12 ms·

Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

222 points by miked85 3y ago

snvzz 3y ago
I would first try SearXNG[0]. 0. https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
simpaticoder 3y ago
Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. The simple truth is that unless they make themselves explicitly liable to users if they are ever caught doing this, that the irresistable urge to monetize user data will tempt even the most well-meaning firm into sin. The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. IANAL but I believe this can be done if ownership agrees to voluntarily enter into something like a fiduciary arrangement with their users. This means writing a EULA that does not minimize the firm's risk, but instead increases it in specific, meaningful ways. Increasing client risk is something attorneys are absolutely allergic to, and will argue up and down about why the client shouldn't do it. I would say that, if the customers know and care about such a step, it could be a valuable PR and marketing move that demonstrates REAL integrity. As it is, we only believe that "users paying for services" will protect against data exfiltration because of very naive reasoning, or, perhaps more accurately, praying.
- chomp5977 3y ago
  Yea I also worry about this. At this moment Kagi feels like the best I can do for search. Unfortunately these days I won't be surprised to hear of fuckery from them. It's happened too many times.
  - fallat 3y ago
    It's happened too many times in general by other companies, or Kagi? All things said, I think Kagi really as the incentives aligned. I'm not a fan of Kagi but I believe the "business is sound" :) Sure, I also believe there's no need for such a business (an extension or whatever would suffice), but that doesn't really matter here nor there.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  > Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. Who would they sell the data to? Google? Ohhhh noooooo... More seriously, as long as it's paired with a "But their search results are still better than Google's trashfire", I'm not sure it would matter. Their tagline is "Fast, accurate, and ad-free", not "Fast, accurate, ad-free, and private."
  - vunderba 3y ago
    Maybe try reading more than one sentence. "We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy." literally on the main page. Smh.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
      That's great but really misses the point. People sign up for Kagi because they want better search results. Any privacy issues are largely peripheral.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        That's me. I do love that Kagi is probably much more private than other engines, but the real draw for me was that it's a search engine that actually works well. Bottom line, that's what I'm paying for. If Kagi became a bad actor with my data, that would just make them like the majority of other search engines, so big picture, I'd not be any worse off. And I'd still have access to a search engine that lets me find what I'm looking for without a lot of struggle.
- chefandy 3y ago
  > The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. Since the userbase consists largely of people who pay them to not act like google, at least for now, it likely would be an existential threat to the firm. They couldn't get much worse in that regard than big free services, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the interim, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and paying out of pocket for a really good service. The results are consistently more useful than Google's and the tooling is much much better. So if they are invasively tracking me and selling my data, you can definitely say "i told you so" but maybe we should call off the firing squad until the verdict has been reached. We currently don't have a trial, charges, a crime, evidence, or even empirically-informed suspicion.
  - Frost1x 3y ago
    Well the other risk you have trusting all your personal data to some organization is the longevity of said organization. Your data may be protected as long as their business model aligns with that but it's never guaranteed to stay that way. One of the best historic examples is MySpace. MySpace started out fine and slowly as it declined and eventually dwindled to nothing, it started selling off massive amounts of previous user data. With no future or user base to speak of, there was a lot more potential benefit selling the data than the cost of protecting/holding it.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      At their worst, they're not any worse than my alternatives. DDG is a modicum better than Google for privacy, but using it makes me want to punch the internet in the face.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What is their privacy policy?
  - juunpp 3y ago
    It doesn't matter.
- TisButMe 3y ago
  I work at Kagi. This is a very reasonable fear to have. We do actually not store the data, but of course you'd need to take me at my word for this. That said, if we did lie or change that, we'd be in immediate breach of our privacy policy (https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy), and as a result be a very easy target for a lawsuit. Given that we're intentionally not VC backed, between the horrible press this would be and the actual costs of fighting such a lawsuit, I expect not much would be left of Kagi afterwards. We are liable to users, in a pretty existential way.
  - simpaticoder 3y ago
    Having read your privacy agreement, I don't see where the threat is existential if you are in breach. I think that the knowledge of engineers of the judicial system, both criminal and civil, is very naive. You can sue anyone over anything at any time - you don't need valid grounds. It also doesn't mean that if you win it matters. Your privacy policy has lots of feel-good language that actually doesn't mean anything - along the lines of the classic "We value your privacy" statement that firms often make. When you analyze it, you find it means nothing. There are no actionable clauses. For example, if you are in breach of "Anonymous logs are aggregated with GCP's logging tools, retained for 30 days." what are the enumerated damages? A counter-party would have to prove show BOTH that you are in breach AND then real damages , which is difficult in this case, and entirely misses the point. E.g. if you sell 1M user data records for $.001 each, and a user has on average 10 records on them, the real damages are $.01, but your firm made $100k on the transaction. I don't see a limit to class action (or forced arbitration) so that's good; but good luck building out that class - especially since you'll resist sharing user data with the class action plaintiff, using the same privacy policy as a shield! (This is the other trick of privacy agreements, apart from not actually saying anything: the stuff that is measurable is unenforceable). It's time that the public stop seeing moonbeams and rainbows in these matters. Do you think that a lender will be satisfied with a debtor statement "I value paying back my debts, and will never be late!"? If not, then why are we mollified by similar statements by software firms made to us? What is measurable has no teeth; what has teeth is not measurable. It's a very dirty trick.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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tentacleuno 3y ago
I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.
- NeckBeardPrince 3y ago
  You're paying Kagi for privacy.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.
    - dropofwill 3y ago
      They’ve been pretty open about the pricing strategy on the blog. Earlier this year they said they were losing money on most accounts at $10/month. They’ve since changed the pricing tiers a few times, but it sounds like they’re in a better place now.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    What is their privacy policy?
    - TisButMe 3y ago
      https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy - it's not written in legalese.
- toasteros 3y ago
darkteflon 3y ago
This is such an easy monthly sub for me. Given the importance of search to our daily lives and work, having your search engine provider re-rank results to optimise their own ad revenue at the cost of your own time and attention is insane. In retrospect.
iansinnott 3y ago
Recently I discovered there's no more "Non-commercial" lens. I'm still a happy Kagi user but I found that lens helpful for avoiding over-SEOd sites filled with affiliate links and was disappointed to see it gone.
- inrodos 3y ago
  I believe this was superseded by the "Small Web" lens.
- burkaman 3y ago
  They just changed the name to Small Web.
jdoss 3y ago
I switched to Kagi earlier this year and I have found its search to be vastly better than Google's in almost every case. The only time I finding myself use Google over Kagi is for searching for local business numbers or Google Maps. If you are on the fence on paying for a search engine give it a shot for a month and you might be as surprised as to how good Kagi is as I was.
titaniumtown 3y ago
Honestly, I rather use Bing and get paid for searching. As a student with no income, I rather use something free.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  As someone who also brought up the pricing situation[0], I also currently make use of a free search engine (DuckDuckGo). In these circumstances, it seems that socioeconomic disadvantage and privacy do not go hand-in-hand. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852478
- Supermancho 3y ago
  A superior solution that's 2/mo or 20/yr would be something I would go for, given my income. I would not expect anyone I know to go for a search engine that charges 10/mo.
justusthane 3y ago
> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter. The enduring (and incorrect) myth of how fiduciary responsibility works.
- konaraddi 3y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    See the other chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852567
  - justusthane 3y ago
    Short term value isn’t the only thing that matters. As CEO, you could say, “Increasing ad-revenue at the expense of everything else will increase profits, but I believe it would be bad for the long term health of the company.” The shareholders might not like it, and the board might fire you, but if you’ve acted in good faith you haven’t violated fiduciary responsibility.
archildress 3y ago
I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."
- NetOpWibby 3y ago
  Narrator: They won't. I upgraded my subscription a few weeks ago because I blew past the first tier's limits. Kagi kinda fills the Neeva-sized hole in my heart.
  - sxg 3y ago
    Kagi doesn't need to win, and they know that. Kagi just has to focus on serving a tiny percentage of Google power users in order to be profitable and induce Google search to compete.
    - NetOpWibby 3y ago
      I wish Neeva knew that too but ah well. I feel like a lot of people on here share the mindset that unless Google can be demolished, there’s no point in being a competitor…which is, a dumb take IMHO.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Common mentality even outside of tech. Guess those people forgot the days of indie labels or mom and pop shop. Can't really blame them given that being the intent for decsdes. For Google, it very roughly makes about $25 per year per user in 2019. But it has an estimated 4 billion users. If you can take even 1% of 1% of these users, thats still 400k users. So you're still bringing on $10m a year if you keep the same price. Now of course Kagi is nowhere near that 400k figure, but also charges more. So you see how it can add up.
