I have been using it for about a year. There is zero advertisement anywhere. No sponsored posts. Just pure search. And they give you quite some good tools to derank or delist websites for you to define your own quality of search results, it’s very effective. They also go the extra mile of de-ranking websites with many trackers as that apparently correlates with SEO which normally doesn’t track with result quality. It’s a very refreshing take on the web. I love it :)

Edit: they also have an extension which allows you to search while being logged out using tokens which improves privacy, in case you want to go the extra mile.

I think so! I’m pretty sure they still give you 100 free searches to try it out, might be worth test driving before you pay for it. From what I understand it’s mostly Google on the back end with Kagi’s own algorithm. My favorite part about it is being able to rank how the results sort themselves based on sites you want to see more or less of, and some other pretty powerful filters. I definitely think it’s worth a shot if you’re curious.

Vanilla guess: WP = Winnie the Pooh.

WP interpreted as “Winnie the Pooh” instead of “Wikipedia”?

Why do you want to replace people that are capable of changing their minds giving input from other people?

I would say we need more of that kind of leadership.

I was following along when they initially announced it and while I personally think its an awful idea, it did seem to stem not from a profit motive but an intention to make Wikipedia easier to use and more effective, and when the vast majority of contributors and editors responded to tell Wikipedia that it was an atrocious idea and that they shouldn’t do it they listened and scrapped the plan.

My point being, isn’t it better as a whole that they’re willing to consider new things but will also listen to the feedback they get from their users and maintainers and choose not to implement ideas that are wildly unpopular?

Writing off all of Wikipedia (the most effective tool for collaborative knowledge collection in human history) just because they announced a well intentioned tool addition and then scrapped the plan when they realized it was unpopular and would likely degrade their platform seems short sighted at best imo.

Though, a big catch is that whatever is generated needs to be verified. The most recent story I’ve seen was the AI proposing the hypothesis of a particular drug increasing antigen presentation, which could turn cold tumors (those the immune system does not attack) into hot tumors (those the immune system does attack). The key news here is that this hypothesis was found to be correct, as an experiment has shown that said drug does have this effect. (link to Google’s press release)

The catch here is that I have not seen any info on how many hypotheses were generated to find this correct hypothesis. It doesn’t have to be perfect: research often causes a hypothesis to be rejected, even if proposed by a person rather than AI. However signal-to-noise is still important for how game changing it will be. Like in this blogpost it can fail to identify a solution at all, or even return incorrect hypotheses. You can’t simply use this data for further training the LLM, as it would only degrade the performance.

There needs to be a verification and filtering first. Wikipedia has played such a role for a very long time, where editors reference sources, and verify the trustworthiness of these sources. If Wikipedia goes under because of this, either due to a lack of funding or due to a lack of editors, a very important source will be lost.