Kagi.com is a fairly recent paid search engine with a trial period. One just needs to put in an email address to register.
*I am in no way affiliated with Kagi
I have been using it recently when I cannot find technical answers in the major free engines. I doubted for some time that it was better, but I have recently found answers hidden on the majors.
They say they are ‘independent’ whatever that means. I tracerouted them to a Google hosted service in US. Maybe if they get enough users they will get more global servers. I think they are worth a look at if you are unhappy with the majors.
I have serious doubts about LLMs reasoning. I think they are in their infancy, so like talking with a small child, one entertains them without taking them too seriously.
I just tried Perplexity for the first time. My first impression was the advertizing. M$ and Amazon stock prices, something about that guy that owns Teslsa…
To be upfront I hate advertizing and I think it is an insidious force that infiltrates ones mind. So much of our culture is advertizing based. I am afraid that LLMs have hidden biases formed by advertizing that will affect people like TV has affected them so far.
I prefer to be given a list of links with snippets for key words. I can work out if the answer is relevant. I deal with a lot of non-standard information. I want to broaden my horizons rather than be told where they lay.
So I found a potential solution to a question earlier today - it was bout how to set a gnome weather non-standard location. The majors did not find my answer. Kagi found me a smaller blog, not a very popular one, that yielded a good answer. Perplexity gave me a rundown of the standard way to change a gnome weather location.
So in this case Kagi wins.
Edit: To be fair, on reviewing my query the LLM gave me roughly the same answer.
They can, today, provide valid answers as longs you have enough knowledge to confirm that they make sense. I got some valid information about how to do things on my system for example.
Advertising is a plague infecting everything. It’s a valid concern that it would also infect LLMs, but just how you can use an OS like Fedora and not some garbage that shows you ads and tracks you, there should be options for local LLMs.
To be fair, a lot of traditional search engine results bring up outdated information, which persists in forums, etc.