    - manonthewall 3y ago
chx 3y ago
I switched on Oct 3. I was beginning to see way too much of these weird domain name mirrors of things in Google Search instead of the real things and I was reading Doctorow on Google's enshittification and I said "OK, enough of this". I guess it's time to move Google Drive and Gmail as well. The latter is probably fastmail but where to put the Google Drive files? It's like 2TB.
- btzs 3y ago
  I have moved my files to a managed Nextcloud instance. Important to me is Linux support and Nextcoud works better for me than the alternatives.
  - chx 3y ago
    Do you have suggestions for ~2TB at a sane price? For example, https://www.hosting.de/nextcloud/managed-nextcloud/ https://www.hosting.de/nextcloud/managed-nextcloud/ you can see 2TB costs 2.5x of a 1TB plan.
    - comment0r 3y ago
      https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-share
Yeri 3y ago
Agreed -- been using Kagi since April 2022, and never looked back. Tried to convert my wife to use it, but she's too used to Google (and the integration with Maps, local recommendations for cafés and restaurants, etc) that don't work as well in Kagi (yet). But for day to day, proper searching, it's 100% better. And I can't stress enough how liberating it is to see the top results of the search are actually most likely the most relevant results (and not "they paid more"). Yesterday I had to set up a clean Windows laptop, and had to use Edge to install Chrome (or Firefox) and 1password: it's just pure lying to users: https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/215/697/509/164/845/original/f79bef25d5c48e2e.jpeg https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/21... (that top banner with download 1password doesn't actually do anything, the next results, made to look like a real result with the sublinks etc is all lastpass cheating and paying to be in front of 1psw).
malablaster 3y ago
I almost bought Kagi. Initially I wanted Universal Summarizer. Then I realized I could install Edge browser (which is essentially Google-free Chrome) and the integrated, free GPT-4 would summarize for me. And I still haven’t had an “ah ha” moment comparing Kagi’s search results. I’m happy to keep trying for free next month, or whenever my free trial searches reset, until I’m sold on the value.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  A google-free chrome … from Microsoft. Doesn’t sound so attractive to me.
northerdome 3y ago
This was me with Neeva but they sold out. I fully expect Kagi to do the same unfortunately.
- deleriousmuffin 3y ago
  The problem was that Neeva sucked. I quit using it after it took me to an actual scam website to buy some product I wanted. What I learned from that was that aligned business model != good product.
adamsb6 3y ago
> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter. This is a widely held misconception, but there's no legal requirement to maximize profits. They're required to act in the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, but this is very broad and includes more than just wringing out every source of profit. I'm a recent Kagi convert, and I'd say that Google's search product declining in usefulness is eventually going to impact its profitability.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Companies don't maximize shareholder value, no matter how much they talk about it. Companies are run by and for the managers of said company, and what gets them promoted. Sometimes that aligns with what the shareholders might want, often it does not.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    For c-suite their comp is mostly awarded by the board which is controlled by largest shareholders. So therefore they are highly incentivized to make them happy which is usually achieved by stonk going up and to the right. For middle managers it’s more complex and is usually divorced from the stock price (and often reality too)
    - daemoens 3y ago
      Can a stock go to the left? If they figured out time-travel, I'm sure the board would be even happier. /s
      - Infernal 3y ago
        Hah, I’m going to start using “down and to the left” the way people use “up and to the right” now
        3y ago
tynan 3y ago
Just to chime in and add another datapoint, I switched to Kagi and expected that I'd eventually go back to Google (like I had when I switched to DDG), but the results are just as good or better and I'm happy to pay to not have ads or tracking.
upghost 3y ago
I should probably add in that kagi has some secret modes. If you precede the search query with `!expert` you get an LLM search response. If you precede it with `!code` you get a GPT-4-ish tuned response. It’s… really good. And since you can do it from a browser bar if you make it your default browser, I find myself reaching for !expert at least 50% as often as ChatGPT these days. Also, it’s extremely good with citations. The !expert mode seems pretty darn up to date, no knowledge cutoff issues. I have no idea if it is search, doing a vector lookup, or they just bake the model every night. Totally magical. Also, I’m following the LLM stuff pretty closely these days — their universal summarized and their search LLM — no one else is doing that right now. It’s genuinely amazing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  I’ve been using Quick Answer quite a bit. The fact that it cites its sources is absolutely fantastic.
- redhale 3y ago
  Neither !expert nor !code prefixes work for me.
  - alphager 3y ago
    Only available in the ultimate plan.
- _gllen 3y ago
  Sounded cool, but seems like it’s (!expert) a closed beta. I just get redirected to expert.nl, maybe requires the ultimate plan? The docs are pretty unclear.
- paradox460 3y ago
  You can also modify the bangs to your liking. I never use podcasts, and so having !p bound to podcast search was useless to me. Opened up the lenses config, and set the programming lens to !p.
- astrostl 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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mortify 3y ago
Something like Kagi is going to have to make its case strongly before making $120/year sound appealing. Google's only advantage over other search engines is its ability to search forums more deeply. The build-in feature of diving into reddit, stack overflow, etc is often useful. After a few test searches, Kagi is adept at this as well. Other free search alternatives that I've been happy with include: Ecosia, Quant, or even startpage.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  They also have a $5/month plan
sampli 3y ago
Kagi is pretty cool, but I wish it had some more live features like Google has. (e.g seeing game scores in a nice format update in real time)
lapcat 3y ago
I really wanted to like Kagi, and admittedly my experimentation did not last long, but contrary to the experience of other commenters, I found Kagi search results to be significantly worse than Google. Maybe it was just the specific subjects I was searching. The final straw for me was when I searched for air quality in my city, and the Kagi results were a total joke, mostly irrelevant. I would have been happy to pay if the results were good, but unfortunately I was disappointed by them.
- smcleod 3y ago
  Have you got an example?
- user3939382 3y ago
  Hm.. I just tried that search for my town and the first result was correct. Wonder what happened.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    It's not necessarily about the top result. It's about the top 20-30 results.
    - beej71 3y ago
      I only looked at the first 15 or so for my town and they were almost all relevant. Maybe city name dependent?
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  I will say in earlier tests I found location-specific queries sort of lacking on Kagi, but I feel like they've improved it. You absolutely do have to be explicit about your location though, because it isn't run by the company tracking your phone.
- miked85 3y ago
  I've found Kagi results to be significantly better than Google in general, however I'm sure certain searches might better on Google.
lampiaio 3y ago
Oh, I didn't know it was time for HN's biweekly Kagi post. Those are invaluable, I use them as a personal reminder for me to water my cactus.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  I mean, when people are writing unpaid ads for a service just because it's so much better... maybe you should try it. (Fastmail too, the other "pay for quality" product often brought up here.)
  - manonthewall 3y ago
    yeah I pay a few bucks a month for protonmail and have never regretted it.
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  As far as promoting stuff and watering stuff infrequently goes, I use an app on my phone called "Planta" to remind me to water my cactus (and other plants). It's one of the few apps whose notifications I don't disable.
Urgo 3y ago
Been using Duck Duck Go for maybe three or so years now? It's very rare I fallback to google other then for google maps (!gm). I do make heavy use of ChatGPT and Bard though. I wish there was more example results then just "best headphones", "steve jobs", and "python exceptions". I'm interested, but not interested enough to sign up. Maybe its just me, but all the marketing and comments are why to switch away from google search.. which I already did. There is a docs page[1] on Kagi vs. DuckDuckGo but it doesn't really have any compelling reason to use Kagi from that. I'd love to see concrete examples of how Kagi has better results then DDG. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html
- smcleod 3y ago
  I’ve found Kagis search results far better than DDG, not even in the same ballpark.
  - Urgo 3y ago
    If you could provide screen shots or a writeup of HOW they are better that would be helpful. Kogi fans just seems to say its better without really any examples. Not saying its not better, but no one has really shown how it is better.
    - dankwizard 3y ago
      I mean its a search engine what are you expecting? More often than not, their search results are returning useable links. People aren't going to write an essay as to the nuances.
    - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
      The article addresses a huge aspect: It's customizable. I frequently know I'm looking for say, a learn.microsoft.com page. So if I boost that domain, and one of the results is on that site, it moves towards the top of the page. My results are explicitly better for me because I am able to tell the search engine what I want to see.
jonjojojon 3y ago
I think Kagi search quality has a coding bias. Searches related to physics,hardware,math are basically identical to google or noticeably worse. My coding related searches are usually much better with much less SEO spam than google. This might be a function of just how much larger the market for coding related content is online.
- jostyee 3y ago
  I guess this is their growth strategy, because programmers are the people most likely to pay for search engines in the current era.
- TisButMe 3y ago
  I work at Kagi. I think this is partly a function of who our early user base was, and the tons of feedback they gave which helped improve our search. Because we don't keep the data, we can't do a lot of the ML-powered search improvements that eg. Google could over all search domains. The good news is as the community expand, so will the feedback, and we'll be able to improve overall. The even better (and quite surprising) news is that we could be better than eg. Google on any topic at all, which tells me that the ML magic is not actually magic, and we will be able to outperform them in other domains as the community grows, the feedback increases, and our code becomes better.
