Sometimes I make cautious forays out of the Google world to see what's going on with the competition. And if for some services in principle you can find a pleasant alternative, then search for me for the last fifteen years in general has been irreplaceable. But with the humanization of Google, the departure from geekiness and the constant desire to commercialize everything possible it's frankly getting worse and worse. As you understand, another attempt. ðŸ”
Previous ones were several years ago more in the format of preparing for judgment day. Something triggered me and I went to switch to some DuckDuckGo, which looked and looks like the Linux of the search engine world. Well, that is, it didn't search for anything normally, but all in a white coat so independent. Suffered for a couple of weeks and returned back.
With the arrival of neural networks all use cases for a search engine are divided in my head into two parts. First, sometimes you just want a naive dumb search. Second, sometimes you want to ask a human question. And Google has surprisingly bad both with the first and the second. On one hand I practically don't control its output, time after time I observe a bunch of ads, useless widgets. On the other hand to some specific question like "When did the album Meteora come out?" it doesn't answer, even though the answer can clearly be found in the search results.
What are the options? Obviously, without Yandex, Bing and the like.
Perplexity tries to break all templates of how search should look. It just has a chat interface, but with links to sources that confirm it's not hallucinating. And on one hand the idea is cool, it closes the second use case completely, but it looks like some terrible combine, leaving literally nothing from classic search that we've gotten used to for years. Copilot from Microsoft is roughly the same thing, although not such a monster visually. Doesn't appeal to me, and who will solve the first use case?
Brave Search looks like a service for normal people. Nice, output is good, can redirect AI questions. But doesn't always answer normally posed questions, carries nonsense, plus with Russian language everything is much more complicated. Those who are used to classic Google search may well like it. By the way, DuckDuckGo has also gotten better than it was. Probably all the same I can say about it, although lately I haven't tried living with it.
Unexpectedly for myself now I've settled on Kagi. Its main drawback is that it's paid. I'm now paying even for internet search, yes. They justify themselves by saying that unlike everyone else it's not monetized through advertising. But it's overall so cool that you want to continue using it and in principle support the product. It closes both use cases just beautifully.
By default it's a maximally old-school interface with a search bar without extra garbage. And if you just want to search for something, it just finds it. If you understand in the process that you want to ask a neural network a question, you just put a question mark at the end. Awesomely convenient.
Depending on the level of your geekiness corruption you can customize the appearance with toggles, and write a custom CSS theme, and manage everything from the keyboard, and use classic search operators like quotes and minuses, and tweak the ranking of different sites in the output to your needs.
From interesting things there's also, for example, a summarizer. You can both quickly draw a summary of a page in the output, and continue a chat about it. From a UX point of view I like everything, not clear what else to dream about. 💳
In general, for now I'm really enjoying it and don't quite understand why I might want to go back. But we'll be watching.