7 ms·
The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.) But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias f
by nine_k 5d ago
The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.)
But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google:
https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20from%202004.%20Given%20a%20search%20request,%20provide%2010%20links%20to%20relevant%20pages,%20each%20with%20a%20short%20text%20from%20the%20page,%20featuring%20the%20search%20terms.%20Avoid%20any%20pages%20that%20do%20not%20contain%20the%20search%20terms.%20the%20search%20request:%20%s https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr...
(Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')
- avazhi 5d agoKagi is good but it’s about 25x too expensive (no really).
- andwur 5d agoGood workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX. The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
- miki123211 5d agoI think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics. Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.
- noisy_boy 5d ago> Worth the $5 for me Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks. They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
- emaro 5d agoI do agree it's kinda expensive. I'm lucky enough that my employer pays the $25 plan for met because it includes access to many LLMs.
- noisy_boy 5d ago> because it includes access to many LLMs. That is interesting, which LLMs? Asking as someone paying monthly Claude subscription.
- prox 5d agoA lot of them. Claude is a choice. Here is the list : https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html You can even choose a model for each turn.
- deleted 5d ago[deleted]
- Lord_Zero 5d agoI pay the $10 and use assistant multiple times a day and never needed the fatter models since for coding I have copilot and Gemini
- emaro 5d agoTrue. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)
- saint_yossarian 5d agoThat prompt mixes in unrelated results about the workings of search engines. You could just use `udm=web`: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web
- jeena 5d agoAh haha that is kind of funny it finds exactly what I was looking for, just much slower than 15 years ago.
- mitxela 5d agoKagi works by scraping Google and other engines, so this should still worry you. I still support the use of Kagi though, as a market signal to Google that we'd even pay them for their product if it wasn't dogshit.
- deleted 5d ago[deleted]
- athrowaway3z 5d agoFor Google, the business side of you paying them doesn't work out as obvious as it might seem. Advertisers are sold the idea that 1000 clicks/impression is X dollars. The average impression might be priced at 1000/X$. But you are worth much more than that for two reasons. - you are a person willing to pay 5$ - Google can sell a “collectivized” product. The same way that eg collective farmer crop insurance creates actual value. and the third reason (as consequence of the second) they dont want people to think about: it gives them more opportunity to fudge the value by making it all very complicated.
- mitxela 5d agoIf they don't want to sell me a deshittified product, I'll continue paying someone else to extract the deshittified product from them. Their choice.
- RobotToaster 5d agoThe advert paradox, anyone willing to spend money to avoid ads is inherently worth more to advertisers, since they're willing to spend money. The more money you're willing to pay to avoid ads the more you're worth to advertisers. That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.
- altmanaltman 5d agoI don't understand your logic. Why would someone that never sees my ads be valuable to me? Why would I care? Everyone spends money on something, the fact you spend it on adblockers doesn't make you automatically more valuable to advertisers. I have never heard of this "advert paradox" concept you mention and I have worked in industry for a while now. All this is just conjecture on your part and doesn't really correspond to how it works.
- cwillu 5d agoI paid for Kagi a couple months, and was rather unimpressed with the quality of results.
- andai 5d ago> You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s
- accountrequired 5d agoThanks, I needed to add a ?aep=11&atvm=2&udm=50 for AI mode. Wow!!!!! >You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:
- ruszki 5d agoI'm using Kagi every day, and unfortunately, it is not true anymore. I think what happens is that the blanket banning of IP ranges because of LLMs, and flat out incompetence and laziness, affects them heavily. I get results, or just a few unrelated ones many times every day, while Google happily returns what I searched for. I think Kagi's index is shrinking, or they really made their algorithm worse. I slowly shifted to use LLMs because of this in the past half years, making the situation probably worse for Kagi. They were the last usable search engines for years now. I still pay for it, but it's increasingly not that useful anymore.
- fred_ 5d agoSame here. Been paying for Kagi for probably a year or so, but I find that it hasn’t really been able to keep up with at least my personal expectations. It feels quite slow (which I don’t remember it always being), and the search result quality is not always the best. On top of that, the 10$/mo is a little steep for me, given that their assistant and maps are quite sub-par in my opinion. I would have preferred them to focus more on the search experience, and less on the other products. Or give me a cheaper plan for only unlimited search without the other products.
- plutokras 5d ago> It feels quite slow It definitely is. The extension-based redirect in Safari is also unreliable. Furthermore, many of my searches (and others', apparently) unexplainably defaulted to Groningen in the Netherlands, even though I'm nowhere near the place. I ended up not renewing my annual subscription. Since then, I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates domain ranking for DuckDuckGo – plus DDG already lets you turn off ads natively.
- thenthenthen 4d agoIronically google has a datacenter there (every company is there basically)
- dartharva 5d ago...you.. do know classic Google Search is still an option, right? Just add `&udm=14` to the search URL. Also Google AI mode is accessible on google.com/ai.
- maxlin 5d agoOh that shorthand is fun. Curious it works at all. But yeah I'd switch to Kagi if I had any more forcing function. Maybe without LLM's but google continously getting worse, that'd been the actual thing for me
- kmfrk 5d agoI like Kagi, but is it me or have their results been less than great for the past 1-3mo? Maybe the places they're pulling their results from have had some changes?
- Zambyte 5d agoI haven't noticed.
- celsoazevedo 5d agoKagi seems to heavily rely on Yandex for results. I don't use it, so can't compare, but are results much better than using Yandex directly?
- nine_k 5d agoI'd say that the ranking, and thus the relevance, is noticeably higher. If I know what I want to find, Kagi is good at surfacing exactly that, not something vaguely related.
- celsoazevedo 5d agoI see, thanks.