ketzo 3y ago
So, one meta-layer of discussion up: do we think the recent surge of Kagi discussion on HN is indicative of a real wave? Or is “picking a different search engine” gonna be something only 1% of users ever do again? I honestly think that even if Kagi does remain pretty niche (<1% of internet searches, for a ballpark), that’s great if it can really serve that niche (so far… mostly HN-user-types, I would bet). But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. So godspeed Kagi, I guess.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  > But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. So godspeed Kagi, I guess. This is a weird take. Most businesses in the world have < 1000 active customers, and most profitable businesses fit in there too. Too many people seem to be trying to be the next Zuckerberg. A profitable, sustainable business is a lot more appealing to most.
- rexf 3y ago
  the discussion feels manufactured to me, but I can see how supposedly privacy first alternatives appeal to the HN crowd
- adam_arthur 3y ago
  Kagi does post their subscriber stats publicly. Whether it's a wave or not is up to interpretation: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats Personally I'm optimistic that they'll actually grow fairly substantially from here. The search experience is far better than Google, especially for power users. Main weakness is location based searches and quick answers being time lagged or lacking detail IMO. It seems to me only a matter of time until they close any gaps though.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. I don't think that seems hard at all, really. Companies do it all the time. What it makes hard is becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) everyone's goal.
Lazare 3y ago
Just chiming in here. My experience is: * Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant. * DDG solves a lot of privacy issues, but the search quality is strictly worse than Google. I know people who use it preferentially, and I respect that, but personally Google search is already so bad than opting for something even worse is hard for me to accept. And I think almost every DDG user is familiar with having to fall back to Google to get a result. * Kagi solves the privacy issues and the search quality is excellent - certainly better than Google is today, and subjectively, feels as good at least as good as Google was at its heyday. And notably I have never needed to fall back to Google; it's just a strict upgrade. I absolutely feel it's worth the cost. I can't really predict if it will stay good; some of the decline in Google is no doubt just because they're the most popular SEO target, so it's possible if Kagi becomes wildly popular it'll be a victim of it's own success. And of course, Kagi's goals and principles may change with time, etc. But as of today, if you think you might get some value from really good search, and Kagi isn't wildly out of your price range, give it a shot.
- juunpp 3y ago
  Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.
  - buzer 3y ago
    They at least claim that they don't save the search history. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
gxs 3y ago
I’m so desperate for an alternative to google that a post like this, combined with what I’ve heard about kagi in the past is enough to make me give it an honest try. I’ve grown such a disdain for google, far cry from when I stood in the long lines to buy the first android phone. I’m starting to feel the same way about Apple, in fact, I think if it weren’t for messages I’d actually be willing to try something else.
rogeliodh 3y ago
They should implement regional pricing. UD$10/month is too much in a lot of countries.
- paradox460 3y ago
  Costs the same for them regardless of where you're searching from, and they have no other revenue sources other than user payments.
- dylanowen 3y ago
  Right now I believe the cost is directly related to what it costs to run the number of queries offered in each plan. Charging less would have them running at a loss.
Semaphor 3y ago
> For example, setting Kagi as your default desktop search for Chromium, Firefox, or Safari browsers requires a browser extension and post-installation settings changes. Can’t speak for the mac-only browser, but for the two general browsers, it’s only a post-installation setting, the extension is if you don’t want to change the setting manually (including the private browsing session URL setting) and get some extra features.
necovek 3y ago
I've switched over to Kagi as it was announced myself. However lately, I've found that it started sucking a lot more when it comes to localised search. I am actually not seeing the value and quality I've seen early on, and will likely stop paying for it as I increasingly do have to fall back to Google.
- mastercheif 3y ago
  I’ve also seen Kagi’s result quality start to decline in the last few months, and I now automatically bang to Google for anything local. My unsourced theory is that they’ve optimized getting their search costs down, at the expense of some edge cases that don’t show up in their KPIs. I’m still a satisfied customer, the product makes me two Starbucks coffees a month happier than I would be still using Google for everything.
  - TisButMe 3y ago
    I work at Kagi. We don't have KPIs that track search quality in that way (we don't have any frontend tracking at all, so we can't know if you click any of the results), and we haven't touched much the sources of data we're using over the last few months. We've also had conflicting reports about this problem, so I'm wondering if it's not variable quality over time and place of our upstreams that's a problem. That said, we're aware that it's currently something we have to improve, "!g best cafe" is not where we want to be. We're working on it, but if you have specific examples/suggestions, please do submit them to kagifeedback.org so we can track them.
    - mastercheif 3y ago
      Appreciate the response and insight. Rooting for you guys, I’ll be sure to submit feedback in the future.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
What I love about Kagi is that I never find myself needing Google. Years ago when I tried out DDG, I found myself appending !g to every query, and I thought that Google Search would always have a place in my life, but Kagi results are _so_ good. So, once YouTube has a viable replacement I might be able to delete my Google account.
- btzs 3y ago
  Not ideal but I use Invidious and redirect any Youtube search results to my Invidious instance. Go to Kagi settings -> advanced --> Redirects and add https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v=(.*)|https://yt.oelrichsgarcia.de/watch\?v=$1 I use my own Invidious instance. yt.oelrichsgarcia.de is from https://docs.invidious.io/instances/#list-of-public-invidious-instances-sorted-from-oldest-to-newest https://docs.invidious.io/instances/#list-of-public-invidiou...
  - Malp 3y ago
    Both are written in Crystal, interestingly enough
Ephil012 3y ago
With all these comments about how Kagi is so much better than Google, I feel like I am living in a alternate world. My experience has been the exact opposite. I've been having to use !g so often on Kagi I turned it off as my default search engine. The thing is I really want to love Kagi, but can't. It just seems inferior in terms of parsing my search queries and returning relevant results. Let me give an example. On Kagi, I searched up "Overcoming addiction to Reddit". On Kagi, most of the top results are actually just Reddit posts about drug addiction / addiction in general and not Reddit addiction [1]. If you scroll down, the is a result about internet addiction, but that isn't what I asked for either. Only once you get to the very bottom do you actually get links about Reddit addiction itself. Even then, there aren't that many. If you do the same query on Google, I get much more results that are actually about Reddit addiction [2]. On top of that, the relevant results are way closer to the top than on Kagi. It even includes high quality links like a Hacker News post on Reddit addiction. I believe Kagi included the same link, but it was hidden all the way on the third page as opposed to being somewhat near the top on Google. Don't get me wrong, Google's results aren't perfect and it has a lot of irrelevant stuff show up in my query about Reddit addiction. But it's still better than Kagi. My theory is that Kagi just saw the words "overcoming addiction" and "Reddit" and assumed I wanted to look for links about addiction in general on Reddit. Basically it's almost like it did "overcoming addiction site:reddit.com" for the top results. Albeit, after the top results it does show links from other sources. Meanwhile, it seems Google did a better job at parsing the query and realizing I was looking up a specific type of addiction, a Reddit addiction. Kagi did not do this. My next problem with Kagi is just the lack of results in general. It seems Kagi likes to return a limited number of results per search. It seems it usually gives 20-30 results and sometimes gives more (~70 results) if you give it a very generic query. The problem with this is it makes Kagi terrible for research. In daily life, I never even read past the first few pages on Google. But when researching a niche topic for a paper, you sometimes need to go way past the first page to find what you're looking for. This might be because when doing research on something vague or niche it's hard to get accurate matches on the first page of search. As a result, having a large number of search result pages in general is useful for when this happens. But Kagi simply doesn't do this. It's limit on how many results it returns just kills the ability for you to actually go more in-depth without issuing a modified search query. I seriously doubt Kagi's index is literally so small it can only return around 70 something results at max, so I just have to think this is some self-imposed limitation which ultimately harms the search quality. Another problem I have with Kagi are lenses. Lenses get hyped up by them, but in practice I found them utterly terrible. I searched up Lo Mein without lenses on and my first results were some pretty high quality recipes. I then turned on the recipe lens and the quality noticeably decreased. Instead of returning Lo Mein recipes from actual recipe sites, it instead returns a Reddit post that links to a gif of someone making Lo Mein. Issue is that gif is actually on gfycat which is shut down. So the top result is useless. The rest of the results aren't even Lo Mein recipes, but instead chicken recipes for instance. So in the process of trying to use lenses to increase my search quality, it actually made it worse. Also, a tiny nit is that Kagi isn't as good at getting quick answers. If I look up a question on Google, it will usually display some quick summary at the top with the answer to the question. Kagi has quick answer too, but you have to manually click on it to get Kagi to generate the quick answer. I get they're a startup trying to save money, but this is just another reason for me to use Google over Kagi. As a whole, I haven't found Kagi to be useful at all like many commenters claim it is. I really wanted Kagi to work out as again I love the idea of Kagi. But ultimately, I can't justify using it over Google because the quality has just been so much worse in my experience. Ultimately, I am paying money for Kagi, yet I am getting a lower quality product than Google which is free. At that point, it doesn't make sense for me to continue with Kagi. 1. https://kagi.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit https://kagi.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit https://www.google.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+redd... (Google may show different results to you because Google might be customizing results based on past searches)
