Are you aware of Kagi (kagi.com)?

With them, at least the AI stuff can be turned off.

Membership is presently about 61k, and seems to be growing about 2k per month: https://kagi.com/stats

Be aware of:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SearchKagi/comments/1gvlqhm/disappo...

I find this amusing, because it seems like Kagi's target audience dislikes this (politically polarized), and I as someone who is not Kagi's target audience likes this (politically neutral).

Wait, what? Their choice is specifically a politically neutral one, wouldn't that mean their target audience is a politically neutral one? Why is your impression that Kagi's target audience is politically polarized users? Been a paying user of Kagi for years, never got that impression.

FWIW, I don't think Kagi should remove or avoid indexing content from countries that invade others, because a lot of the times websites in those countries have useful information on them. If Kagi were to enact such a block, it would mean it would no longer surface results from HN, reddit and a bunch of other communities, effectively making the search engine a lot less useful.

Politics is not just a 1 dimensional line.

Yeah, it's two dimensional. One axis goes from good to evil. The other axis, chaotic to lawful.

There's a secret third dimension you can ascend to through a hole in the neutral middle where the forces of the other two axes cancel out. 'The Elites' doesn't want you to know this.

/hj?

Heh Heh Heh, the D&D standard approach. ;)

Why is supporting Yandex, who are involved in Russian politics and linked to the ruling regime, a neutral decision? That is very much a political decision, in the same way that working with US tech companies is a political decision. You need to decide what you're willing to tolerate and where your ethical lines are drawn; the alternative isn't neutrality, it's nihilism.

Solution: Kagi as it is, but with a ‘remove Yandex’ toggle. Even if it was a paid upgrade, I’d take it.

Because when Ferret7446 says "neutral", they mean "anything that doesn't harm them". Centrism is a lie.

Same reason supporting Google, Microsoft, YCombinator is a neutral decision.

Kagi uses both Yandex and Google btw.

There are few other powerful countries, with countless Web services, who freely wages war(s) on other countries and support wars in many different ways. Is there a way to avoid their products?

As a European, I'm also increasingly in favour of avoiding American companies. Especially the big corrupting near-monopolists.

It's worth pointing out the flaws of all bad actors. The more info we have, the more effectively we can act.

Whataboutism doesn't get us anywhere — saying "but what about X" (insert anything for X here) usually results in doing nothing.

Some of us would rather take a stand, imperfect as it is, than just sit and do nothing. Especially in the very clear case of someone (Kagi) doing business with a country that invaded a neighboring country for no reason, and keeps killing people there.

Why this particular stand? Is doing nothing any better than taking what are essentially random stands? Obviously if you are Ukrainian this will be an important stand to you, but otherwise doing things based on a mix of what the media you like focuses on or whatever is not really very different from doing nothing.

I think "no wars of conquest" is a bright line that was crossed by Russia, that hasn't been crossed by other nations in a long time. And I think it's important for the whole world to take a stand on that, not just the nation that was invaded. It's not a "random stand."

>"no wars of conquest"

how about "no wars of genocide"? you know, like the one the collective West had enthusiastically supported for a while now?

I find it much easier to take a strong stand on Russia/Ukraine than on Israel/Palestine. The history of Israel/Palestine is much more of a gray area. Palestine has used plenty of aggressive actions and rhetoric that make Israel's actions more understandable (if not justified).

Example of actions: Gaza invaded Israel and killed, raped, and kidnapped civilians on October 7. Ukraine had no such triggering event that caused Russia to invade.

Example of rhetoric: Gaza's political leaders have said they want to destroy Israel. I don't think anyone in power in Ukraine has said they want to destroy the Russian state.

Plenty of people boycott Israeli goods and there's an increasing trend of moving away from reliance on American services also.

I am amused by my (unpopular and downvoted by now) comment by the scourge of "whataboutism" sparked a discussion, where comments begin with "how about" :-)

That is exactly my point! Saying "but what about" is akin to saying "you shouldn't do anything, because there is another unrelated $thing happening elsewhere". I refuse to follow this line of thinking.

did you just "but what about X" to the previous comment which is the whole point of this thread?

