Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

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>> The Dead Internet is a mirage caused by the unreasonable effectiveness of digital marketing…

> On the contrary… The search engines themselves…

With you 100% except for the opening rebuttal. What do you think /caused/ search engines to devolve like this if not digital marketing?

I pay cash for kagi.com, and recommend it.

Engineers should try their “lens” approach. I’d pay more for trusted curated lenses, and hope that’s in their model. The site above could offer a curated list of valid sites, and then I’d find them in the one engine too. (See Similar Projects on Marginalia’s About page.)

I also pay for Neeva, but they’re clearly trying to have their advertorial cake and eat it too. Still, it’s a better resource than Google when seeking an actual product.

I worry that solving digital marketing’s ‘unreasonable effectivness’ requires more than just ability to subscribe to content without ads, it should be possible to buy products without marketing budget built into the cost. Lower cost products would outcompete those spending money on ads, so all else being equal, enabling products to compete without marketing budget is the only solution I see. I don’t think a Neeva solves this by itself, though it’s likely a necessary component.

Another vote of support for kagi.com -- it's well worth the payment.

Our (collective) disinclination towards paying for things on the Internet is what has led to the "everything must be monetized via ads" local maxima we're now stuck in.

If you care enough about this state of affairs, and can afford to do so (most people here can), then please consider paying for parts of the Internet that are important to you, like a search engine.

Paid search engines sound like they'd make filter bubbles even worse though, no?

When you have as much information as there is on the internet, any attempt to sort through it creates a bubble. At least a paid search engine allows feedback between the users and the algorithm and some confidence that the engine won't go under because the authors lost interest/got tired fighting abuse for free/etc.

The filter bubble is the value proposition. I never want to see results from spam sites like Quora or expertsexchange.

Have you seen the crap outside the filter bubble? It is trendy to call filter bubbles the well from which all sorrows are drawn but not everything is worth reading, no matter how many drink the koolaid.

This isn't scientific obviously, but I feel since I started using Kagi, my scope has widened significantly of what I rely on for results. Another +1 for what these guys are attempting.

You pay for search one way or another, I'd rather be direct about it.

You're assuming you're not already in the worst possible filter bubble: advertising incentivized curation.

It depends on what the customer base is paying for and expecting. If they expect a bubble and complain about it not being there, they'll likely get a bubble. If they complain about the bubble being there, steps will likely be taken to reduce or remove it.

For better or worse, the direction of a paid product is usually fairly well defined, as long as they've taken time to understand their customers.

Their first result for their first example search, "best headphones" is from 2014. Google results for this are way better.

Unless the best headphone was designed in 2014?

The release date of the headphones is not the important data point there. The date of the article is what we care about. The article is 8 years old and therefore excludes thousands of new headphones that could conceivably be the best. Even if today's best was released in 2014, a 2014 article pointing to that same pair isn't a very authoritative source when shopping for headphones today.

Headphones don’t age. It’s perfectly fine for such an old article coming up, especially if gets referenced on prosumer forums such the r/audiophile or r/hifi subreddit.

Sennheisers headphone division got eaten by its own success: the sennheiser hd 650 is so durable and has such a great soiund quality, that people just aren’t switching away from that 20 year old headphone.

In case the link you mentioned isn’t about that mid range headphone, it’s probably about the beyerdynamics T1.

Besides talking about audio equipment: I hate the sites on google who update the dates of their articles although the content wasn’t changed. Happens way to often. I googled the release date of BOTW2 a few days ago, and 3/4 of the search results were blatant seo spam where the initial article was about something else, and then the headline and date were changed in order to get more traffic from google.

Imo you are setting the wrong priorities for a search engine.

>Headphones don’t age. It’s perfectly fine for such an old article coming up, especially if gets referenced on prosumer forums such the r/audiophile or r/hifi subreddit.

But an outdated article doesn't guarantee this to be true. For example, maybe the manufacturer released an updated version that is a better value proposition and kept the old model around to have a more budget friendly option. Or perhaps another company purchased the manufacture and demand they cut costs. Or maybe this model is new and people haven't yet learned that there is a specific part that frequently fails after a few years of use. An old article can't speak to these hypotheticals. It doesn't mean the article is wrong. It just means that the article is less informed than if it were written today giving the exact same recommendation.

>the sennheiser hd 650 is so durable and has such a great soiund quality, that people just aren’t switching away from that 20 year old headphone.

But this is only something that can be truly known after those 20 years.

>I hate the sites on google who update the dates of their articles although the content wasn’t changed.

I agree, and while this is a related issue, it isn't really the same problem. It is a failure in Google's anti-SEO features. They don't need to trust the date on the article. They could compare cached versions of the page to see what changed besides the date.

> But an outdated article doesn't guarantee this to be true.

Nor does a new article on a "review" site monetized with affiliate links guarantee it. So who do you trust more? Older but honest review from an expert or a new affilate driven review? Kagi choses the former as likelier to be more valuable to the user in this case.

The issue still is that there objectively could be better headphones released after 2014.

If I saw a photograph of all the cellphones from 2004, I can pick out the best cellphone, this doesn’t mean that the best cellphone from 2004 is still the best cellphone.

It’s implied that “best” usually means what is “best” for what people need today as those needs evolve drastically over time and especially with tech products.

Why is that the choice? You are assuming an expert has not written an honest review of the headphone market in 8 years.

It would presumeably surface in the results too.

This is actually a feature. Try answering the query 'best headphones' yourself.

Must be the peak. That's when the first "true wireless earbuds" came out.

Another happy Kagi customer here.

As a data scientist, just being able to block Towards Data Science and other garbage DS content churned out by amateurs to get their resumes boosted is well, well worth it. It's ridiculous how much top ranking content on Google is flat out technically incorrect, or at least clearly misunderstanding the subject.

Also a big fan & paying customer of kagi.com - the only setting adjustment I've made so far is pushing docs.rs up in search results, so I get that instead of crates.io when looking up Rust stuff.

To me it falls into the category of IntelliJ products, where it makes my life and productivity so much better that the price is a no-brainer

What worries me about Kagi is this bit in their FAQ:

"... it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. ... An average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal due to testing etc. Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it."

I went and looked up my Google search history for yesterday - it's 40 searches. I'd expect it to be above average, but still... if it's $10 per 80 queries, it feels like $10 is likely to be too low to be sustainable. And while I personally don't mind paying more, I wonder how many people will - and what it'll mean for the service long term, if they just can't attract enough people to make it worthwhile.

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