It'd be very interesting to run the same experiment except rather than on different engines, just on different versions of Google in different years. Sadly I can't really search 2005 Google anymore of course but it would be interesting nonetheless to see if it's Google in general or rather the recent "enshittification" of their results. It may be intriguing to expand to survey takers outside of Reddit to get a potentially less biased set of results, yes.

Wonder if you could reconstruct synthetic versions of Gsearch with archive pages. I'd guess SEO/SEM companies have the data to build a small version of this and track the changes over time.

Yeahhh I like to think of it as search like it's 2015...

Search had ads in 2015. They were just a bit less obtrusive.

Yeah I really do need to, I'm not sure why I didn't from the start...

I actually did not know if these, but I definitely will implement those!

Woah it was because I had run out of API credits, fixed! I'll improve the error screen for that. Sorry, did not expect this traffic, it's had several thousand searches today!

I see, that is odd and I haven't run into that yet, thank you! I'll have a look into it and try to reproduce the issue, which browser+OS are you on?

Yup, it is pretty much just a better frontend for existing search. I want to build my own index and ranking algorithm in the future, but sadly it's quite resource intensive so it will depend on financial viability a bit in terms of timeframe.

So it's not a search engine, it's a frontend for a search engine.

You can just turn off the AI feature in Brave search so it’s sort of extra pointless.

It’s possibly worth pointing out that the about page doesn’t offer any indicator that this is an actual nonprofit entity from a legal standpoint, so at this point I have to assume it’s just a sole proprietorship that is pinky promising to become a non-profit.

In that sense I’m quite happy “donating” to Kagi to provide a stable and supported product from a company with employees.

That's fair enough. For the record I do intend to apply for a non-profit official entity. I would say it still has a role as opposed to Brave considering the lack of advertising though.

I certainly assume your heart is in the right place. I felt like it was worth warning people to do research before making donations.

Sure, would've made for a chunky post title tho :P

There's tons of these frontends, including SearXNG and proprietary (but very good) Kagi. Kagi are working on their own index; this will be their meat.

I am convinced LLMs are the way forward for searching, with a caveat: what they summarize isn't very relevant (it is overrated). It just gives a (hopefully accurate) semantic context. What matters is the sources it directs to. These are your links normally on top of ypur search query.

I'm genuinely curious why "LLMs are the way forward for searching".

Is it that the results won't be stack ranked lists anymore and instead a conversational output? Personally that's not what I want. I want results that are contextual to my search. If there's a use case for LLMs in search this would be, at least for me, what I'd be looking for. It seems, however, that all of the AI in search results today are not that.

I do pay for Kagi and will continue if the quality of the product continues to offer the quality product that it is today.

openwebsearch.eu wants to build an open index. But despite the funding it is still quite sparse.

How is it better?

Oh! I will make sure to fix that, thank you for the bug report!

Honestly I agree. This is part of what I love about the idea of Kagi. I do believe a not-for-profit alternative is needed, however if there's any for-profit model a search engine should have, it should be paid for by the user rather than the advertiser imo.

I do intend to support this and have actually already been asked to!