"enthusiastic support"

https://yougov.co.uk/international/articles/52279-net-favour...

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/10/03/how-american...

etc etc....

I'm not sure what collective West you're referring to; but apparently it excludes every major Western European nation, America, and Canada.

Doing something is literally the opposite of doing nothing. This is complete gibberish.

It's "doing nothing" because it's rationalizing keeping the status quo. Avoiding Kagi is doing nothing; using Kagi is doing something.

> Why this particular stand?

First, any stand is better than whataboutism and just sitting there doing nothing.

Second, this stand results from my thoughts. It is my stand. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Third, in the history of the modern world there were very few black&white situations where there was one side which was clearly the aggressor. This is one of them.

> First, any stand is better than whataboutism and just sitting there doing nothing.

I definitely disagree with this. There are many cases where you might take the wrong stand, especially where you do not have detailed knowledge of the issue you re taking a stand over.

It's still better to take a stand even when there is a risk of being wrong because there is always a risk of being wrong. Don't let fear of being wrong or not knowing everything (which is impossible) stop you from standing up for your beliefs. Instead, stand up for what you believe, but be open to having your mind changed. If new information comes to light which changes your position that's perfectly acceptable.

It's a lot easier to live with yourself when you act according to your best understanding of the situation than when you allow fear to paralyze you into inaction at a time when you should have done something.

> wrong stand

But that's the whole point, isn't it? What is "wrong"? You decide.

You see people in a peaceful country getting invaded and being bombed, shot, raped and tortured? You decide if this is "wrong". I'm just saying that you should decide, rather than say "but what about something else".

“whataboutism” is the reddit word for calling out hypocrisy

Google is worse than Yandex, no? At this time, Russia is (debatably*) more evil than the USA, but that doesn't mean Yandex is more evil than Google. And I'm told Yandex has better search results.

* most of the evil stuff Russia's done, the USA's done way more of

I was very conscious of this comment being called out as a 'whatabout', it was still only thing I could think of and wrote it bit carefully.

My point was that we should either not take an issue with things like this and block everything in the whole country because their government is bad. Or we should do the same for other countries too.

Not only is "whataboutism" literally anti-communist jargon, you're using it wrong. It was meant to refer to when the US would criticize some aspect of the USSR and the USSR would point to the fact that the US was an apartheid state. The point was that the accusation that the US was making was entirely different from the observation that the USSR was making - it was simply a change of subject.

You can't call for a boycott on a cosmetics company that experiments on dogs if you are a rival cosmetics company that experiments on ten times as many dogs.

Damn. I didn't know that.

Now we need a 2nd Kagi, so we can switch to that one instead. :(

Thank you. Didn't know that and was, until now, considering paying for a Kagi subscription.

> "We do not discriminate based on current geopolitical issues."

That's one way of phrasing it.

Yandex has the best image search, and others are years behind it. Further more Nebius has sold all group’s businesses in Russia and certain international market. They are completely divested from Russia for a 1.5 years already: https://nebius.com/newsroom/ynv-announces-successful-complet...

The post you linked was posted when the divestment was already going underway, so it is at least dishonest if not malicious.

Yandex is the government approved search engine in Russia, which is impossible without the state exerting control over it. I wouldn't pay much attention to divestment, it's not how any of that works.

For instance here you can learn that Yandex NV is fully controlled by a group of Russian investors: https://www.rbc.ru/business/06/03/2024/65e7a0f29a7947609ea39...

The government's where the offices of a software company are physically located exert control over them. To follow this logic to its end and apply it even handedly results in nation based NIH syndrome surely?