catgirlinspace 3y ago
Have been using Kagi for around a month and a half now and have been loving it. The results do feel better compared to Bing, but hard to describe how exactly, they just do.
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? Ask HN: How to Pronounce Kagi? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616169 - Sept 2023 (12 comments) Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905 - Sept 2023 (944 comments) Kagi search is 6 times faster than Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37588686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37588686 - Sept 2023 (5 comments) Kagi Small Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281 - Sept 2023 (185 comments) Ask HN: Is paid search-engine model like Kagi viable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374900 - Sept 2023 (22 comments) Kagi Search Stats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315961 - Aug 2023 (55 comments) Kagi Number of Users and Searches Stats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313141 - Aug 2023 (6 comments) Ask HN: How can Kagi be so fast and customizable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37065082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37065082 - Aug 2023 (15 comments) Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 - Aug 2023 (485 comments) Kagi: Words You Cannot Use: 'Constitutional AI', 'Anthropic', 'Anthropic, PBC' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741153 - July 2023 (51 comments) Kagi raises $670k - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 - June 2023 (359 comments) Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040346 - May 2023 (77 comments) Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35809082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35809082 - May 2023 (163 comments) Important Clarifications and Apology Regarding Kagis' Pricing Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35149788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35149788 - March 2023 (10 comments) Kagi – Paid Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179949 - Dec 2022 (166 comments) The Age of PageRank Is Over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 - Nov 2022 (373 comments) Kagi/Orion status update: First three months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 - Sept 2022 (191 comments) Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments) Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments) --- (Reposts are fine after a year or so, and links to past threads are just to satisfy curious readers)
dotnet00 3y ago
I'm on the Kagi trial, so far it's the only search engine I've used where I haven't felt the need to fallback to Google. I'll be upgrading to the unlimited tier as soon as I get through the trial.
mantra2 3y ago
Kagi seems cool to me and I appreciate what they’re doing but I’ve been using DDG for years now and find myself falling back to Google less and less. It has improved quite a bit for my personal use and I can’t imagine spending $100/year+ for search. I’d be game if it was a little less.
bravetraveler 3y ago
I'd be more inclined to sign up if there were AI-free [but still unlimited] plans. I'm willing to pay to a degree... but honestly, I'm not that compelled by AI/LLMs and get heartburn from utility billing.
solarkraft 3y ago
Piling onto the Kagi experience reports: I used it when it was free and while it was fine, I didn't feel enough of a difference to DuckDuckGo/Google for it to be worth it to switch permanently.
MiddleEndian 3y ago
This reminded me about my own free Kagi account. Searched for `emperor bed` and the article on my personal site about building my own emperor bed appeared as the 4th entry vs somewhere around the tenth on Google. I'll give it a shot as my default search shortcut for awhile.
theshrike79 3y ago
Is Kagi really that good or is their Astroturfing game just next level? I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it - and we're still talking about a $10/month search engine. Something that has been historically free at all times.
- alphager 3y ago
  I was highly skeptical (and especially didn't like the nature of having a limited number of searches per month), but decided to try it for a few days. I'm blown away. They really are that good
- cyann 3y ago
  I'm a paying customer since June 2022, and I was wondering if I was the only one using its most powerful feature: domains personalizations. I guess not: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2 https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2 When you start searching a lot for professional reasons (e.g. rust the language vs rust the game), Kagi's value is a no-brainer.
- TisButMe 3y ago
  I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :) In fact, we even axed our referral bonus program a couple months back to ensure that no third party had anything to gain in promoting Kagi. Recently, that included saying "no" to an independent journalist who explicitly asked for referral bonus for their readers. All you see is organic.
  - upghost 3y ago
    Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!
wutwutwat 3y ago
Maybe my shit is all being MITM’d but Google, DDG, and Kagi all spit out the same useless results. Doesn’t matter what I search for, and I’m not searching for anything special, just everyday random things. Search has regressed to ask Jeeves days imo
- reportgunner 3y ago
  What are you searching for ?
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    Everyday random things. You’ll have to be my ISP, government, or browser if you want to collect specifics. Hit up Google they’ll sell it to you, just cut me a commission check will ya?
    - temp2022account 3y ago
      > Everyday random things If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere. I use Kagi where Bing used to be, for technical reference lookups. It's excellent at putting API docs front-and-center, which means I can alt-tab back to my text editor that much faster. What I love about Kagi is how little of my time and attention the tool requires. Also my own anecdata - the privacy concerns are a red herring, because the utility of knowing everything you've typed into your PC is diminished when ad surface area no longer exists. I like that Kagi has a privacy focus, but them losing it would not cause me to stop paying for the service as long as the quality was the same or better.
      - wutwutwat 3y ago
        > If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere Y'all have a hard on for knowing specifically what I'm searching for, for some reason, don't ya? I've been a software engineer for over a decade. I'm self taught. I've worked at some of the largest websites in the world. I owe my entire career to my ability to search for shit I don't know and finding results that literally teach me how to program. In a way, I owe my entire career to Google's search results that used to be top notch. The point is, I know how search used to be, and I know now that it sucks complete ass for me. I know how to search for the proper keywords because I wouldn't have my career without it so you should trust me when I say it's not user error, it's the search results, and stop asking for specific search terms when I'm guaranteeing you 100% the issue is not me. If I sucked at searching I wouldn't be on this site typing this message right now, I'd still be working in a factory.
renegat0x0 3y ago
There are several ways to measure search results. Someone should make analysis of Google results. I searched "Elon Musk" in kagi and Google. I see the results with more text on Kagi. It is more dense. Google shows me more of blank space. The second thing is domain variety. "Elon Musk" on google shows twice wikipedia, twice CNBC, twice new york times, twice guardian. Mainstream domains are shown several times, with similar titles. Kagi joins groups that nicely. I searched for "diablo 2 mods". I was expecting hobby pages, fan pages, with forums, mods, wallpapers, maps. It is all gone. Nobody hosts sites like that? The ones there were - are they gone? Has it all split into reddit, nexusmods, facebook groups? Can Google search facebook and reddit now easily? Why such groups are not showed on results, only r/diablo? I feel that whenever I search something media outlets appear first. Even when searching for mods ign shows with some articles. Is google a good tool for discovery, or just for searching a precise information like "how to solve this x compilation error"? Has Internet become a dull place because people are consoomers now, not creators? Or people are just focused on creating food images on an Instagram? There is no sense of wonder with results. Maybe my expectations are too high?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Kagi has a lower resolution picture of the world simply because they don't have as many servers as Google.
2-718-281-828 3y ago
how good is kagi compared to google for languages other than english? german, russian, chinese etc does kagi also censor illegal content or content residing in a gray zone? like porn, streaming movies, torrenting, racism etc does kagi censor so called fake news and dangerous misinformation with regard to corona for example?
guillemsola 3y ago
This example on python exceptions on their sample queries... The second result is a very opinionated result about exceptions considered and anti pattern https://sobolevn.me/2019/02/python-exceptions-considered-an-antipattern https://sobolevn.me/2019/02/python-exceptions-considered-an-... Maybe this was tweaked to be catchy for developers but I don't think is the right thing to see as the second entry. If you search for exceptions you want to learn how they work, that is what 99% of the people would need. An entry like this is dangerous for instance if you are just someone trying to learn about them. IMO this is a red flag about the quality for a search engine. Maybe they are just targeting seasoned tech people who would see this content interesting. But definitely not a search engine for the masses.
gwbas1c 3y ago
IMO: Seems expensive, unless the subscription also came with some other services, like email and storage.
andreagrandi 3y ago
I use Kagi (along with DuckDuckGo) and I really appreciate the quality of their search results, but if you care about privacy do not use their Safari extension. Due to a Safari limitation, all the queries are leaked to the previously selected default search engine https://kagifeedback.org/d/1575-ios-extension-leaking-search-queries https://kagifeedback.org/d/1575-ios-extension-leaking-search... In addition to this, since all the search attempts are being redirected to Kagi, you can’t use any other search engine unless you deactivate the extension and this prevents you from trying the same query on different engines. P.S: as far as I understand, they don’t have much freedom with the implementation and everything would be much easier if Safari allowed to customise the search engines, but I’m not sure this limitation is being properly communicated to the users (unless I missed some warning during extension installation)

