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Try Switching to Kagi

• LoganDark 1y ago
  I love Kagi, but they seem extremely hobbled by Bing's terrible index. I occasionally have to switch to Google to find stuff and that makes me sad.
• shadowvoxing 1y ago
  I use DDG daily and I'm happy with the results. In fact, I've become quite a fan of it lately. And with my ChatGPT sub, Kagi seems unnecessary.
• decimalenough 1y ago
  > no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark) TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.
  • jessekv 1y ago
    !code will get you into the proper code assistant. I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though. For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor) Edit: I got this working.
    • sitkack 1y ago
      What do you mean by custom assistants because you can make your !<word> assistants with your own prompt and the model of your choice. Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?
      • jessekv 1y ago
        No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!
        • sitkack 1y ago
          From https://kagi.com/assistant https://kagi.com/assistant you can also click on the down "Model Dropdown Chooser" and there is an entry to make your own assistants.
  • al_borland 1y ago
    Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other. https://kagi.com/assistant https://kagi.com/assistant Additional details on the blog post about it. https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all
    • ac29 1y ago
      > https://kagi.com/assistant https://kagi.com/assistant Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does
      • freediver 1y ago
        We heard you!
        • benrapscallion 1y ago
          Still doesn’t work for me.
  • louthy 1y ago
    This is one of my favourite features. The UX is so god damn simple that it makes switching to an AI response so ridiculously trivial, I love it.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• coreyh14444 1y ago
  Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want. And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
  • Ezhik 1y ago
    Kagi also lets you make custom bangs - I've got Google on !f and !h in addition to !g (sorry Flickr and Haskell users) to deal with typos.
• submeta 1y ago
  Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products. Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
  • lcsh0s 1y ago
    have you considered proton for emails?
  • aitchnyu 1y ago
    What does Kagi assistant (every plan has sub SOTA a few days back) lack compared to Perplexity?
• therein 1y ago
  Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.
• iLoveOncall 1y ago
  I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK". But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue. I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • orhmeh09 1y ago
    Perhaps you are lucky to stick to happy paths or are not particularly discerning. It's real. https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/ https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-wors...
    • iLoveOncall 1y ago
      Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews? > They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality. Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
      • troupo 1y ago
        I am a real person, and sponsored links will often span the entire results page with relevant links being 4th-6th.
      • mistercheph 1y ago
        LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results. Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever. Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN. Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
• rspoerri 1y ago
  I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.
• internet_points 1y ago
  The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search). The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.") That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
• sixtyj 1y ago
  Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?
  • rspoerri 1y ago
    With DDG I kept looking for better results, which I typically found, not so with Kagi.
  • foresterre 1y ago
    DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago. I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause. I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard". The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
    • sixtyj 1y ago
      Thanks. Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.
      • Terretta 1y ago
        The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug. Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
  • sph 1y ago
    I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  "Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality." This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use. It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
  • snorremd 1y ago
    I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it. Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down. Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design. > Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down. The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
      • jay_kyburz 1y ago
        I would be very interested to know if Kagi starts to down rank a site for everybody if lots of its users manually down rank it.
• dsego 1y ago
  The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.
• pookieinc 1y ago
  For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?
  • evertedsphere 1y ago
    how do you tolerate the sheer latency of running the "vast majority" of your web searches through an llm
    • esseph 1y ago
      How many searches previously to find the right question to ask x search time = total_search_time # of searches is lower, total-search_time drops
      • criddell 1y ago
        For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.
    • ChocolateGod 1y ago
      The LLM can read through the results quicker than you can and provide the information you were looking for.
      • bigstrat2003 1y ago
        Well, it provides something at any rate. Whether or not it's the information you were looking for is very much a matter of luck.
  • senko 1y ago
    I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases. I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)
• Ezhik 1y ago
  Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely. It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4". I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
  • demaga 1y ago
    I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches. Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.
    • stevekemp 1y ago
      I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time. A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing. Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
  • mubou 1y ago
    > how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead. Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
• camillomiller 1y ago
  Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least). So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code. Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
  • Ezhik 1y ago
    There's also uBlacklist for blocking domains from search engines, a miracle extension.