You are talking about an entity whose ownership is 99.8% Russian nationals and state companies; whose employees for the most part are Russian nationals, whose main market is Russia and with very little tangible assets that can be arrested in the Netherlands. The only reason for this "divestment" is sanctions evasion.

you clearly don't know anything about nebius

They have a lot of hardware in e.g. Finland. I don't think they provide GPU access to the russian companies, feel free to correct me

We were talking search engines here, but interesting indeed! What's the name of Neibus CEO?

Arkady Volozh, obviously

Some clarification. Since 2024 Yandex NV split into Nebius (NL-registred NASDAQ-listed company, no longer a search engine) and russian-based Yandex. The latter is fully controlled by russian investors.

I wouldn’t trust a divorce where one party still provides for the other.

You don't "trust" a divorce is alimony was part of the settlement?

Yep, when the party paying can decide not to pay and there are no teeth to extract payment, that gives immense power to the payer.

At least in my area, there are legal avenues if alimony goes unpaid. Assets can be seized to pay off late payments and wages can be garnished.

Its a different story if the payer truly can't afford to pay the alimony, but at that point they wouldn't have the immense power you are concerned with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797 (11 months ago)

https://som.yale.edu/story/2022/over-1000-companies-have-cur...

You pays your money, you takes your choice.

You are mistaken to think that zealots can be reasoned with. They have been conditioned to react upon anything “Russia” like a Pavlovian cue, a command of the trained animal. They are a herd that moves as a herd, based on cues of lead animals. No amount of proof or evidence will ever dissuade them from a position that the herd is moving in. They cannot reason on their own and lack the courage to separate, let alone say something that the herd disapproves of, lest they be expelled from the herd and ganged up on.

I don't agree with this logic. It implies that people who use Google, Bing and a million other products made by US-based companies are supportive of the huge amount of attrocities commited or aided by the United States. Or other countries. It feels very odd to single out Russia's invasion of Ukraine but to minimize the Israeli genocide of palestinians in Gaza, the multiple unjust wars waged by the United States all over the world etc.

It doesn’t imply any of that at all.

There certainly is a huge army of people ready to spout this sort of nonsense in response to anyone talking about doing anything.

Hard to know what percentage of these folks are trying to assuage their own guilt and what percentage are state actors. Russia and Israel are very chronically online, and it behooves us internet citizens to keep that in mind.

Google doesn’t censor those atrocities for the US government. That’s the key difference.

It's often fairly easy to find US government-centric news and criticism with Google.

But as one counterexample: The end of the US penny was formed and announced not with public legislative discourse, nor even with an executive order, but with a brief social media post by the president.

And I don't mean that it's atrocious or anything, but I wanted to see that social media post myself. Not a report about it, or someone's interpretation of it, but -- you know -- the actual utterance from the horse's mouth.

Which should be a simple matter. After all, it's the WWW.

And I've been Googling for as long as there has been a Google to Google with. I'd like to think that I am proficient at getting results from it.

But it was like pulling teeth to get Google to eventually, kicking and screaming, produce a link to the original message on Truth Social.

If that kind of active reluctance isn't censorship on Google's part, then what might it be described as instead?

And if they're seeking to keep me away from the root of this very minor issue, then what else might they also be working to keep me from?

I have yet to see any kind of censorship when querying Yandex, do you have any examples?

Not overtly - and not all of the things the US as a whole may want.

But Google does censor.

based Vlad tbh

Yeah I kept thinking "man I should try kagi" and then that :(

Try it anyway.

He probably doesn’t want to support genocide.

Hope he doesn't pay his taxes then considering where US aid ends up

I pay my taxes, that's not optional. Paying search engine is.

Better not use Hacker News then. It's funded by Y Combinator, which is in the USA, which does many genocides.

Better not buy any phones or computers either.

Interestingly they flagged comments saying HN is based in the USA but not comments saying Google is based in the USA.

Naw, the well is poisoned and I question the company's decision making at this point.

Imo, Kagi is still the better option, because it isn't supporting the global surveillance mechanism we call advertising. All these people, missing the forest for the single yandex tree.