222 points by miked85 3y ago

I would first try SearXNG[0]. 0. https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng

Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. The simple truth is that unless they make themselves explicitly liable to users if they are ever caught doing this, that the irresistable urge to monetize user data will tempt even the most well-meaning firm into sin. The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. IANAL but I believe this can be done if ownership agrees to voluntarily enter into something like a fiduciary arrangement with their users. This means writing a EULA that does not minimize the firm's risk, but instead increases it in specific, meaningful ways. Increasing client risk is something attorneys are absolutely allergic to, and will argue up and down about why the client shouldn't do it. I would say that, if the customers know and care about such a step, it could be a valuable PR and marketing move that demonstrates REAL integrity. As it is, we only believe that "users paying for services" will protect against data exfiltration because of very naive reasoning, or, perhaps more accurately, praying.

chomp5977 3y ago
Yea I also worry about this. At this moment Kagi feels like the best I can do for search. Unfortunately these days I won't be surprised to hear of fuckery from them. It's happened too many times.
- fallat 3y ago
  It's happened too many times in general by other companies, or Kagi? All things said, I think Kagi really as the incentives aligned. I'm not a fan of Kagi but I believe the "business is sound" :) Sure, I also believe there's no need for such a business (an extension or whatever would suffice), but that doesn't really matter here nor there.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. Who would they sell the data to? Google? Ohhhh noooooo... More seriously, as long as it's paired with a "But their search results are still better than Google's trashfire", I'm not sure it would matter. Their tagline is "Fast, accurate, and ad-free", not "Fast, accurate, ad-free, and private."
- vunderba 3y ago
  Maybe try reading more than one sentence. "We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy." literally on the main page. Smh.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    That's great but really misses the point. People sign up for Kagi because they want better search results. Any privacy issues are largely peripheral.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      That's me. I do love that Kagi is probably much more private than other engines, but the real draw for me was that it's a search engine that actually works well. Bottom line, that's what I'm paying for. If Kagi became a bad actor with my data, that would just make them like the majority of other search engines, so big picture, I'd not be any worse off. And I'd still have access to a search engine that lets me find what I'm looking for without a lot of struggle.
chefandy 3y ago
> The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. Since the userbase consists largely of people who pay them to not act like google, at least for now, it likely would be an existential threat to the firm. They couldn't get much worse in that regard than big free services, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the interim, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and paying out of pocket for a really good service. The results are consistently more useful than Google's and the tooling is much much better. So if they are invasively tracking me and selling my data, you can definitely say "i told you so" but maybe we should call off the firing squad until the verdict has been reached. We currently don't have a trial, charges, a crime, evidence, or even empirically-informed suspicion.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  Well the other risk you have trusting all your personal data to some organization is the longevity of said organization. Your data may be protected as long as their business model aligns with that but it's never guaranteed to stay that way. One of the best historic examples is MySpace. MySpace started out fine and slowly as it declined and eventually dwindled to nothing, it started selling off massive amounts of previous user data. With no future or user base to speak of, there was a lot more potential benefit selling the data than the cost of protecting/holding it.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    At their worst, they're not any worse than my alternatives. DDG is a modicum better than Google for privacy, but using it makes me want to punch the internet in the face.
wolverine876 3y ago
What is their privacy policy?
- juunpp 3y ago
  It doesn't matter.
TisButMe 3y ago
I work at Kagi. This is a very reasonable fear to have. We do actually not store the data, but of course you'd need to take me at my word for this. That said, if we did lie or change that, we'd be in immediate breach of our privacy policy (https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy), and as a result be a very easy target for a lawsuit. Given that we're intentionally not VC backed, between the horrible press this would be and the actual costs of fighting such a lawsuit, I expect not much would be left of Kagi afterwards. We are liable to users, in a pretty existential way.
- simpaticoder 3y ago
  Having read your privacy agreement, I don't see where the threat is existential if you are in breach. I think that the knowledge of engineers of the judicial system, both criminal and civil, is very naive. You can sue anyone over anything at any time - you don't need valid grounds. It also doesn't mean that if you win it matters. Your privacy policy has lots of feel-good language that actually doesn't mean anything - along the lines of the classic "We value your privacy" statement that firms often make. When you analyze it, you find it means nothing. There are no actionable clauses. For example, if you are in breach of "Anonymous logs are aggregated with GCP's logging tools, retained for 30 days." what are the enumerated damages? A counter-party would have to prove show BOTH that you are in breach AND then real damages , which is difficult in this case, and entirely misses the point. E.g. if you sell 1M user data records for $.001 each, and a user has on average 10 records on them, the real damages are $.01, but your firm made $100k on the transaction. I don't see a limit to class action (or forced arbitration) so that's good; but good luck building out that class - especially since you'll resist sharing user data with the class action plaintiff, using the same privacy policy as a shield! (This is the other trick of privacy agreements, apart from not actually saying anything: the stuff that is measurable is unenforceable). It's time that the public stop seeing moonbeams and rainbows in these matters. Do you think that a lender will be satisfied with a debtor statement "I value paying back my debts, and will never be late!"? If not, then why are we mollified by similar statements by software firms made to us? What is measurable has no teeth; what has teeth is not measurable. It's a very dirty trick.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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tentacleuno 3y ago

I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.

NeckBeardPrince 3y ago
You're paying Kagi for privacy.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.
  - dropofwill 3y ago
    They’ve been pretty open about the pricing strategy on the blog. Earlier this year they said they were losing money on most accounts at $10/month. They’ve since changed the pricing tiers a few times, but it sounds like they’re in a better place now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What is their privacy policy?
  - TisButMe 3y ago
    https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy - it's not written in legalese.
toasteros 3y ago

darkteflon 3y ago

This is such an easy monthly sub for me. Given the importance of search to our daily lives and work, having your search engine provider re-rank results to optimise their own ad revenue at the cost of your own time and attention is insane. In retrospect.

iansinnott 3y ago

Recently I discovered there's no more "Non-commercial" lens. I'm still a happy Kagi user but I found that lens helpful for avoiding over-SEOd sites filled with affiliate links and was disappointed to see it gone.

inrodos 3y ago
I believe this was superseded by the "Small Web" lens.
burkaman 3y ago
They just changed the name to Small Web.

jdoss 3y ago

I switched to Kagi earlier this year and I have found its search to be vastly better than Google's in almost every case. The only time I finding myself use Google over Kagi is for searching for local business numbers or Google Maps. If you are on the fence on paying for a search engine give it a shot for a month and you might be as surprised as to how good Kagi is as I was.

titaniumtown 3y ago

Honestly, I rather use Bing and get paid for searching. As a student with no income, I rather use something free.

tentacleuno 3y ago
As someone who also brought up the pricing situation[0], I also currently make use of a free search engine (DuckDuckGo). In these circumstances, it seems that socioeconomic disadvantage and privacy do not go hand-in-hand. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852478
Supermancho 3y ago
A superior solution that's 2/mo or 20/yr would be something I would go for, given my income. I would not expect anyone I know to go for a search engine that charges 10/mo.

justusthane 3y ago

konaraddi 3y ago
Could you elaborate?
- Semaphor 3y ago
  See the other chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852567
- justusthane 3y ago
  Short term value isn’t the only thing that matters. As CEO, you could say, “Increasing ad-revenue at the expense of everything else will increase profits, but I believe it would be bad for the long term health of the company.” The shareholders might not like it, and the board might fire you, but if you’ve acted in good faith you haven’t violated fiduciary responsibility.

archildress 3y ago

I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."