  • senko 1y ago
    Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable. I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
  • sph 1y ago
    I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site. Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi. I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
  • d12bb 1y ago
    German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.
• glenjamin 1y ago
  I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!
  • sshine 1y ago
    How so? I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser. The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
    • sph 1y ago
      I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL. When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does. Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this. Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
• roflmaostc 1y ago
  I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan. Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am. I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions. The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
• sitkack 1y ago
  That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.
• Zealotux 1y ago
  I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.
• axegon_ 1y ago
  No, thanks, I'll stick to qwant: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_kagi_search_engine_directly_funds_yandex/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...
  • flymaipie 1y ago
    Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? It seems weird to me.
    • troupo 1y ago
      They pay for search results to search providers because Kagi doesn't have an index of their own. In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.
    • kenanfyi 1y ago
      They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
    • xigoi 1y ago
      It’s not funding, it’s paying for a service.
      • SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
        Funding does not imply a lack of receiving something in return, only a flow of money. It can be both
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
• lelanthran 1y ago
  I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google. I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card. [1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
  • shayway 1y ago
    Brave user here too. I like it. One thing I really appreciate is the links to your query on Google/Bing partway down the page.
• mbix77 1y ago
  Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.
• eloisius 1y ago
  > The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
• frank20022 1y ago
  For those who tried both: Kagi or Perplexity? I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...
  • bananapub 1y ago
    kagi has a free trial (100 searches) so you can just answer this very personal question for yourself.
  • dredmorbius 1y ago
    Based on this alone, Kagi. <https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>
  • feydaykyn 1y ago
    The first answer is to try each one full time for a week and see which one is better for your use case. For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.
• schrectacular 1y ago
  I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month. I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
  • jetbalsa 1y ago
    I guess I'm a power user, I'm at > Total searches this period 1,216 > Assistant interactions this period 92 I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
    • SietrixDev 1y ago
      I don’t think I’m a power user and I’m constantly over 1000 searches / month. Just a few days ago I upgraded my plan to the highest tier to play with the better models and in a few days it’s gonna renew for a year at this tier. If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.
    • schrectacular 1y ago
      Strangely (or maybe not based on how pricing economics work) this is the most appealing tier. Thanks for the reply, it is helpful .
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car? > I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
• daitangio 1y ago
  I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing. Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible). Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like: - StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
• bananapub 1y ago
  another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else. Some nice features that may not be obvious: - you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic" They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are. Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use. Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
• senko 1y ago
  Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead. Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages. Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?
  • senko 1y ago
    Seems to be unburied!
• greazy 1y ago
  I have at least one kagi 3 month trial link. If anyone wants it, reply below :)
  • grussladd 1y ago
    I would love to try it out, if the link is still available :)
  • timothevs 1y ago
    That would be very kind, if you still have it available. I have been on the fence - skeptical as is my nature, but I wonder if I am in the wrong here :)
    • greazy 1y ago
      Here you go https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493 https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493 Hope you see this!
      • timothevs 1y ago
        Very kind - thank you! I think I was a bit late or it expired. But it did prompt me to set up an account which I had been putting off. Haha, now off to explore Kagi with my 100 searches to see what it has to offer.
  • ibrahimsow1 1y ago
    Yes please
    • greazy 1y ago
      Here you go. Hope you see this before it gets snapped up https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493 https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493
  • SG- 1y ago
    Curious, but how do you get 3 month trial invites?
• nexo-v1 1y ago
  I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock). Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for. Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.
• wtmt 1y ago
  I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services. But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it. I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better. [1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
• devinprater 1y ago
  Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.
• dickiedyce 1y ago
  I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow. What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.
  • scroot 1y ago
    I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable
    • coldpie 1y ago
      Could either of you provide some specific search terms (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search box) that provides better results on Kagi than on Google?
      • decimalenough 1y ago
        From the article: "Canada ETA"
• stranded22 1y ago
  I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).
  • nsteel 1y ago
    I'd not heard of controld before. I was going to ask what's the benefit over pihole but I think they've got it covered at https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/ https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/ > Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.
• whalesalad 1y ago
  I have been using it for a few years now and can't live without it. They really nailed it.