Meh. Most people, including myself, couldn't care less, and Yandex image search is very capable.

So if America invades Venezuela should we all stop using google? Should we have stopped using google when the U.S. invaded Iraq and killed 150,000 people[1]?

Should we stop using products imported from China for the cultural genocide they've perpetrated against the Uyghurs?[2]

Is Yandex Russia?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

You can take whatever stand you want. When there’s a country that killed, raped and tried to exterminate most of Eastern Europe we can choose to cut any and all ties with it and consider them for all intents and purposes ..terrorists.

And the fact that there are other countries that should also be considered terrorists, doesn't mean we shouldn't boycott this one. It means we should boycott them all. But boycotting a few is still better than nothing.

I sort-of see where you're coming from, but it also ignores a double standard to me. Don't buy search from a company that uses an api from another company that is (or was? unclear) based in a country that invaded another country and completely upended the world order. For some people that's a line that they don't want to cross and I get it.

However if that's the case how can they continue buying Chinese products when China has done the same thing, but worse, and for longer, to their own population? Because it's less convenient to stop? _That_ to me lands squarely in the "take whatever stand you want" category with the addendum of, "and don't worry if it doesn't make sense."

Is it because it's within their own borders and therefore isn't our problem?

> However if that's the case how can they continue buying Chinese products ...

Why are you assuming they are?

That's a legit question and it is based on assumptions I have about the overall HN audience based on similar threads I've seen in the past. So yeah definitely take it with that grain of salt.

Honest answers are yes, yes, and yes. It may be unavoidable for the average person to avoid imported goods from China, but we should remain aware of our place in the world and try where we can. If the US does invade Venezuela, I sincerely hope that individuals and business owners try to cut as many ties with complicit US tech companies as possible. Honestly, with this clusterfuck of war crimes going on over "drug boats," I hope they're already starting.

I directly use Yandex sometimes, because there are huge blind spots for all the US-based engines I'm aware of, and it fills some of them in.

If someone can point me to a better index for that purpose, I'd love to avoid Yandex. Please inform me.

Kagi is based in the United States, as is YC.

If you are concerned about heinous war crimes and the slaughter of civilians to the point that you don't want to use private services from countries that conduct such acts, you should avoid both already.

Why's that something to be aware of? Yandex is actually a good search engine, so I'm told, as long as you don't search for things related to Russian politics. Kagi presumably knows this and won't use their results related to Russian politics.

Feels more like a scare campaign to me - someone doesn't want you to use Kagi, and points to Yandex as a reason for that.

I'm surprised this is possible given the sanctions on Russia.

I remain amazed by the lack of attention given to this.

Regardless of one's position on the 'everything online is Russian propaganda, Russian bots or misinformation - invest in sickles and hammers, comrade / wtf just use basic common sense and the internet is as safe as it ever was' continuum, such universal enthusiasm for a Russian-owned, Russian-controlled search engine should generate a little more counter-argument, at the very least.

Absolutely no mention of Google, Bing, Startpage, DDG, or even Mojeek search engines usually pass online without somebody detailing the problems, flaws, or why they're not as good as the alternatives. Usually, at least 20% of the comments will be overtly critical, with at least 1 person passionately arguing that this search engine is going to destroy life as we know it / funds genocide / is an abomination unto God.

On open forums and spaces where a variety of users and tastes are represented, that minimum level of criticism usually applies to absolutely everything from movies to toothbrushing techniques to kids' TV to low-carb breakfasts. If more than 3 people care enough about something to discuss it, at least 1 of those people will hate it and feel the need to enunciate why.

Except Kagi. Kagi must enjoy the highest praise-criticism ratio of anything I've ever seen on the web, including concepts like sunshine and heaven and the eradication of polio.

Seriously. The only 'real' criticism I ever see of Kagi is like 'I personally don't like it because I don't think a search engine is worth more than $19.99' or 'unfortunately I need x feature', and it's always followed by a reply saying 'Ah, well Kagi is now available for $19.50' or 'you'll be thrilled to know that x feature can be enabled in Kagi by following these steps'.

