Bing couldn't answer "MangoldtLambda[11]" either, and it also couldn't answer "differentiate x^2 with respect to x", and didn't show a graph for "norway gdp".

🞬 blog.kagi.com (blocked ghs.googlehosted.com)

> 16:28 - 14:50 = 22 hours and 22 minutes

although, Google never could not too.

fantastic news, really glad to hear about this

Now it says unlimited, but I'm not sure "you and a swarm of a thousand digital clones" counts as fair use...

Input interpretation

convert 5209 seconds to hours, minutes

     Results

     1 hour 26.82 minutes <==OK

     1.447 hours <==Not asked for

     Additional conversions

     1 hour 26 minutes 49 seconds <==Acceptable interpretation

A lot of HNers would have very positive views and comments about any particular thing, which does not mean they are associated with them.

When I switched to eu.startpage.com, it stopped treating me like a bot. But eventually it started misbehaving in other ways: more than a page of ads (more than two, on mobile!), inserting the ads at the last moment so that your eyes and sometimes your click or tap would land on an ad. Occasionally, I'd win by searching for something so esoteric that no ads displayed. But later they started inserting results specific to my realworld location for searches that returned few or no results.

I reluctantly removed the adblock exemption for StartPage, which causes them to now insert a plea to support them by enabling ads. I contacted their support, who refused to believe that the had pages of ads, and they had no interest a paid version.

Then I found Kagi, and tried it every once in a while until it matured. I still sometimes goto StartPage's EU site on other computers, but on my own I mainly use Kagi.

They made the $10/mo plan unlimited in September 2023

I tend to just ignore or hide the posts I find very annoying, but I understand that isn't necessarily how everyone is.

Makes it easy to ensure that I'm always on old reddit and wikipedia with the better (older :p) layout. Also allowed me to clean up a lot of the results that I knew were from low quality domains, such as getting rid of pinterest since results from it almost never led to anything useful.

I also enjoy the lenses, I hated how the Google results for recipes tended to only make already frustrating recipe sites even more frustrating to dig through. The small web lens is also very nice for when I'm already searching for a niche topic.

Besides that, I also reflect the vague description of the search results seeming to be better.

And of course on top of that, there's the lack of tracking and putting my money where my mouth is regarding preferring to pay for a good privacy preserving service.

My experience has been that Kagi's customizations are the key selling point, allowing you to block and bump domains to meet your needs:

* I have Wikipedia pinned, so if there's a Wikipedia article it's always the top result, whereas Google has lately started downweighting Wikipedia much of the time (as a simple example see COVID-19).

* I have Pinterest blocked entirely, so I never see results from them. As an example, try "living room refurbishment ideas".

* I have MDN upweighted, so it tends to rank higher than random people's blog posts for web dev queries.

There was an old article explaining how Google interpreted "Polish" from "polish" in its search results. Of course, kagi, Bing, Google, etc. can no longer find this article..

Zero ads. User centric features being rolled out. Kagi has improved more in the last 6 months than google did in 10 years that I used the product.

Generally I've started using bangs and lenses for changing searches in a wholly categorical manner. I.e. the !i bang for image search.

I did change the !p bang from podcasts to activating the programming lens, because programming tends to have a lot of terms that overlap with more general language, and so sometimes its nice to swap in and out of that mode.

I hope it never becomes possible to own Kagi stock. They seem like a great company, I'd hate to see them become worthless chasing eternal growth because shareholders demand it.

Google stock would be worthless without its ad empire. Without ads, they would have no need to acquire Youtube and Android.

$10/mo also would not be enough for Wall St. Ask Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, anybody really. Ads will always be just around the corner.

wink wink, nudge nudge.

Ecosia have also been relying on Bing, but recently announced that they've now added Google as well.

I don’t think Google has a publicly known licensing deal ,

I’ve wound up moving folks over to individual Ultimate accounts. They’re working on a revised one payer/many users product. Once that’s available I’ll consolidate everyone there and experiment with making it the default search experience in our managed browsers.

It probably took me about 200 to 300 searches before I was firmly decided that paying for Kagi is worth it. If I hadn't been freshly mad about Google's declining search quality, and displeased with DDG for something they had recently done (can't remember at this point), after the trial I probably wouldn't have paid and just would have gone back to DDG.

I should boost expertsexchange.com in my kagi search results just for the joy.

My take (as a subscriber) is still that the majority of information I'm seeing is assimilated and distilled from the more mainstream sources, but I'm possibly underestimating how much comes from their own indexes.

I will admit that for news I tend to use the !gn bang to jump straight to Google News as it tends to be a more complete feed than Kagi's news tab, so wasn't thinking about TinyGem. But I'd also forgotten completely about Kagi's "Small Web" initiative for indexing non-commercial content that's not interlinked enough for other engines to prioritize it. I believe that's what Teclis (and possibly TinyGem as well) concentrates on.

IIRC, the few times I tried routing searches into that index I didn't find much, so I set it aside, but that's probably because I'm usually searching for more widely-consumed content.

Mathematica is "nuclear power plant" included. It includes not only a very wide range of functions but also a huge amount of data.

For example several years ago they started adding data on biological organisms. They now have data on over a million species of animals, with hundreds of properties for most of them. You could for example with one simple command get a scatter plot showing bird weight vs bird lifespan. Or for mammals lifespan vs number of teeth. It's just a ridiculous amount of data and it is all easily accessible for computing and graphing.

Same for astronomy. It has a ton of data about the solar system. It's got physical properties of numerous bodies, and orbital data too, and it has functions for various astronomical computations. So if you wanted to see how the distance between Mars and Earth varies over time it is a simply command to get a plot of that over say the last 50 years.

Want a list of all geological formations where T. rex have been found? It can make that list for you, because it has a bunch of geological formation data and it has a bunch of dinosaur data.

They've got data on countries, and cities, and geography, and demographics, and economics, and more.

Other systems can beat Mathematica in specific areas, but nothing else comes near its breadth, and in those specific areas where something else beats it it is still usually decent in those areas.

I gave Python a good shot but gave up. A beautiful language but what a waste of time trying to get any simulation going.