I think there's a very important nugget here unrelated to agents: Kagi as a search engine is a higher signal source of information than Google page rank and ad sense funded model. Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.

> We found many, many examples of benchmark tasks where the same model using Kagi Search as a backend outperformed other search engines, simply because Kagi Search either returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher, or because the other results were not polluting the model’s context window with more irrelevant data.

> This benchmark unwittingly showed us that Kagi Search is a better backend for LLM-based search than Google/Bing because we filter out the noise that confuses other models.

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clearleaf 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

Hey Google, Pinterest results are probably messing with AI crawlers pretty badly. I bet it would really help the AI if that site was deranked :)

Also if this really is the case, I wonder what an AI using Marginalia for reference would be like.

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viraptor 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

It's likely they can filter the results for their own agents, but will leave other results as they are. Half the issue with normal results are their ads - that's not going away.

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pixelready an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger

Kagi works better and will continue to do so as long as Kagi’s interests are aligned with users’ needs and Google’s aren’t.

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sroussey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are several startups providing web search solely for ai agents. Not sure any agent uses Google for this.

	▲	clearleaf 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Maybe we should learn to pass reverse-turing tests and pretend to be LLMs so we can use this stuff lol.
	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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MangoToupe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

They spent the last decade and a half encouraging the proliferation of garbage via "SEO". I don't see this reversing.

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

Unlikely. There are very few people willing to pay for Kagi. The HN audience is not at all representative of the overall population.

Google can have really miserable search results and people will still use it. It's not enough to be as good as google, you have to be 30% better than google and still free in order to convert users.

I use Kagi and it's one of the few services I am OK with a reoccurring charge from because I trust the brand for whatever reason. Until they find a way to make it free, though, it can't replace google.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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bitpush 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.

I'm not convinced about this. If the strategy is "lets return wikipedia.org as the most relevant result", that's not sophisticated at all. Infact, it only worked for a very narrow subset of queries. If I search for 'top luggages for solo travel', I dont want to see wikipedia and I dont know how kagi will be any better.

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VHRanger 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(Kagi staff here)

Generally we do particularly better on product research queries [1] than other categories, because most poor review sites are full of trackers and other stuff we downrank.

However there aren't public benchmarks for us to brag about on product search, and frankly the simpleQA digression in this post made it long enough it was almost cut.

1. (Except hyper local search like local restaurants)

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oidar 4 hours ago | parent [-]

do you use pinned/deranked sites as an indicator for quality?

	▲	VHRanger 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think we share them across accounts, no, but we do use your personal kagi search config in assistant searches.

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viraptor 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The wrote "returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher" and not "wikipedia.org as the most relevant result" - that's an important distinction. There are many irrelevant Wikipedia pages.