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aabaker99 | 3 years ago

I just signed up and tried it a little bit and I like what I see so far. I find myself increasingly frustrated with Google search results for a particular use case: searching for documentation. For example, today's work had me thinking about Python's datetime and timedelta and I wanted a reference on what functions are available. With Google I am annoyed with results from geeksforgeeks.org and freecodecamp.com because they are not reference materials and generally only cover some basic use cases. In Google, those two sites are in the top four results. In Kagi, they are not. Instead, there is a longer-form blog post from guru99.com, stack overflow, and the official Python documentation.

Now, I will admit that for this particular query Kagi and Google results are pretty close. But my general experience is that when I search in Google I find that I have to look farther down the search results to look past the blogspam to find the authoritative reference.

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VWWHFSfQ|3 years ago

The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches.

Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.

ryandrake|3 years ago

"Do you want to learn about blogspam? If so, you are on the right page. You will learn about blogspam here. One of the most major things about blogspam is that it exists on the Internet. You just learned that blogspam exists on the Internet. In this way, you have become educated about blogspam.

Now that you know about blogspam, we'll move on to the next topic: How to find blogspam. It's actually very easy to find blogspam. You are on the right page if you want to learn about finding blogspam..."

andirk|3 years ago

For HTML, CSS, Javascript, and browser APIs, I simply add "mdn" to the search to guarantee I get the official-ish MDN docs. From there, I can dive in to W3C specs, etc if needed.

Those training wheel search results are annoying but they're highly ranked probably because most people like and use them.

Semaphor|3 years ago

For me, #1 is the official documentation, #2 is a decent looking tutorial, #3 has a slightly better page on google, #4 is a clear kagi winner.

Neither of them offers bad results, but we are talking about google, it makes no sense to give example searches without saying what results you receive as Google is so heavily personalized.

Kagi does personalization, but it’s explicit. You yourself decide the region to search in (my default is international, though there are quick bangs to search in other regions), and you can up- or downrank domains, as well as block them completely.

holoduke|3 years ago

Always add the keyword 'forum' to your search terms. It filters out most of the crap.

adzm|3 years ago

Maybe it's just me but search results for that were very helpful in my case. Official documentation, stack overflow questions, an informative blog about cte gotchas, all within the top half of results.

mda|3 years ago

Just Googled it, the first result is official postgres documentation, second is a tutorial, what exactly you get / expect when you search for it?

Calamitous|3 years ago

Another nice thing about Kagi is that you can eliminate domains from your search results. Obvious content farms are pretty easy to spot and remove.

AndroidKitKat|3 years ago

My favorite feature is being able to boost a certain domain up in the the results (or even pin it if you really would like). I often search for different Pokemon and prefer the information that a site like Serebii.net gives me over something like Bulbapedia.

nmstoker|3 years ago

Yes, eliminating and boosting favoured sites are both excellent feathers on Kagi