search terms enough, so it is up to the search engines themselves to detect metadata bloat, and that ends up being a cat-and-mouse game.
I don't want incentives for ads-criminals and SEO spam :( I want the search engine to help me find high quality pages, not piles of crap.
Does anyone use Neeva? I have been for a few years, and pay for it. Loving it so far.
I was a heavy user of Google way back when, then moved to DDG for many, many years. Settling on Neeva.
However, I will check out Kagi now, maybe I will move again.
I was a heavy user of Google way back when, then moved to DDG for many, many years. Settling on Neeva.
However, I will check out Kagi now, maybe I will move again.
There is also a (related, I assume) PR to remove the search syntax page from being published entirely[1]. It's dated December, so it may be fair to assume this has all just been documentation-publishing that hasn't been done yet, as others have posited. That says nothing of the rationale/efficacy of such filtering/syntaxing, though.
[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152
[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152
I really don't see a bright future for search engines. LLMs have exposed a new way to interact with knowledge, which is that, instead of sifting through results/webpages manually, they do that for us and present answers instead.
Sure, they have a ways to go (for example, i think they should provide confidence level for their answers based on how many docs/pages they ran into during training that support a particular answer; show references when asked etc) but the search engine as an interface is obsolete at this point.
Sure, they have a ways to go (for example, i think they should provide confidence level for their answers based on how many docs/pages they ran into during training that support a particular answer; show references when asked etc) but the search engine as an interface is obsolete at this point.
Since DDG is just a proxy for Bing, do they have a survival plan once Microsoft cuts them off? Is it a long-term contract?
Would encourage DuckDuckGo people who are looking for a new option to consider Ecosia - it also uses the Bing API so it has good indexing coverage - but does a much better job of postprocessing the results.
Bing also doesn't do "site:" queries properly it seems.
Bing doesn’t do a lot of query filters properly. You can put a phrase in quotations and it’ll give you things that … aren’t that.
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Why couldn't DuckDuckGo just offer an "advanced mode" in settings where operators are still active?
They could default to the simple one and achieve their goal.
They could default to the simple one and achieve their goal.
They could. Perhaps they will, but they may need to charge for it if Bing is charging them for those fancy features.
I just used DuckDuckGo with filter, and it worked as expected (i.e., the filter still correctly filters).
E.g., search query: t-shirts -site:amazon.com
E.g., search query: t-shirts -site:amazon.com
Yes, according to the linked diff, that is the only remaining filter.
Got it. There are some one-offs that still function, but for the most part the filters are wiped. Bummer. I wonder if Google paid DDG to remove the filters, as a means of reclaiming search traffic.
As mentioned elsewhere, it's most likely related to a price hike for the Bing API that DDG uses. No need for conspiracy theories.
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DDG has top of the page ads now for products when doing an image search.
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Who in their right mind would continue to rely on Kagi after the bait and switch? How many more "realities of the search market" will they need to learn? It amazes me that anybody would accept such an egregious betrayal, whether or not they can afford the new pricing.
Sorry that you feel that way, but there was no bait and switch, just reality of search today.
I expanded on it more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683834
I expanded on it more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683834
Does no one here use searx?
I keep seeing Kagi being pushed and it seems suspicious as Kagi is a subscription based search engine that limits your searches to their paid tiers.
Kagi shillposting with their bot accounts?
I keep seeing Kagi being pushed and it seems suspicious as Kagi is a subscription based search engine that limits your searches to their paid tiers.
Kagi shillposting with their bot accounts?
Imo there's nothing suspicious about, I am an early adopter and I happily pay for it. It simply provides better results than Google, Bing, DDG and any other search engine I've tried.
I'm not a fan of subscription based software/services at all, but for once I think it makes sense when it comes to search queries.
Before I was an avid user of google but seeing the results getting worse and worse made me look for different solutions. For now i'm interested in supporting a search engine that can keep itself above water through my wallet.
Before I was an avid user of google but seeing the results getting worse and worse made me look for different solutions. For now i'm interested in supporting a search engine that can keep itself above water through my wallet.
I doubt it's shillposting, their search is genuinely very good. Better than Google at the very least - which is admittedly a low bar these days, but not every alternative manages that, e.g. Neeva (in my opinion, anyway).
That said, I stopped using it after they increased prices. I'll reconsider it when they figure out how to decrease them and add privacy-friendly payment methods.
I think Kagi is good, but not $25/mo good. People with SV salaries will disagree, though.
That said, I stopped using it after they increased prices. I'll reconsider it when they figure out how to decrease them and add privacy-friendly payment methods.
I think Kagi is good, but not $25/mo good. People with SV salaries will disagree, though.
It's a paid search service, and I'm honestly really happy with that distinction and what it entails. Being paid means that they can deliver on and support features that users can use to get the best results for them, without worrying how those features may affect potential advertisers and their opinions of the service.
For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension. They already deprioritize a whole lot of "junk" sites -- for example I very rarely see the kinds of technical results that are just reposts of Stack Overflow but laden down with their own ads, and if I do see them I can nuke the site from orbit, never to be seen again.
They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme currently, but I've always found the plans fair and very transparent. If you are interested in good search and potentially giving the industry a bit of a hint that search is important enough to pay for, and all this advertiser-prioritized bullshit is unacceptable, I can wholeheartedly endorse them.