And the occasional 'I don't use it because it seemed a bit wierd and wasn't worth it' comment languishing on the outskirts of the discussion.

So yeah. I do not expect this comment to stir much discussion, mainly because it's like 24 hours after the main debate and is on a pretty low-impact thread on hacker news from an uninspiring new ish account. But also because Kagi critical comments are written in sand, whatever the discussion or authority or audience.

That should make people more suspicious.

> But also because Kagi critical comments are written in sand, whatever the discussion or authority or audience.

Maybe people just turn up too late and their comments generally aren't seen?

I don't like defending Russia which is a horrible country, but I find it hypocritical to only talk about their imperialism and pretend not to see that the most imperialist country in the world, the one that has started, financed, and participated in the most wars, is the United States, and yet the question of boycotting American companies is never brought up. Google has been intentionally sabotaged in terms of image search and reverse image search; Yandex is literally the best on the market, but Kagi should boycott them because their headquarters are in the wrong country?

What's your point? Yandex is a good place to search for things Google has been ordered to not show you. Has been for a decade by now.

Yandex has the best reverse image search by a huge margin.

How does Kagi know what is AI stuff? I don't see how they can 'just turn it off'

It's driven by community ratings.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919067

so it is like humans vs robots started? robots ask humans questions to verify they are not robots. humans mark content as robot-generated to filter it out.

My first instinct is that users abuse it like they do any other report/downvote mechanism. They see something they just don't plain like, they report it as AI slop.

By "turn it off" I mostly mean that Kagi have their own AI driven tools available, but a toggle in your user settings disables it completely.

ie it's not forced down your throat, nor mysteriously/accidentally/etc turned back on occasionally

Haven't looked back since I signed up.

I’ve had much better results with Kagi than with Google in the past few months. I’d trialed them a couple times in the past and been disappointed, but that’s no longer the case.

The AI stuff in google search can be turned off.

  https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=kagi

My default browser search tool is set to google with ?udm=14 automatically appended.

What is UDM? Presumably the U is Urchin but what’s the rest?

Never seen it documented.

what if there was an open source search engine that contributors kept making better but it was a paid subscription tool?

There is also the fact that automatically generated content predates ChatGPT by a lot. By around 2020 most Google searches already returned lots of SEO-optimized pages made from scrapped content or keyword soups made by rudimentary language models or markov chains.

Well there's also the fact that GPT-3 API was released in June 2020 and its writing capabilities were essentially on par with ChatGPT initial release. It was just a bit harder to use, because it wasn't yet trained to follow instructions, it only worked as a very good "autocomplete" model, so prompting was a bit "different" and you couldn't do stuff like "rewrite this existing article in your own words" at all, but if you just wanted to write some bullshit SEO spam from scratch it was already as good as ChatGPT would be 2 years later.

Also the full release of GPT-2 in late 2019. While GPT-2 wasn't really "good" at writing, it was more than good enough to make SEO spam

I didn't remember that, but it would explain the spam exponential grow back then.

And 10 years ago, Reddit was already experimenting with auto-generated subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator.

It was popular way before 2020 but Google managed to keep up with SEO tricks for good decade+ before. Guess it got to breaking point.

> Google made the search results worse here

Did you mean:

worse results near me

are worse results worth it

worse results net worth

best worse results

worse results reddit

search: Emacs

  Did you mean vim ?

  (vice-versa)

Tbh, this sounds like a Google Easter egg.

Because it is

> if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information

You assume the aim here is for you to find relevant information, not increase user retention time. (I just love the corporate speak for making people's lives worse in various ways.)

You finding relevant information used to be the aim. Enshittification started when they let go of that aim.

I think this is about trustworthy content, not about a good search engine per se

But it's not necessarily trustworthy content, we had autogenerated listicles and keyword list sites before ChatGPT.

