Switched to Kagi 2 months ago, can't recommend it enough.
It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time.
I haven't googled a single thing since switching to Kagi. Easily worth the $10/mo to not have my search history monetized, and to work with a company whose incentives are maximally aligned with giving me the content I am searching for.
Kagi also has nice features like personalized upweighting/downweighting of certain websites.
The Kagi team is also super responsive to feedback. I've submitted a few bug/feature requests that have gotten fixed within a week or two.
It's amazing that a small team can compete with google.
"It's not worse" is exactly how I feel using Kagi. I REALLY wanted to like DuckDuckGo. But it simply did not work for me most of the times. I have no idea what Kagi does to make it "not worse" but just by being "not worse" and "not google" at the same time it's kind of better.
re: weighting, can you weight sections of sites? Like subreddits?
edit: oh man, if i could paid and get API access for my own apps.. that would be killer. Slowly extend it to stuff like IOT or AI integrations that i normally don't want to give cloud providers.. this would be really cool
> if i could paid and get API access for my own apps
Assuming it's paid per search, just screen-scrape the thing? There's no reason they'd care what client you use to access it if you're paying for each request.
Well i'm not going to pay and jump hoops like screen scrape. My question was more that if i'm paying, i'd also love first-class API access. Sounds like they give it, sweet!
Kagi is in fact better for me very frequently. I customized it to my liking and it shows better results than Google. Sure, I would be able to find the same content on Google, but that would require using keywords for site or file type.
With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
I have to say their own homepage does not inspire confidence - it currently shows three sample search results, and clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. For comparison DDG shows a bunch of headphone review sites, all of which seems reasonably reputable.
In fact all three of these have some odd results -
- "steve jobs"'s fifth result is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs at a 2003 conference, but the result is linked to a seemingly random 2606s timestamp and it is right below the Videos section with much more relevant videos
- "python exceptions"'s second result is a blog post about Python exceptions being anti-patterns. I've not used Python in a while but that seems very wrong, and a terrible result to show to someone who might be learning Python or looking up how Exceptions work.
> clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result.
On the other hand, having such an obvious mistake on the homepage makes me trust more that they believe in their product enough to give you raw, real results (which may sometimes include stale content such as a parked domain) rather than a manually-crafted "perfect" results page that wouldn't be representative of the real product at all.
Kagi is great for the kind of searches I do -- mainly searching for wikipedia articles, stackoverflow questions, etc. If I ever want to buy a product I don't know much about, I usually spend some time reading the megathread on whatever niche subreddit there is on the topic.
When I search Kagi for "best headphones" the first link on the page is to /r/HeadphoneAdvice, which is probably where I'd want to go. There are some not as good results down the page, but I never would have even seen them because the 1st link is what I wanted.
For "python exceptions" the top links are all to the python.org docs about exceptions, which is almost certainly what I wanted with that generic search.
If I search "steve jobs" or really <any famous person or event>, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time, and that is the #1 result. I've gotten increasingly frustrated with google in the last few years that they've gone away from this behavior for lots of searches. Sometimes the wikipedia article isn't even on the first page.
So, for my use cases, Kagi is behaving totally optimally for all these searches.
I wonder if Kagi gets significantly better results than Brave's? I almost entirely moved to Brave from DDG, and the difference is like night and day, but could Kagi's search really be worth $10/month? I could use some more Brave vs. Kagi comparisons.
I keep seeing comments like this when Kagi is brought up. One of them motivated me to try kagi about a month ago. I would love to replace google and try out every alternative search engine I encounter. I admit it will be hard to replace. I'm a programmer and searching is basically a sixth sense for me at this point. I'm frequently frustrated with google results but have never found anything less frustrating.
I signed up for kagi, ran out of the free searches in 2 days, my initial impression was "not better than google" and never looked back. I probably would have tried for a few more days if the trial was longer. Still more likely than not that I would have crawled back to google, but it did seem like not enough time to fully evaluate. For instance, the upweight/downweight feature you mention is intriguing but I didn't really get a chance to see any benefits of it.
Software engineers - the breed that goes to extremes and compromises a lot just to avoid… paying for software.
I agree partially that they could have a longer trial but on the other hand, $10 without any sort of contract is a low enough barrier to give it a whirl.
I'd be thrilled to pay for such a service if I found it even remotely sticky, and I genuinely wanted it to be. I just found it mediocre. If some of their features' benefits compound over time it seems like it would be better to have a lengthier trial period.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. I have the same impression just that my reaction was, "not better than google for real money." It's too much for not enough of a difference as far as I was able to tell.
I can't use anything else then google for more than a day - for me every other search engine returns worse results than google, especially in my native language (polish), but startpage seemed to be best choice if I ever had to switch
1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network?
2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit?
I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.
> 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network?
Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible.
2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
> What are the downsides to having your search history monetized?
Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads?
The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad.
Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked.
