Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
Here’s Kagi
Alas, it has the emergent mind answer ranked fairly high still, and when search result was set to my country it was actually ranked highest.
Also, if you use Quick Answer, you’ll get same wrong answer:
Quick Answer There are no countries in Africa whose name starts fully with the letter “K”. While Kenya is the closest match, its name does not start solely with “K” [1]. All of the African countries’ names were reviewed across multiple sources and none began completely with the letter “K” [2][3][4].
Kagi’s “quick answer” gives me a better result:
Though I don’t know if that’s because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn’t show it by default, at least with my settings.
I think it’s just based on which 4-6 search results are ranked on top for you / your country, and then that’s used as basis for the quick answer. It also seems to cache the quick answer so even after I forced it so downrank some results, my answer was the same.
Cool thing about kagi though. I added emergent mind to my blocked domains list, and now the quick answer displays the proper answer. Still not ideal but better than no options at all to fix it
The internet really is unusable without some way to block user/sites/etc… That’s Kagi’s single greatest feature.
Yeah I actually just found that functionality myself today when I was looking at how I could get rid of the very same emergent mind result.
However, it seems that my quick answer got cached, at least for a while, so it stayed the same even if the results now were different.
How are you liking Kagi?
Not op but I love kagi. I’ve tried so many search engine alternatives and always found myself going back to Google (or using g! to get Google results)
Kagi is the first I’ve tried where the results are good enough (and get better as I tailor what domains I want to appear higher or lower) to not have to rely on Google. I am a pretty avid searcher though and found I need to be on the $10/month plan for it to work out to the cheapest while still searching like I normally do
I think I stopped searching for things because Google got so damn bad. I remember the days when I could go several pages deep just looking through the internet.
Kagi is definitely peaking my interest from what I’ve seen so far.
Switched a year ago and never looked back. I was using ddg before that. Highly recommended. Being able to block and rank sites is great. You can also setup redirects and there’s a quick link to the Internet Archive for every link too.