• Steve@communick.news
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    10 hours ago

    Chicago schools should really contact Kagi. They announced they would be willing to work with schools that wanted out of Google’s AI experience for their students.

    • ranandtoldthat@beehaw.org
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      5 hours ago

      I’m not really a fan of Kagi myself. I gave it a try a while back. The issue is that with a limited number of searches I get worse results, because I’m less willing to refine my queries.

      With query refinement I can get excellent results on Google. So ultimately Google is better for me than Kagi.

    • XLE@piefed.social
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      10 hours ago

      Maybe Kagi could first walk back their AI-first manifesto…

      …Or schools could use literally anything else that doesn’t cost an extra subscription…

      • Kaul@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 hours ago

        This article is about 7 years old, before AI was even used as widely as it is now, and it’s referencing their optional AI tool. This doesn’t strike me as “AI-First” but more like “we’re trying to make our AI search assistant more reliable than the rest”.

        I get the AI hate and the “paid search” Kagi hate, but saying they’re an AI-First company doesn’t seem right to me. You don’t even get AI results unless you add a question mark to your search. Additionally, you can report websites and images for being slop. Can’t do that with any other search engine.

      • Steve@communick.news
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        10 hours ago

        Schools shouldn’t ever use tools that interrupt a lesson with an ad.
        And we don’t know how much (if anything) it costs the school. It certainly doesn’t cost the student a subscription if that’s what you mean.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 hours ago

      I started using them 2 weeks ago. Previously I was using DDG, occasionally when searching and didn’t get an answer I added “!g” to query which redirected me to Google, but I don’t think in those scenarios Google ever had better results.

      With Kagi I so far did not have need to go to Google or DDG at all.

      I also like that I’m in charge. For example I wanted to avoid buying from Amazon. Unfortunately it is not enough to not use their site, because they also show up on top of search results. I can select their service and deprioritize them so now I see other stores when searching for a product.

      So far I’m sold.

      Google was great 2000-2010, but it got worse, supposedly by SEO manipulations, but I also heard (maybe it was Cory Doctorow) that actually because they are making money on ads they actually have incentive to not provide the best results as they want us to spend more time on their site.