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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email (hackers.town)

submitted 8 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] archchan@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it's basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.

I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don't want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn't use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don't use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it's more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 points 8 months ago

We need open search. Like Wikipedia for search, or something.

[–] Zoop@beehaw.org 6 points 8 months ago

I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven't checked them all out myself yet.

[–] Mojeek@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

are you able to let us know what you use Mojeek for? Just interested in where we slot in

[–] archchan@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet

Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.

It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let's me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn't rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you'll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.

With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.

[–] Mojeek@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I've shared this with the wider team.

This being said, if you have things that you'd like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there's a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