NetOpWibby 3y ago
Narrator: They won't. I upgraded my subscription a few weeks ago because I blew past the first tier's limits. Kagi kinda fills the Neeva-sized hole in my heart.
- sxg 3y ago
  Kagi doesn't need to win, and they know that. Kagi just has to focus on serving a tiny percentage of Google power users in order to be profitable and induce Google search to compete.
  - NetOpWibby 3y ago
    I wish Neeva knew that too but ah well. I feel like a lot of people on here share the mindset that unless Google can be demolished, there’s no point in being a competitor…which is, a dumb take IMHO.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Common mentality even outside of tech. Guess those people forgot the days of indie labels or mom and pop shop. Can't really blame them given that being the intent for decsdes. For Google, it very roughly makes about $25 per year per user in 2019. But it has an estimated 4 billion users. If you can take even 1% of 1% of these users, thats still 400k users. So you're still bringing on $10m a year if you keep the same price. Now of course Kagi is nowhere near that 400k figure, but also charges more. So you see how it can add up.
  - manonthewall 3y ago

chx 3y ago

I switched on Oct 3. I was beginning to see way too much of these weird domain name mirrors of things in Google Search instead of the real things and I was reading Doctorow on Google's enshittification and I said "OK, enough of this". I guess it's time to move Google Drive and Gmail as well. The latter is probably fastmail but where to put the Google Drive files? It's like 2TB.

btzs 3y ago
I have moved my files to a managed Nextcloud instance. Important to me is Linux support and Nextcoud works better for me than the alternatives.
- chx 3y ago
  Do you have suggestions for ~2TB at a sane price? For example, https://www.hosting.de/nextcloud/managed-nextcloud/ https://www.hosting.de/nextcloud/managed-nextcloud/ you can see 2TB costs 2.5x of a 1TB plan.
  - comment0r 3y ago
    https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-share

Yeri 3y ago

Agreed -- been using Kagi since April 2022, and never looked back. Tried to convert my wife to use it, but she's too used to Google (and the integration with Maps, local recommendations for cafés and restaurants, etc) that don't work as well in Kagi (yet). But for day to day, proper searching, it's 100% better. And I can't stress enough how liberating it is to see the top results of the search are actually most likely the most relevant results (and not "they paid more"). Yesterday I had to set up a clean Windows laptop, and had to use Edge to install Chrome (or Firefox) and 1password: it's just pure lying to users: https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/215/697/509/164/845/original/f79bef25d5c48e2e.jpeg https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/21... (that top banner with download 1password doesn't actually do anything, the next results, made to look like a real result with the sublinks etc is all lastpass cheating and paying to be in front of 1psw).

malablaster 3y ago

I almost bought Kagi. Initially I wanted Universal Summarizer. Then I realized I could install Edge browser (which is essentially Google-free Chrome) and the integrated, free GPT-4 would summarize for me. And I still haven’t had an “ah ha” moment comparing Kagi’s search results. I’m happy to keep trying for free next month, or whenever my free trial searches reset, until I’m sold on the value.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
A google-free chrome … from Microsoft. Doesn’t sound so attractive to me.

northerdome 3y ago

This was me with Neeva but they sold out. I fully expect Kagi to do the same unfortunately.

deleriousmuffin 3y ago
The problem was that Neeva sucked. I quit using it after it took me to an actual scam website to buy some product I wanted. What I learned from that was that aligned business model != good product.

adamsb6 3y ago

> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter. This is a widely held misconception, but there's no legal requirement to maximize profits. They're required to act in the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, but this is very broad and includes more than just wringing out every source of profit. I'm a recent Kagi convert, and I'd say that Google's search product declining in usefulness is eventually going to impact its profitability.

bombcar 3y ago
Companies don't maximize shareholder value, no matter how much they talk about it. Companies are run by and for the managers of said company, and what gets them promoted. Sometimes that aligns with what the shareholders might want, often it does not.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  For c-suite their comp is mostly awarded by the board which is controlled by largest shareholders. So therefore they are highly incentivized to make them happy which is usually achieved by stonk going up and to the right. For middle managers it’s more complex and is usually divorced from the stock price (and often reality too)
  - daemoens 3y ago
    Can a stock go to the left? If they figured out time-travel, I'm sure the board would be even happier. /s
    - Infernal 3y ago
      Hah, I’m going to start using “down and to the left” the way people use “up and to the right” now
      - 3y ago

tynan 3y ago

Just to chime in and add another datapoint, I switched to Kagi and expected that I'd eventually go back to Google (like I had when I switched to DDG), but the results are just as good or better and I'm happy to pay to not have ads or tracking.

upghost 3y ago

I should probably add in that kagi has some secret modes. If you precede the search query with `!expert` you get an LLM search response. If you precede it with `!code` you get a GPT-4-ish tuned response. It’s… really good. And since you can do it from a browser bar if you make it your default browser, I find myself reaching for !expert at least 50% as often as ChatGPT these days. Also, it’s extremely good with citations. The !expert mode seems pretty darn up to date, no knowledge cutoff issues. I have no idea if it is search, doing a vector lookup, or they just bake the model every night. Totally magical. Also, I’m following the LLM stuff pretty closely these days — their universal summarized and their search LLM — no one else is doing that right now. It’s genuinely amazing.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
I’ve been using Quick Answer quite a bit. The fact that it cites its sources is absolutely fantastic.
redhale 3y ago
Neither !expert nor !code prefixes work for me.
- alphager 3y ago
  Only available in the ultimate plan.
_gllen 3y ago
Sounded cool, but seems like it’s (!expert) a closed beta. I just get redirected to expert.nl, maybe requires the ultimate plan? The docs are pretty unclear.
paradox460 3y ago
You can also modify the bangs to your liking. I never use podcasts, and so having !p bound to podcast search was useless to me. Opened up the lenses config, and set the programming lens to !p.
astrostl 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mortify 3y ago

Something like Kagi is going to have to make its case strongly before making $120/year sound appealing. Google's only advantage over other search engines is its ability to search forums more deeply. The build-in feature of diving into reddit, stack overflow, etc is often useful. After a few test searches, Kagi is adept at this as well. Other free search alternatives that I've been happy with include: Ecosia, Quant, or even startpage.

ncallaway 3y ago
They also have a $5/month plan

sampli 3y ago

Kagi is pretty cool, but I wish it had some more live features like Google has. (e.g seeing game scores in a nice format update in real time)

lapcat 3y ago

I really wanted to like Kagi, and admittedly my experimentation did not last long, but contrary to the experience of other commenters, I found Kagi search results to be significantly worse than Google. Maybe it was just the specific subjects I was searching. The final straw for me was when I searched for air quality in my city, and the Kagi results were a total joke, mostly irrelevant. I would have been happy to pay if the results were good, but unfortunately I was disappointed by them.

smcleod 3y ago
Have you got an example?
user3939382 3y ago
Hm.. I just tried that search for my town and the first result was correct. Wonder what happened.
- lapcat 3y ago
  It's not necessarily about the top result. It's about the top 20-30 results.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I only looked at the first 15 or so for my town and they were almost all relevant. Maybe city name dependent?
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
I will say in earlier tests I found location-specific queries sort of lacking on Kagi, but I feel like they've improved it. You absolutely do have to be explicit about your location though, because it isn't run by the company tracking your phone.
miked85 3y ago
I've found Kagi results to be significantly better than Google in general, however I'm sure certain searches might better on Google.

lampiaio 3y ago

Oh, I didn't know it was time for HN's biweekly Kagi post. Those are invaluable, I use them as a personal reminder for me to water my cactus.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
I mean, when people are writing unpaid ads for a service just because it's so much better... maybe you should try it. (Fastmail too, the other "pay for quality" product often brought up here.)
- manonthewall 3y ago
  yeah I pay a few bucks a month for protonmail and have never regretted it.
MiddleEndian 3y ago
As far as promoting stuff and watering stuff infrequently goes, I use an app on my phone called "Planta" to remind me to water my cactus (and other plants). It's one of the few apps whose notifications I don't disable.

Urgo 3y ago

Been using Duck Duck Go for maybe three or so years now? It's very rare I fallback to google other then for google maps (!gm). I do make heavy use of ChatGPT and Bard though. I wish there was more example results then just "best headphones", "steve jobs", and "python exceptions". I'm interested, but not interested enough to sign up. Maybe its just me, but all the marketing and comments are why to switch away from google search.. which I already did. There is a docs page[1] on Kagi vs. DuckDuckGo but it doesn't really have any compelling reason to use Kagi from that. I'd love to see concrete examples of how Kagi has better results then DDG. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-duckduckgo.html

smcleod 3y ago
I’ve found Kagis search results far better than DDG, not even in the same ballpark.
- Urgo 3y ago
  If you could provide screen shots or a writeup of HOW they are better that would be helpful. Kogi fans just seems to say its better without really any examples. Not saying its not better, but no one has really shown how it is better.
  - dankwizard 3y ago
    I mean its a search engine what are you expecting? More often than not, their search results are returning useable links. People aren't going to write an essay as to the nuances.
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    The article addresses a huge aspect: It's customizable. I frequently know I'm looking for say, a learn.microsoft.com page. So if I boost that domain, and one of the results is on that site, it moves towards the top of the page. My results are explicitly better for me because I am able to tell the search engine what I want to see.

jonjojojon 3y ago

I think Kagi search quality has a coding bias. Searches related to physics,hardware,math are basically identical to google or noticeably worse. My coding related searches are usually much better with much less SEO spam than google. This might be a function of just how much larger the market for coding related content is online.

jostyee 3y ago
I guess this is their growth strategy, because programmers are the people most likely to pay for search engines in the current era.
TisButMe 3y ago
I work at Kagi. I think this is partly a function of who our early user base was, and the tons of feedback they gave which helped improve our search. Because we don't keep the data, we can't do a lot of the ML-powered search improvements that eg. Google could over all search domains. The good news is as the community expand, so will the feedback, and we'll be able to improve overall. The even better (and quite surprising) news is that we could be better than eg. Google on any topic at all, which tells me that the ML magic is not actually magic, and we will be able to outperform them in other domains as the community grows, the feedback increases, and our code becomes better.

