I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google.
I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google.
Kagi is jaw-droppingly amazing. With Google search quality declining, Bing being on average 95% as good as Google, and DuckDuckGo being 90% as good, I was doubting there was any way that search engines would ever improve. Kagi has removed that doubt completely. I ask for stuff and it finds it. I couldn't believe there could be such a useful product.
Apparently it uses Bing plus some secret sauce although in my experience the results are a bit worse than pure Bing. Having said that I have not performed a rigorous study, this is just my guess from using all these search engines over a prolonged period.
It was mostly Bing and Yandex. The latter was responsible for the odd Russian language results you'd get at times but presumably produced English results as well.
Bing may be that good for some, but every time I use it it stinks and I end up back on Google. Same for DDG.
Then again, my queries tend to be pretty specific and are probably not a typical use case.
I really expected code.you.com to be tailored to coding, but the results are nonsensical. The $ got stripped, as well as any other characters like %, #, or _. Casing is also ignored.
Searching for $PATH results in this. Yes, I definitely wanted these results:
> PATH (People Acting To Help), Inc. is a comprehensive Behavioral / Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities center located in Northeast Philadelphia.
> Better health moves humanity forward | PATH
The scope of our work is vast because it must be. Billions of people are still underserved or marginalized by inequitable systems. To close the gaps, we advance progress in dozens of health areas, from epidemic preparedness, HIV/AIDS, and malaria, to maternal and newborn care, sexual and reproductive health, tuberculosis, and more.
I'm a product manager working on code.you.com. This is good feedback and an interesting suggestion. We'll work on adding those special characters, variables and casing to make the search better for coding.
We're just getting started but working really hard to make this something special. There is a fairly active slack community if you have any other suggestions and want to share. thx.
Oh it is definitelt a Google problem.
I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google.
I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google.
They are ready.