this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

The best search engine for my money is kagi. It's $5 a month but there's no ads, I get to block pinterest and I downranked fandom wikis. There's even a fediverse filter.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No tf it isn’t.

Most people don’t even know what perplexity is.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

well whether popular doesn't neceserally mean ungood. though I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to search engines as the amount they have to build up information wise to potentially be good is pretty extreme, it's unlikely that someone could accomplish it without actually being known

edit: oh shit, it's just AI crap.. nevermind any of my potential it's not impossible that a hidden gem would be feasilble it's AI crap. No nobody needs a search engine to bring up something that you can't verify if it's credible information or just random guesses made by what's popular on the internet... completely worthless.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Perplexity cites its sources though, so you can just read those when you suspect it's halloucinating.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

halloucinating

you're hallucinating extra letters

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

kagi is actually a pretty good, quite unknown search engine. I strongly prefer it to google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It has some pretty unsavory behind the scenes stuff going on though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

wut? never heard of that, but I guess I never looked really. Unsavory how?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Mostly with the CEO lying, AI, and privacy concerns. https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

why cant we ever just have something good.

oh well, ill be keeping my eyes open for alternatives, this is bad but still better than google I guess.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago

The article is a breathless advertisement and the comments below it tell the real story.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

Did they pay for the article?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

Wot? Perplexity ai, that app that I have on my phone and that I sometimes ask random things when I want to be angry at something and that gives entirely useless and wrong answers 95% of the time? lollmaoeven

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It is good for answering simple questions. It isn't a search engine its more of an answers engine wherby you ask something and it will do the search and procure the answer from the results. It works well most of the time however like all AI it hulicinates so if you ask it something too complex it isnt very good.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Maybe not now, but in future, with more accurate results, AI powered search will be preferred by majority, because of the convenience.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

When the citations are on point, I like AI search. 9 times out of 10 I care enough to read the source though.

However, there are still way too many hallucinations when it comes to sources in my experience. It just wastes my time when I go to verify and find that AI just spat out garbage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Anyone have an opinion on Perplexity compared to Brave Search?

I really value Brave having their own independent search index. Google, Bing, and Yandex have dominated the space for quite some time.

I know Perplexity claims to have a small / curated independent index, but I’m not really sure how true that is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Brave has been surprisingly solid in my experience. I have noticed they tend to be lacking on image results though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Mojeek has its own index as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can't say much in regards to perplexity, but I find kagi's index to be quite nice. Especially if you find fortune forum posts helpful (which I do as a software dev). It's paid only, so there's no advertising incentive to the company and also a ton of configuration. I search a lot, so I went with the 10 dollar plan. 5 bucks gets you 300 searches a month, 10 is unlimited plus access to their LLM which documents information sources like perplexity.

Personally, I found perplexity to be quite annoying with the more ai focused UI and trying to learn your interests. Kagi is a search engine first plus some other features they're developing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As far as I know, Kagi doesn't have their own index. They use a mix of google and brave's results (maybe some other search engines too?), and then sort their results to give "better" ordered results.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

They use many sources, including other search engines and specific websites, but also claim to use two of their own indexes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, from my experience I believe Kagi’s results are like 90%+ pulled from Brave’s search index. I like the concept of Kagi, but I prefer SearXNG as a search aggregator.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

That's still using Google,no?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I didn’t read this article but yes. I’ve basically stopped using search engines altogether now and use Perplexity. It’s nice to be able to say “that didn’t work, here’s the error” and “double check your work because this is important” and it just…does it. It’s not perfect but it’s miles better than googling up that 5 year old Stack Overflow post with your exact question and zero answers.