Sure, but I think that the underlying assumption is that, after the public release of ChatGPT, the amount of autogenerated content on the web became significantly bigger. Plus, the auto-generated content was easier to spot before.

Honestly the biggest failing is just SEO spam sites got too good at defeating the algorithm. The amount of bloody listicles or quora nonsense or backlink farming websties that come up in search is crazy.

For most commercial related terms, I suspect if you got rid of all “spanmy” results you would be left with almost nothing. No independent blogger is gonna write about the best credit card with travel points.

I agree with your point, but you picked a poor example. Have you met any credit reward min-maxers?

I had a coworker who kept up a blog about random purchases she’d made, where she would earn some money via affiliate links. I thought it was horrendously boring and weird, and the money made was basically pocket change, but she seemed to enjoy it. You might be surprised, people write about all sorts of things.

People used to do it early internet before affiliate marketing really took it over. Certainly it was more genuine and products were bemoaned for their compromises in one dimension as much as praised for their performance in another. Everything is a glowing review now and comparisons are therefore meaningless.

Sites like Credit Karma / NerdWallet exist. While I think they are rife with affiliate link nonsense and paid promotion masquerading as advice, I'm also pretty sure they have paid researchers and writers generating genuine content. Not sure that quite falls into the bucket of SEO blogspam.

It still counts because they would only ever recommend affiliate partnered products.

This is bullshit the search engines want you to believe. It's trivial to detect sites that "defeat" the algorithm; you simply detect their incentives (ads/affiliate links) instead.

Problem is that no mainstream search engine will do it because they happen to also be in the ad business and wouldn't want to reduce their own revenue stream.

Afaik they did not lost the fight. They stopped trying, because it was good for short term earnings

Yes, this is true. It was revealed in Google emails released during antitrust hearings. Google absolutely made a deliberate decision to enshittify their search results for short term gains.

Though maybe it's a long term gain. I know many normal (i.e. non-IT) people who've noticed the poor search results, yet they continue to use Google search.

I feel like google gave up the fight at some point. I think HN had some good articles that indicated that.

Certainly seems that way if you observed the waves of usability Google search underwent in the first 15 years. There was several distinct cycles where the results were great, then garbage, then great again. They would be flooded with SEO spam, then they would tweak and penalize the SEO spam heavily, then SEO would catch up.

The funny thing is that it seems like when they gave up it wasn't because some new advancement in the arms race. It was well before LLMs hit the scene. The SEO spam was still incredibly obvious to a human reader. Really seems like some data-driven approach demonstrated that surrendering on this front led to increased ad revenue.

Significant changes were made to Google and YouTube in 2016 and 2017 in response to the US election. The changes provided more editorial and reputation based filtering, over best content matching.

the main theory is that with bad results you have to search more and get more engaged in ads so more revenue for google. Its enshitification

ML and AI killed it between 2011-2016 somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

The problem is that before Nov 30, 2022 we also had plenty of human-generated slop bearing down on the web. SEO content specifically.

Goodhart's law applies to links, too. Google monetized them and destroyed their value as a signal.

> The problem

That's a separate problem. The search algorithm applied on top of the underlying content is a separate problem from the quality or origin of the underlying content, in aggregate.

> I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

Ask Prabhakar Raghavan. Bet he knows.

Counterpoint: The experience of quickly finding succinct accurate responses to queries has never been better.

Years ago, I would consider a search "failed" if the page with related information wasn't somewhere in the top 10. Now a search is "failed" if the AI answer doesn't give me exactly what I'm looking for directly.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for the last... decade or so. And it still seems to return fairly relevant documentation towards the top.

To be fair, that's most of what I use search for these days is "<<Programming Language | Tool | Library | or whatever>> <<keyword | function | package>>" then navigate to the documentation, double check the versions align with what I'm writing software in, read... move on.

Sometimes I also search for "movie showtimes nyc" or for a specific venue or something.

So maybe my use cases are too specific to screw up, who knows. If not, maybe DDG is worth a try.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing search results.