ketzo 3y ago

So, one meta-layer of discussion up: do we think the recent surge of Kagi discussion on HN is indicative of a real wave? Or is “picking a different search engine” gonna be something only 1% of users ever do again? I honestly think that even if Kagi does remain pretty niche (<1% of internet searches, for a ballpark), that’s great if it can really serve that niche (so far… mostly HN-user-types, I would bet). But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. So godspeed Kagi, I guess.

averageRoyalty 3y ago
> But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. So godspeed Kagi, I guess. This is a weird take. Most businesses in the world have < 1000 active customers, and most profitable businesses fit in there too. Too many people seem to be trying to be the next Zuckerberg. A profitable, sustainable business is a lot more appealing to most.
rexf 3y ago
the discussion feels manufactured to me, but I can see how supposedly privacy first alternatives appeal to the HN crowd
adam_arthur 3y ago
Kagi does post their subscriber stats publicly. Whether it's a wave or not is up to interpretation: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats Personally I'm optimistic that they'll actually grow fairly substantially from here. The search experience is far better than Google, especially for power users. Main weakness is location based searches and quick answers being time lagged or lacking detail IMO. It seems to me only a matter of time until they close any gaps though.
JohnFen 3y ago
> But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. I don't think that seems hard at all, really. Companies do it all the time. What it makes hard is becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) everyone's goal.

Lazare 3y ago

Just chiming in here. My experience is: * Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant. * DDG solves a lot of privacy issues, but the search quality is strictly worse than Google. I know people who use it preferentially, and I respect that, but personally Google search is already so bad than opting for something even worse is hard for me to accept. And I think almost every DDG user is familiar with having to fall back to Google to get a result. * Kagi solves the privacy issues and the search quality is excellent - certainly better than Google is today, and subjectively, feels as good at least as good as Google was at its heyday. And notably I have never needed to fall back to Google; it's just a strict upgrade. I absolutely feel it's worth the cost. I can't really predict if it will stay good; some of the decline in Google is no doubt just because they're the most popular SEO target, so it's possible if Kagi becomes wildly popular it'll be a victim of it's own success. And of course, Kagi's goals and principles may change with time, etc. But as of today, if you think you might get some value from really good search, and Kagi isn't wildly out of your price range, give it a shot.

juunpp 3y ago
Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.
- buzer 3y ago
  They at least claim that they don't save the search history. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html

gxs 3y ago

I’m so desperate for an alternative to google that a post like this, combined with what I’ve heard about kagi in the past is enough to make me give it an honest try. I’ve grown such a disdain for google, far cry from when I stood in the long lines to buy the first android phone. I’m starting to feel the same way about Apple, in fact, I think if it weren’t for messages I’d actually be willing to try something else.

rogeliodh 3y ago

They should implement regional pricing. UD$10/month is too much in a lot of countries.

paradox460 3y ago
Costs the same for them regardless of where you're searching from, and they have no other revenue sources other than user payments.
dylanowen 3y ago
Right now I believe the cost is directly related to what it costs to run the number of queries offered in each plan. Charging less would have them running at a loss.

Semaphor 3y ago

> For example, setting Kagi as your default desktop search for Chromium, Firefox, or Safari browsers requires a browser extension and post-installation settings changes. Can’t speak for the mac-only browser, but for the two general browsers, it’s only a post-installation setting, the extension is if you don’t want to change the setting manually (including the private browsing session URL setting) and get some extra features.

necovek 3y ago

I've switched over to Kagi as it was announced myself. However lately, I've found that it started sucking a lot more when it comes to localised search. I am actually not seeing the value and quality I've seen early on, and will likely stop paying for it as I increasingly do have to fall back to Google.

mastercheif 3y ago
I’ve also seen Kagi’s result quality start to decline in the last few months, and I now automatically bang to Google for anything local. My unsourced theory is that they’ve optimized getting their search costs down, at the expense of some edge cases that don’t show up in their KPIs. I’m still a satisfied customer, the product makes me two Starbucks coffees a month happier than I would be still using Google for everything.
- TisButMe 3y ago
  I work at Kagi. We don't have KPIs that track search quality in that way (we don't have any frontend tracking at all, so we can't know if you click any of the results), and we haven't touched much the sources of data we're using over the last few months. We've also had conflicting reports about this problem, so I'm wondering if it's not variable quality over time and place of our upstreams that's a problem. That said, we're aware that it's currently something we have to improve, "!g best cafe" is not where we want to be. We're working on it, but if you have specific examples/suggestions, please do submit them to kagifeedback.org so we can track them.
  - mastercheif 3y ago
    Appreciate the response and insight. Rooting for you guys, I’ll be sure to submit feedback in the future.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

What I love about Kagi is that I never find myself needing Google. Years ago when I tried out DDG, I found myself appending !g to every query, and I thought that Google Search would always have a place in my life, but Kagi results are _so_ good. So, once YouTube has a viable replacement I might be able to delete my Google account.

btzs 3y ago
Not ideal but I use Invidious and redirect any Youtube search results to my Invidious instance. Go to Kagi settings -> advanced --> Redirects and add https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v=(.*)|https://yt.oelrichsgarcia.de/watch\?v=$1 I use my own Invidious instance. yt.oelrichsgarcia.de is from https://docs.invidious.io/instances/#list-of-public-invidious-instances-sorted-from-oldest-to-newest https://docs.invidious.io/instances/#list-of-public-invidiou...
- Malp 3y ago
  Both are written in Crystal, interestingly enough

Ephil012 3y ago

With all these comments about how Kagi is so much better than Google, I feel like I am living in a alternate world. My experience has been the exact opposite. I've been having to use !g so often on Kagi I turned it off as my default search engine. The thing is I really want to love Kagi, but can't. It just seems inferior in terms of parsing my search queries and returning relevant results. Let me give an example. On Kagi, I searched up "Overcoming addiction to Reddit". On Kagi, most of the top results are actually just Reddit posts about drug addiction / addiction in general and not Reddit addiction [1]. If you scroll down, the is a result about internet addiction, but that isn't what I asked for either. Only once you get to the very bottom do you actually get links about Reddit addiction itself. Even then, there aren't that many. If you do the same query on Google, I get much more results that are actually about Reddit addiction [2]. On top of that, the relevant results are way closer to the top than on Kagi. It even includes high quality links like a Hacker News post on Reddit addiction. I believe Kagi included the same link, but it was hidden all the way on the third page as opposed to being somewhat near the top on Google. Don't get me wrong, Google's results aren't perfect and it has a lot of irrelevant stuff show up in my query about Reddit addiction. But it's still better than Kagi. My theory is that Kagi just saw the words "overcoming addiction" and "Reddit" and assumed I wanted to look for links about addiction in general on Reddit. Basically it's almost like it did "overcoming addiction site:reddit.com" for the top results. Albeit, after the top results it does show links from other sources. Meanwhile, it seems Google did a better job at parsing the query and realizing I was looking up a specific type of addiction, a Reddit addiction. Kagi did not do this. My next problem with Kagi is just the lack of results in general. It seems Kagi likes to return a limited number of results per search. It seems it usually gives 20-30 results and sometimes gives more (~70 results) if you give it a very generic query. The problem with this is it makes Kagi terrible for research. In daily life, I never even read past the first few pages on Google. But when researching a niche topic for a paper, you sometimes need to go way past the first page to find what you're looking for. This might be because when doing research on something vague or niche it's hard to get accurate matches on the first page of search. As a result, having a large number of search result pages in general is useful for when this happens. But Kagi simply doesn't do this. It's limit on how many results it returns just kills the ability for you to actually go more in-depth without issuing a modified search query. I seriously doubt Kagi's index is literally so small it can only return around 70 something results at max, so I just have to think this is some self-imposed limitation which ultimately harms the search quality. Another problem I have with Kagi are lenses. Lenses get hyped up by them, but in practice I found them utterly terrible. I searched up Lo Mein without lenses on and my first results were some pretty high quality recipes. I then turned on the recipe lens and the quality noticeably decreased. Instead of returning Lo Mein recipes from actual recipe sites, it instead returns a Reddit post that links to a gif of someone making Lo Mein. Issue is that gif is actually on gfycat which is shut down. So the top result is useless. The rest of the results aren't even Lo Mein recipes, but instead chicken recipes for instance. So in the process of trying to use lenses to increase my search quality, it actually made it worse. Also, a tiny nit is that Kagi isn't as good at getting quick answers. If I look up a question on Google, it will usually display some quick summary at the top with the answer to the question. Kagi has quick answer too, but you have to manually click on it to get Kagi to generate the quick answer. I get they're a startup trying to save money, but this is just another reason for me to use Google over Kagi. As a whole, I haven't found Kagi to be useful at all like many commenters claim it is. I really wanted Kagi to work out as again I love the idea of Kagi. But ultimately, I can't justify using it over Google because the quality has just been so much worse in my experience. Ultimately, I am paying money for Kagi, yet I am getting a lower quality product than Google which is free. At that point, it doesn't make sense for me to continue with Kagi. 1. https://kagi.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit https://kagi.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit https://www.google.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+redd... (Google may show different results to you because Google might be customizing results based on past searches)

catgirlinspace 3y ago

Have been using Kagi for around a month and a half now and have been loving it. The results do feel better compared to Bing, but hard to describe how exactly, they just do.