• mhb 1y ago
  I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?
  • noname120 1y ago
    I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search
    • tempest_ 1y ago
      Very likely due to the cost of the maps api.
    • mhb 1y ago
      When I search for a city, along with the list of results, there is a map on the right. When I click on it, it doesn't go to Google Maps.
• neogodless 1y ago
  About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense. This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far. What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want. But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on. I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
  • jrmg 1y ago
    Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago. I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
    • neogodless 1y ago
      I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)
    • packetlost 1y ago
      That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.
• __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice. I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.
• eviks 1y ago
  > A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result. Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click) Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?
• jccalhoun 1y ago
  I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should. I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)
  • esafak 1y ago
    Imagine a product so bad they have to dole out gift cards to make people use it. Are you saying you can use google through bing and get paid?? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY
• harshitaneja 1y ago
  My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too. I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
  • jetbalsa 1y ago
    Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.
    • Zambyte 1y ago
      The assistant recently was made available to all tiers, with only the more expensive models being limited to the higher tier.
    • harshitaneja 1y ago
      Assistant was surprisingly useful. In a couple of occasions I had it find me research papers I didn't know existed for a problem I had been working on for long. However the realization for me was that I shouldn't neglect search abilities of the LLMs I was already paying for. I tried to replace my Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions with Assistant but the usage limits were too low for me. And for the cases where I wanted to use long context of Gemini models, the assistant had an arbitrary limit of only 32k I think. However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.
  • abtinf 1y ago
    What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?
• Lariscus 1y ago
  I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.
  • esafak 1y ago
    https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
    • Lariscus 1y ago
      I like it, but that still leaves metadata like the fact that I have an account at all. With the low user numbers of Kagi any privacy guarantee by them is an illusion. Since Kagi is operating out of a country without any privacy laws that could protect me, I will not use their services.
• grimblee 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    Kagi is founded and based in California by a guy from Yugoslavia. It’s not Russian.
• prinny_ 1y ago
  I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same. There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.
  • lucasyvas 1y ago
    If anything your description could be justification for some people to pay for it.
    • tigroferoce 1y ago
      I personally would pay even if the results were _slightly_ worse. But for me they are as good or better than Google. I also use a lot the assistant, so I'm happy customer so far.
  • mvieira38 1y ago
    If you only use it occasionally, you can pay for the 300 searches a month plan and they won't bill you until you exceed that amount
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.
  • righthand 1y ago
    It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.
• mkbelieve 1y ago
  Kagi rules for search, and they also have the best AI front end in my opinion.
• theusus 1y ago
  I tried Kagi and Brave. I get similar results on both but Brave is cheaper and AI answers.
• bearjaws 1y ago
  Recently converted 2 coworkers to Kagi, their minds we're blown when I was sharing screen and had no ads and relevant search results.
• waiwai933 1y ago
  I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either. That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)
• rkangel 1y ago
  I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born. I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
• dvngnt_ 1y ago
  Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results. Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi
• GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  I wish there was a discounted plan that didn't include "AI" - if the search is good, that's all I'm looking for in a search engine.
• billbrown 1y ago
  For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work. https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog
  • kristofferR 1y ago
    Not only that, but they also have an issue tracker/FR page [1] and a Discord server [2]. It feels way more human and less corporate than Google. [1] https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/ [2] https://kagi.com/discord https://kagi.com/discord
    • MostlyStable 1y ago
      While this is true, it's one part of Kagi that I wouldn't expect to remain true if they every actually got mainstream success. That human/less corporate feel is less an effect of their mission goals than it is their very small size. They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.
• 1oooqooq 1y ago
  did this guy sell his apple stock and joined early on kagi private equity?
• jhickok 1y ago
  I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.
• jordemort 1y ago
  No
• senorqa 1y ago
  99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm. It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.
  • prirai 1y ago
    What tools do you use for command line searching?
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
      Currently, the script looks like this #!/bin/sh 0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073 "0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1 yy___ are UNIX filters written in C. 0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc. yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL. This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers. Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches. 1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time. 2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.
