Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now.
Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers.
For me it has value in two different ways:
1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you.
2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out.
I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas.
I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search:
- Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic)
- I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively
This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.
Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way.
I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.
> but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text
All that content was created with existing SEO rules in mind. As soon as GPT-likes have established behaviour, we'll get new kind of content that specifically targets them. But at least we can enjoy better results in the meantime.
It's tricky to extrapolate from Google. It's fairly obvious that there are things Google could do to fix this problem such as to penalize ads. They are never going to do as long as their main income is those very ads they would need to penalize to address the search engine spam problem.
In general, a big part of why Google is struggling so much with search engine spam is that they are such a dominant force in directing web traffic that they're effectively re-shaping the web around them to optimize for their algorithm. If you had any sort of diversity in search, this would be much less of a problem because the economic incentives would be much smaller.
I don't think it can be taken for granted that any search ecosystem would struggle in the same way Google has been struggling. I think their SEO-problems is a direct consequence of their monopoly on search and a lack of real competition.
Have you tried asking ChatGPT? That’s where all my technical questions start these days.
In the past few days it’s helped me with a bunch of k8s stuff (“explain this coredns log message”, “give me the kubectl command to show all events sorted by most recent first”, etc…)
I'm trying it a bit and it looks pretty good. A bit worse at re-using context but promising. Why does kagi gives that away for free, but asks a fee for search ? I would argue chat is more expansive operationnally ?
This a Kagi experiment (hence on labs.kagi.com subdomain). We run many experiments to learn about AI and search and we will be soon implementing learnings from FastGPT into Kagi.
Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers.
For me it has value in two different ways:
1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you.
2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out.
I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas.
I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search:
- Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic)
- I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively
This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.