this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Not really an app, but I'm going to add https://kagi.com/ here; it's time for a shakeup in the search industry that actually works, and Kagi delivers.
Controversial, but Telegram is such a solid open source app in terms of UI/UX and a good middle ground between something like Discord and Signal.
Now that I've shared my unpopular opinions...
Prices seem high... Features, seem nice (but not crazy):
(Source)
Additionally, it seems that they don't have seem to have any external audits or releasing of code (correct me if I'm wrong). Additional they have a web browser, that's only for Apple's ecosystem. Overall, you pay for no-ads, I feel like for this feature set you could just use DuckDuckGo with advertisements off, or the HTML version (which doesn't include JavaScript either). I'm kinda skeptical about it, but if it ends up taking off I'll be happy there will be another alternative to Google.
This actually looks very cool, so many new backup solutions to try after this thread. 🥲
They talk about their prices better here: https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing. Including:
I mean, yes and no; it's not quite a filter as it can tweak the ranking not just outright put something at the top or remove it.
These are actually super cool because they put things like the old "site:reddit.com" trick on steroids and https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/code.html is like site:stackoverflow.com on steroids.
You definitely can do this in plenty of things; I don't think it's all that compelling really, but it's a nice feature none the less, and it's arguably easier to sync "bangs" than it is to sync these shortcuts between browsers and different software; but yeah, not a big motivator for me.
Similar comment about the syncing of this; but yeah, this also wasn't a big motivator for me.
True, but I think it's there 1 for completeness, and 2 because the count of ads and trackers as a criteria is pretty unique to them. It's also quite a bit more user facing, and easier to work with than say, getting the same options from Google search.
Not sure what you mean by custom ones, haven't seen anything about that; but it's definitely in the feature parity category.
Don't forget things like redirects (change your lemmy UI?) and their own index, which includes things like wayback machine results -- particularly relevant with CNET deleting old content to boost their Google ranking.
Their generated summaries are also pretty cool, e.g. from the CNET article:
They don't, but they do have a clearly worded privacy policy https://kagi.com/privacy.
The search engine itself, no; but their browser extensions are open source: https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions
I've tried a lot of different backup solutions... I'd be curious where you're leaning, but I'd say this one is likely going to be your winner for ease of use, privacy, and cross-platform functionality.
I gotta hand it to them for being transparent about their pricing, including that limit feature... AWS should take some notes.
I'm assuming you're a programmer so I gotta ask, how much easier does this make it for your to find documentation and answers to that one error that the language never decided to document for some reason?
Google does always seem to hide them for some reason, despite the fact that it would be easy to work into the interface.
In this post they say: "We have many instant answers already and are constantly adding more, with the idea of allowing users to define their own ‘widgets’ in the future." I'm assuming it's not released yet, but it does sound like a cool feature when they do.
I didn't see either one of these features on the blog post, likely because it was from 2022, but pretty cool being able to search for old content that's been deleted.
I stand corrected, that is nice that at least a bit of it is, I didn't see that on their website, granted I did miss the entire "Help" page somehow.
Alright, so I created a trail account, and gave it a try with a random article, and hey, pretty cool, and would actually save time. I even tried it with some pretty simple documentation, it did end up just describing the steps that had to be taken. Although, I noticed a little "discuss this document" button, and asked it what code I'd need, it gave it to me. Then asked it to make tweaks like changing the key and sections to ones that actually would be in a configuration file, and it changed it. It could even do things beyond just the lines it's on, like instead of printing the value, make sure it's not a value. I gotta say, I actually am pretty impressed by that (even if it is relatively simple work), I know ChatGPT and Copilot could (likely) do the same things, but how it broke it down from an article is pretty cool.
Now, I'm likely not gonna become a paying customer for it, like I said in the original post -- I'm using (Neo)vim, and, while I've played around with AI like this, I don't find it ever really falling into my workflow. Maybe down the road, and if the internet keeps getting worse, it might be worth it. That being said you can do a lot of these things with alternative solutions, but a search engine that puts them all together is pretty cool, and does save some time.
Currently, I'm using Nextcloud, and I distro hop enough that all I need to do is backup my documents, which most are code and can go on Git(Lab/Tea/Hub). Although, I'm finally settling down (there's like one or two more distros that I want to try) with Arch Linux, and a proper backup solution would be nice, by plan is to just go through this entire thread, compare features, and try them out.
Thanks for explaining Kagi to me by the way, it is in fact a pretty cool service!
I used DDG for like 2 years. Almost every single search I had to search in both DDG and then in Google since the results from DDG were terrible. I recently switched to Kagi and have only had to try to find something in Google twice, and neither time Google was able to find what I needed either. You're not just paying for no ads, you're paying for actual search engine results, whereas the other companies, you are the product.
The only things I've cared about using Kagi are the ability to completely block domains, lenses, bangs, and actual search results that get me what I need. The rest is just a bonus.
I did the trial for kagi and completely stopped using Google within 3 days. Kagi is so much better it’s easily worth it. And it has actually useful features unlike Google. It’s insane how long google sat on their haunches and waited to let others surpass them.
I use duckduckgo /Searxng /Startpage pls dont shame on me but these are wholesome apps that makes me never look at google again Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi otherwise!
How can Privacy.com be open source If they have to survive in the business they have to make it some propreitory I am a non american and i dont care about its proprietoryship , what i care is when would they open it to people like us! It seems such wholesome service and that too for freemium