      • prirai 1y ago
        > Currently, the script looks like this > > #!/bin/sh > 0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073 > > "0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1 > > yy___ are UNIX filters written in C. > > 0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc. > > yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL. > > This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers. > > Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches. > > 1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time. > > 2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket. How can I get more details about these filters. Are there existing implementations somewhere online which I can test? Seems pretty interesting.
• 0_gravitas 1y ago
  25$ a month user here and quite happy with just how quiet results are, equally so with the Assistant output when I've used it.
• mcpar-land 1y ago
  I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page. But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.
• mapumbaa 1y ago
  Just go for metaGer instead. Non-profit and based in Germany.
• mac-attack 1y ago
  searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.
• nedt 1y ago
  I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly. My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.
  • kristofferR 1y ago
    Nope, they've solved that: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
    • handsclean 1y ago
      Session links are what you’re looking for. Privacy Pass doesn’t work if you clear cookies, and in fact will lock you out of Privacy Pass for a month if you clear cookies maybe four times. Ask me how I found out. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....
    • nedt 1y ago
      Always needs an extension. That's not the same as just using Duckduckgo.
  • bigyabai 1y ago
    Me too, actually. I'm starting to think this "buy Kagi!" movement is being pushed by people who didn't even know they could change their default search provider.
• ctvo 1y ago
  As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage. Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
  • pjm331 1y ago
    Yeah that’s the only type of search that I always append the !g to
    • frereubu 1y ago
      You can shorten that to !gm if you want to go straight to Google Maps.
      • kevincox 1y ago
        Or just set up a browser search keyword/engine to go straight to Google Maps if that is what you want. I have Kagi as my default but have a small handful of keyword bookmarks set up for when I am making something that isn't a general web search. "m <location>" for Google Maps, "i <title>" for IMDB, "p <query>" for Kagi image search, "d <query>" for D&D Rules Search, you get the idea. This way Kagi doesn't even see my query, I don't need to wait for the redirect, I get to set up the shortcuts myself and I can switch any of my search providers (even the default) without affecting my "bangs".
  • KoolKat23 1y ago
    Absolutely agree. Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU. If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi. Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.
• poulpy123 1y ago
  I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service
• barbazoo 1y ago
  Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.
• Arathorn 1y ago
  The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|
• dkarl 1y ago
  I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.
• thi2 1y ago
  My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill. So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it. It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.
  • schmorptron 1y ago
    FYI, I think the $10 plan that's now "basic AI" used to just be the unlimited search plan and they just recently added a limited capacity of the AI stuff to it.
• catapart 1y ago
  Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
  • yesfitz 1y ago
    I read through the whole opinion piece. Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.
  • mvieira38 1y ago
    I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time
  • omgitspavel 1y ago
    I also want to add that Kagi recently partnered with a Russian state-owned search engine Yandex: https://kagi.com/changelog#5340 https://kagi.com/changelog#5340. This means they are paying money to the Russian state through taxes and sharing my search queries with it. This was a critical issue for me, and it led me to stop using it and request a refund earlier this year.
    • 369548684892826 1y ago
      Exactly, glad I'm not the only one!
    • parasti 1y ago
      This is a critical issue to pretty much every EU citizen.
    • switch007 1y ago
      And according to the link below, the Kagi founder/CEO claims Yandex is a private company headquartered in Kazakhstan, unrelated to the Russian government. https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311987220115248 https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311987220115248
• eGP9jDq_nw 1y ago
  does kagi censor offensive results?
• gmiller123456 1y ago
  Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google. It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually. I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
• icar 1y ago
  Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad. Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.
  • thi2 1y ago
    For german it works fine, how is duckduckgo doing with catalan?
• niuzeta 1y ago
  I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them. I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are. I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
• zenGull 1y ago
  Fwiw, give a searxng instance a try.
• temp0826 1y ago
  Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)
  • dddw 1y ago
    Nextdns price is really good. 20 bucks per year. One can only get so many 5 buck per month subscriptions, because eventually they compound and it becomes just too much. It is the reason I haven't done Kagi, but search is getting worse and worse nowadays, so I might just do it soon. I'm typing this because I like to see more 1 to 3 bucks a month typs of services.