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? Ask HN: How to Pronounce Kagi? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616169 - Sept 2023 (12 comments) Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905 - Sept 2023 (944 comments) Kagi search is 6 times faster than Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37588686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37588686 - Sept 2023 (5 comments) Kagi Small Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281 - Sept 2023 (185 comments) Ask HN: Is paid search-engine model like Kagi viable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374900 - Sept 2023 (22 comments) Kagi Search Stats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315961 - Aug 2023 (55 comments) Kagi Number of Users and Searches Stats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313141 - Aug 2023 (6 comments) Ask HN: How can Kagi be so fast and customizable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37065082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37065082 - Aug 2023 (15 comments) Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 - Aug 2023 (485 comments) Kagi: Words You Cannot Use: 'Constitutional AI', 'Anthropic', 'Anthropic, PBC' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741153 - July 2023 (51 comments) Kagi raises $670k - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 - June 2023 (359 comments) Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040346 - May 2023 (77 comments) Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35809082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35809082 - May 2023 (163 comments) Important Clarifications and Apology Regarding Kagis' Pricing Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35149788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35149788 - March 2023 (10 comments) Kagi – Paid Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179949 - Dec 2022 (166 comments) The Age of PageRank Is Over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 - Nov 2022 (373 comments) Kagi/Orion status update: First three months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 - Sept 2022 (191 comments) Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments) Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments) --- (Reposts are fine after a year or so, and links to past threads are just to satisfy curious readers)

dotnet00 3y ago

I'm on the Kagi trial, so far it's the only search engine I've used where I haven't felt the need to fallback to Google. I'll be upgrading to the unlimited tier as soon as I get through the trial.

mantra2 3y ago

Kagi seems cool to me and I appreciate what they’re doing but I’ve been using DDG for years now and find myself falling back to Google less and less. It has improved quite a bit for my personal use and I can’t imagine spending $100/year+ for search. I’d be game if it was a little less.

bravetraveler 3y ago

I'd be more inclined to sign up if there were AI-free [but still unlimited] plans. I'm willing to pay to a degree... but honestly, I'm not that compelled by AI/LLMs and get heartburn from utility billing.

solarkraft 3y ago

Piling onto the Kagi experience reports: I used it when it was free and while it was fine, I didn't feel enough of a difference to DuckDuckGo/Google for it to be worth it to switch permanently.

MiddleEndian 3y ago

This reminded me about my own free Kagi account. Searched for `emperor bed` and the article on my personal site about building my own emperor bed appeared as the 4th entry vs somewhere around the tenth on Google. I'll give it a shot as my default search shortcut for awhile.

theshrike79 3y ago

Is Kagi really that good or is their Astroturfing game just next level? I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it - and we're still talking about a $10/month search engine. Something that has been historically free at all times.

alphager 3y ago
I was highly skeptical (and especially didn't like the nature of having a limited number of searches per month), but decided to try it for a few days. I'm blown away. They really are that good
cyann 3y ago
I'm a paying customer since June 2022, and I was wondering if I was the only one using its most powerful feature: domains personalizations. I guess not: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2 https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2 When you start searching a lot for professional reasons (e.g. rust the language vs rust the game), Kagi's value is a no-brainer.
TisButMe 3y ago
I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :) In fact, we even axed our referral bonus program a couple months back to ensure that no third party had anything to gain in promoting Kagi. Recently, that included saying "no" to an independent journalist who explicitly asked for referral bonus for their readers. All you see is organic.
- upghost 3y ago
  Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!

wutwutwat 3y ago

Maybe my shit is all being MITM’d but Google, DDG, and Kagi all spit out the same useless results. Doesn’t matter what I search for, and I’m not searching for anything special, just everyday random things. Search has regressed to ask Jeeves days imo

reportgunner 3y ago
What are you searching for ?
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  Everyday random things. You’ll have to be my ISP, government, or browser if you want to collect specifics. Hit up Google they’ll sell it to you, just cut me a commission check will ya?
  - temp2022account 3y ago
    > Everyday random things If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere. I use Kagi where Bing used to be, for technical reference lookups. It's excellent at putting API docs front-and-center, which means I can alt-tab back to my text editor that much faster. What I love about Kagi is how little of my time and attention the tool requires. Also my own anecdata - the privacy concerns are a red herring, because the utility of knowing everything you've typed into your PC is diminished when ad surface area no longer exists. I like that Kagi has a privacy focus, but them losing it would not cause me to stop paying for the service as long as the quality was the same or better.
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      > If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere Y'all have a hard on for knowing specifically what I'm searching for, for some reason, don't ya? I've been a software engineer for over a decade. I'm self taught. I've worked at some of the largest websites in the world. I owe my entire career to my ability to search for shit I don't know and finding results that literally teach me how to program. In a way, I owe my entire career to Google's search results that used to be top notch. The point is, I know how search used to be, and I know now that it sucks complete ass for me. I know how to search for the proper keywords because I wouldn't have my career without it so you should trust me when I say it's not user error, it's the search results, and stop asking for specific search terms when I'm guaranteeing you 100% the issue is not me. If I sucked at searching I wouldn't be on this site typing this message right now, I'd still be working in a factory.

renegat0x0 3y ago

There are several ways to measure search results. Someone should make analysis of Google results. I searched "Elon Musk" in kagi and Google. I see the results with more text on Kagi. It is more dense. Google shows me more of blank space. The second thing is domain variety. "Elon Musk" on google shows twice wikipedia, twice CNBC, twice new york times, twice guardian. Mainstream domains are shown several times, with similar titles. Kagi joins groups that nicely. I searched for "diablo 2 mods". I was expecting hobby pages, fan pages, with forums, mods, wallpapers, maps. It is all gone. Nobody hosts sites like that? The ones there were - are they gone? Has it all split into reddit, nexusmods, facebook groups? Can Google search facebook and reddit now easily? Why such groups are not showed on results, only r/diablo? I feel that whenever I search something media outlets appear first. Even when searching for mods ign shows with some articles. Is google a good tool for discovery, or just for searching a precise information like "how to solve this x compilation error"? Has Internet become a dull place because people are consoomers now, not creators? Or people are just focused on creating food images on an Instagram? There is no sense of wonder with results. Maybe my expectations are too high?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Kagi has a lower resolution picture of the world simply because they don't have as many servers as Google.

2-718-281-828 3y ago

how good is kagi compared to google for languages other than english? german, russian, chinese etc does kagi also censor illegal content or content residing in a gray zone? like porn, streaming movies, torrenting, racism etc does kagi censor so called fake news and dangerous misinformation with regard to corona for example?

guillemsola 3y ago

This example on python exceptions on their sample queries... The second result is a very opinionated result about exceptions considered and anti pattern https://sobolevn.me/2019/02/python-exceptions-considered-an-antipattern https://sobolevn.me/2019/02/python-exceptions-considered-an-... Maybe this was tweaked to be catchy for developers but I don't think is the right thing to see as the second entry. If you search for exceptions you want to learn how they work, that is what 99% of the people would need. An entry like this is dangerous for instance if you are just someone trying to learn about them. IMO this is a red flag about the quality for a search engine. Maybe they are just targeting seasoned tech people who would see this content interesting. But definitely not a search engine for the masses.

gwbas1c 3y ago

IMO: Seems expensive, unless the subscription also came with some other services, like email and storage.

andreagrandi 3y ago

I use Kagi (along with DuckDuckGo) and I really appreciate the quality of their search results, but if you care about privacy do not use their Safari extension. Due to a Safari limitation, all the queries are leaked to the previously selected default search engine https://kagifeedback.org/d/1575-ios-extension-leaking-search-queries https://kagifeedback.org/d/1575-ios-extension-leaking-search... In addition to this, since all the search attempts are being redirected to Kagi, you can’t use any other search engine unless you deactivate the extension and this prevents you from trying the same query on different engines. P.S: as far as I understand, they don’t have much freedom with the implementation and everything would be much easier if Safari allowed to customise the search engines, but I’m not sure this limitation is being properly communicated to the users (unless I missed some warning during extension installation)