The UI is just horrible and a huge waste of space. I had to use a user style to make it a non-headache to use.
Kagi routinely lacks results that every other search engine I use get no problem. I can't give any examples but I found myself going to page 5+ more often on Kagi than any other service.
I have no problem with the UI. It's snappy, clean, doesn't have a bunch of cruft, it's easy to find results, etc. It feels like Google of yore.
Same thing with the search results, I find them really excellent. In my experience, there's much less SEO spam. If you search for a programming language function, you get links to the proper documentation, not some trash "geeksforgeeks" site or whatever. I can't remember if I've ever had to go past page one.
Obviously YMMV on that, it's entirely possible it's different depending on what you're searching for. But I'm very happy paying for Kagi, and will continue to do so.
Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?
[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!
Usually it's non-novel (correctly-harmelessly but unhelpfully, restating the web search results). When it's novel it's because it's wrong.
I would remember the situation where reading the LLM thingy added any value if it ever happened. The weird little UI thing they do where they only show the LLM result if you wait for it to render makes this very easy, I have to scroll up to even consider it.
People are now changing how they search and gather information to use AI. You're automatically discounting that person's experience because they avoid using AI for valid reasons. A lot of times Google AI is outright wrong, not even close to correct. It makes sense to not rely on it and only going back to see if it's improved.
I don't "ignore AI". I just haven't changed how I search and gather information because it's clearly not accurate yet. I still have to fact check it which negates the benefits(time saving). Occasionally I go back to see if it's improved and usually it hasn't. That's not bias.
source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
In terms of "best on the market" for AI search, I know that I am much more likely to trust the one that seems more like a direct summary of the stuff the search engine is traditionally responding with (and presumably has been well tuned in the last several decades) versus the one more likely to make stuff up or to leave the realm of what you are actually asking for some other search it thinks is better for you.
Though admittedly that's a very personal judgment call; some people want the assistant to search for "what they really mean" rather than "what they asked for". It's also a lot of gut vibes from how these AIs write about their research and some of that can be hallucinations and lies and "prompt optimization" as much or more than any sort of "best on the market" criteria.
It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.
But clickbait is how they make money...
That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead."
I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits.
I find myself regularly copying URLs, sending it to Gemini, and asking it to answer what I want to get out of the article.
I'm not wasting my time scrolling through a mile of website and 88,000 ads to find the answer to the headline.
If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user.
I use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat , but there are GUIs too.
Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".
In my experience, the answers tend to be sourced from fringe little blogs that I would never trust in a Google search.
Google at least attempts to rank them by quality, while LLM web search seems to click on the closest match regardless of the (lack of) quality.
X was some tehnical thing I didn't know a lot about so it gave me some more words to narrow down the query that I would not have known about myself. And that really helped me find the information I needed.
It also threw in some book tips for good measure.
So yeah I can highly recommend this workflow.
If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats
Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat)
YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok)
Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al)
This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that their ways were superior, ultimately leading to their demise.
Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
So nope, open models won't be a threat in the future.
What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
But an ad company will never do that.
Not true, I use them all the time. They have links available for when I want further information, which is not very often.
Google does need to adapt or die
The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.
Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.