Kagi has quickly grown into something of a household name within tech circles. From Hacker News and Lobsters to Reddit, the search provider seems to attract near-universal praise. Whenever the topic of search engines comes up, there’s an almost ritual rush to be the first to recommend Kagi, often followed by a chorus of replies echoing the endorsement.
I find this article a little conspiratorial, something they admit themselves, but it’s not bad. I don’t think that Kagi has some evil agenda, but it’s a corporation, and as all corporate products, it can be enshittified. I think that Kagi is really useful for some people, as I’ve heard some really good things about it, but I’ve never had to actively searched for obscure stuff, I always know where and how to look for the information I want, so I don’t see the use for me. I’ll keep an eye on them, let’s hope they become a good company.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Never heard of Kagi before, article convinced me I don’t wanna use it anyways…lol.
Wasn’t the original Google search algorithm published in a research paper? Maybe someone with more domain knowledge than I could help me understand this: is there any obstacle to starting a search engine today that just works like that? No AI, no login, no crazy business…just something nice and rudimentary. I do understand all the ways that system could be gamed, but given Google/Bing etc.'s dominance, I feel like a smaller search engine doesn’t really need to worry about people trying to game it’s algorithm.
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
The basic algorithm is quite straightforward, it’s the scale and edge cases that make it hard to compete.
“Ideally”, from a pure data perspective, everybody would have all the data and all the processing power to search through it on their own with whatever algorithm they prefer, like a massive P2P network of per-person datacenters.
Back to reality, that’s pretty much insanely impossible. So we get a few search engines, with huge entry costs, offering more value the larger they get… which leads to lock-in, trying to game their algorithms, filtering, monetization, and all the other issues.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Hrrmm. Webrings it is. But also, the search engine problem seems like one calling out for a creative solution. I’ll try to look into it some more I guess. Maybe there’s a way that you could distribute which peer indexes which sites. I would even be fine sharing some local processing power when I browse to run a local page ranking that then gets shared with peers…maybe it could be done in a way where attributes of the page are measured by prevalence and then the relative positive or negative weighting of those attributes could be adjusted per-user.
Hope it’s not annoying for me to spitball ideas in random Lemmy comments.