• praisewhitey 1y ago
  >I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th It's the first result on Duckduckgo.
  • coldpie 1y ago
    It's the first result on Google for me, too. Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.
• dmje 1y ago
  Of all the arguments, the “but it’s expensive” one is the one I really fail to parse. Search is probably the tool we all use day in and day out - it’s critical to everything we do both at work and at home. Paying for it is only a mind stretch because we’re so used to “free” but really, it’s nothing. Two coffees for a search that isn’t full of shit is an absolute no-brainer in my opinion.
• speckx 1y ago
  After using Kagi for two years now, I can't go back to Google or Bing. On principle, I pay for the Ultimate package because I desperately want there to be something besides Google and Bing.
  • dhc02 1y ago
    That also is a factor in why I pay for more than I need. I want them to succeed.
• superkuh 1y ago
  I paid for 3 months. Kagi was okay, but it's not really a search engine like I use search engines. They only ever returned <200 results per search query. So you had to depend on their system to magically know what results you wanted out of everything in existence. There was no way to look through the actual search results returned deeply. This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.
• gpvos 1y ago
  > The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; [...] If you want an official website, always follow the link to the Wikipedia article, and there click on the link to the official website. Also, I find Duckduckgo a lot better than Google in general.
• switch007 1y ago
  No thanks. I'm not sending money and traffic to Yandex. I'm going to give Qwant a go (French company, headquartered in Paris)
• layoric 1y ago
  Been using Kagi for about 18 months, and IMO well worth it. It does what is says on the tin, it's a search. You use it, it provides good results, and you're done. No fighting with ads, no making you automatically skipping the first few results because you know from experience they are promoted. You control what experience you want with specific domains. Privacy pass means you don't even have to be logged in. One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.
• api 1y ago
  I've used Kagi for over a year. It's been months since I've used Google. Now I also use LLMs (both local and hosted) along with Kagi, and Google is obsolete for search. Google's results are really awful, and it constantly nags me to install Chrome.
• agentk9 1y ago
  Being "apolitical" is no excuse for funding a russian company (yandex). If they did not do this I would probably be a paying customer. There is nothing else in this space that has the trust or features that kagi has. The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • Spivak 1y ago
    I would consider reading Vlad's response to this which is extremely measured and not at all "throwing his hands up" at the issue.
    • jwe 1y ago
      As somebody who is also not a Kagi customer because of this the statement of Vlad is exactly "throwing his hands up". Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world." All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.
      • Spivak 1y ago
        They are contributing to Russia's economy so I'm not sure what you hoped he'd say contrary to that. I don't consider someone buying from US businesses to be any kind of implicit support of my government, while at the same time choosing to avoid businesses from a country in the manner desired here is taking a pretty strong political stance.
        • jwe 1y ago
• istillwritecode 1y ago
  Nah. I don't do subscriptions for much of anything. I just do fewer searches now that I know google is so heavily slanted toward commercially relevant queries. Kagi seems like an obvious acquisition target. They will never raise enough paying subscribers.
• pensatoio 1y ago
  I tried it a few months back, and it blew me away how much search could be improved. I am now a paying customer and extremely satisfied with the product.
• pwn0 1y ago
  Why would you use Kagi over something like SearxNG?
• pzo 1y ago
  With current geopolitical environment I would be more inclined to switch to Kagi if they move HQ to EU or Swiss.
• roydivision 1y ago
  I switched about two months ago, paid for a year. It's such a relief, it's like having search of ten years ago back again. It just works, and no useless crap. Options that make sense to ME, not to the profit line. I'm now paying for: - Search - Email - News - Backups Of course I'd rather not spend the money, but ALL these services are leagues ahead of the ad-supported alternatives. This is how the Internet should work. (Edit - formatting)
• martin82 1y ago
  been using Kagi for a few years now. I'm happy. Whenever I have to use Google on a rare occasion I am shocked by just how filthy and useless it is.
• Starter1437 1y ago
  I've built something similar. I also added a way to use CLI-like features straight from the browser address bar. Check it out: https://github.com/wajeht/bang https://github.com/wajeht/bang