I subscribed to the $5 plan last night for that very reason, and then immediately unsubscribed because it was the most user-hostile search engine I’ve ever used. Limit of 300 searches per month, with the 300 AI interactions that I’ll never use being a separate category. There’s also a cap of 1000 sites in the personalized results. Worst all all though the theme made my eyes bleed and every time I refreshed the page trying to get it to apply the custom CSS it ran up my 300 searches. Oh and also they only show you a maximum of two pages of results FFS. Bloody hell the issues are endless.
I just wanted the ability to uprank good sites, and downrank or block a handful. Being able to brand domains as trusted is the best solution I can think of to AI polluting search results.
DuckDuckGo allows me to block 5 sites and sync that between browsers but not uprank or downrank them.
Brave allows me to uprank and block, but not downrank or sync between devices. And it doesn’t let me uprank the au TLD (which is far more restrictive than com or org). Also after upranking anime-planet.com and searching for “The Apothecary Diaries” it didn’t show up in the results at all unless I appended “site:anime-planet.com”.
For me the dealbreaker was they don’t care user requests (they have a platform kagifeedback.org for listenining users, just listening not caring!) and they don’t do any real improvements for search quality
For me the specific dealbreaker is the price. Specifically because it’s not the price of a artisanal search engine, it’s the price of an AI chatbot (both in terms of the dollar value and what they’re spending it on).
And now, to read that site’s article on javascript and see if I need to rethink whether disabling Wasm and WebGL by default is enough (Edit: That article is just a list of vulnerabilities and a guide on how to disable javascript).
I’m not really against AI (specifically text-based GenAI), but AI does change the reality of using the internet. I need to be able to promote trustworthy domains in my search results and accumulate such a list over years.
Brave search technically has such a feature, but firstly the owner is a homophobe, and secondly the feature isn’t really as power-user oriented as I’d like.
Especially on Duck Duck Go. Ugh. It’s so bad sometimes. You search for a topic and the first page is all blog style websites with rambling, garbage A.I. text.
It’s been hard to find good websites in top results of search engines. A lot of them are very well SEO tuned AI slop.
I really need to switch to Kagi, but it’s American so I don’t want to give them money.
Kagi is just a mix of Bing, Google, Yandex, Mojeek, Brave with AI and it’s not worth for $10
I subscribed to the $5 plan last night for that very reason, and then immediately unsubscribed because it was the most user-hostile search engine I’ve ever used. Limit of 300 searches per month, with the 300 AI interactions that I’ll never use being a separate category. There’s also a cap of 1000 sites in the personalized results. Worst all all though the theme made my eyes bleed and every time I refreshed the page trying to get it to apply the custom CSS it ran up my 300 searches. Oh and also they only show you a maximum of two pages of results FFS. Bloody hell the issues are endless.
I just wanted the ability to uprank good sites, and downrank or block a handful. Being able to brand domains as trusted is the best solution I can think of to AI polluting search results.
DuckDuckGo allows me to block 5 sites and sync that between browsers but not uprank or downrank them.
Brave allows me to uprank and block, but not downrank or sync between devices. And it doesn’t let me uprank the au TLD (which is far more restrictive than com or org). Also after upranking anime-planet.com and searching for “The Apothecary Diaries” it didn’t show up in the results at all unless I appended “site:anime-planet.com”.
For me the dealbreaker was they don’t care user requests (they have a platform kagifeedback.org for listenining users, just listening not caring!) and they don’t do any real improvements for search quality
here is a good critisizm https://マリウス.com/doubting-your-favorite-web-search-engine/
For me the specific dealbreaker is the price. Specifically because it’s not the price of a artisanal search engine, it’s the price of an AI chatbot (both in terms of the dollar value and what they’re spending it on).
And now, to read that site’s article on javascript and see if I need to rethink whether disabling Wasm and WebGL by default is enough (Edit: That article is just a list of vulnerabilities and a guide on how to disable javascript).
yeah what if I just want “Search Engine”
Mojeek and Ecosia are building their own index, and then you don’t need to subscribe to a service that’s all-in on AI
I’m not really against AI (specifically text-based GenAI), but AI does change the reality of using the internet. I need to be able to promote trustworthy domains in my search results and accumulate such a list over years.
Brave search technically has such a feature, but firstly the owner is a homophobe, and secondly the feature isn’t really as power-user oriented as I’d like.
We really need something like this, maybe an addon or userscript
Every time I try mojeek it’s the worse experience ever. Ask Jeeves was more reliable.
Never heard of exosia tho have to try it.
I’m sorry to disappoint you further, but Ecosia, like DDG, is just A Bing proxy for now.
Regardless, I support their effort to break the US stranglehold on search engines
Especially on Duck Duck Go. Ugh. It’s so bad sometimes. You search for a topic and the first page is all blog style websites with rambling, garbage A.I. text.