(for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability)
A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
This is a good point as well. Ultimately any search engine has user IP address though, modulo VPN and similar technologies.
For a regular user who signs into Google to use Gmail, they'll be searching while signed in anyway - no real loss of privacy, and arguably much gained by not broadcasting anything into the adtech data pools.
For a very privacy conscious user who wants to be anonymous and is already taking steps like using VPNs, there is a loss in privacy due to payment info being attached. (You could argue Google accounts could be pseudo anonymous, but for most users they're anything but - location data, history, emails and search queries make them totally identified).
There are technical solutions to avoid the payment linking issue (cash in envelope, selling gift cards via retail, etc), or through using blind signature schemes to separate payment from usage. The user experience of these options is likely to be far more complex, with people losing access and customer service fiascos with people being unable to prove they signed up before etc.
Which is an option with Brave and DDG, but obviously not Kagi. Yes, obviously, this is only going to be a relatively fringe use-case that depends on the user having generally decent opsec.
I don’t think the argument is that “paid” is more private than “free” in a general sense, just that Kagi specifically can allow you more privacy than Google because Kati’s business model is direct monetization.
No need to argue the abstract; all that matters is the specific. If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.
If you have to pay to use Kagi, that means you can only use it logged into a user profile that's associated with a payment method. Which means you have to trust them not to log your traffic in a way that can be associated back to your account. I would feel a little more comfortable if they had a warrant canary, but I can't seem to find one.
If Kagi is being honest, typical usage of Kagi is probably more private than typical usage of advertising-supported search engines. But I can more easily verify that using e.g. Brave Search via Tor is private.
> If you have to pay to use Kagi, that means you can only use it logged into a user profile that's associated with a payment method.
True. But even the payment thing could be solved although most users won't care. Mullvad comes to mind: you can send them cash via mail and the payment is associated to a serial number that is simultaneously your login and password.
> If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.
That's not really the point. It is up to Kagi to prove to their customers that they are trustworthy, not up to the customers to find abuses of trust.
If I -- for example -- use Tor and a private browsing window to access Google search, I have a pretty good expectation of privacy. I don't have to trust Google here; they simply cannot correlate my search with my Google account in this case, at least not 100% reliably (browser fingerprinting, etc.).
But with Kagi, they know that every search I make, regardless of how I make it, is from me (or, at least, from someone using my account), and that account is tied to my real-world identity. Sure, they could implement a more complicated payment method, where I pay a third party, and that third party blind-signs some credentials that Kagi trusts. But they haven't done that, at least as an option, and that bothers me.
When it comes to third parties, the best kind of trust is the trust that you don't have to have. I have to trust that Kagi isn't keeping a record of my search results. I would rather that I just don't have to trust anything, because there's nothing nefarious they can do.
> It is up to Kagi to prove to their customers that they are trustworthy
Fair enough. Since that is a provably impossible bar, you’re basically saying nobody should do business with anyone. Which I admire from an ideological purity perspective, but don’t really have time for at this age.
I have a Kagi account, and am pretty happy with the search results. But I don't like that I have to trust them not to keep a record of my search history, tied to my account. I have no reason to believe they are malicious, but I also have nothing -- aside from their word, which is worthless coming from someone I don't personally know -- to give me a reason to trust them.
If I'm doing something in private browsing mode, I fall back to DDG. Not only do I feel weird about being signed into something when I'm supposedly doing something "private", either I have to manually sign into Kagi each time I open a private browsing window, or install their extension, neither of which I really want to do.
So I'm torn; I'm not sure if I'll keep paying for the account, or cancel it and go back to DDG.
Then again, I also pay Fastmail for email, which gives them access to all my email. Arguably that's just as bad (if not worse) for my privacy than giving someone my search history. It's not clear to me why I'm ok with that, but uncomfortable when it comes to Kagi. I suppose email is inherently tied to me, whereas search results need not be? I dunno.
Regardless, this is the big issue with paying for something on the internet that you can also get for free. In some ways my search privacy can be "trustably" better with Google (via private browsing + Tor or at least a VPN) than it can ever be with Kagi, which is weird.
Basically none if you use an extension to auto delete your cookies and ad blockers. You have more potential privacy issues by paying for a search engine.
Maybe less anonymity, although you can use anonymous email and credit cards - there are many providers out there.
But a search business where you pay for search is more likely to be privacy-respecting than a search business where a 3rd party (advertiser) is paying for your searches, just because the business model aligns incentives.
1) I often search for things I’m curious about but find repulsive at a moral or ethical level. I don’t want the assumption of “searched for = agrees with/motivated by/associated with” indelibly hashed against my identity then sold to anyone and everyone for any purpose. If I lived in areas where thought is a crime, the ability for a company to assemble a complex personality profile is even more concerning as it’s discoverable and could be used to screen people against an ideology. While I don’t worry about that today, I don’t know who holds the guns tomorrow.
2) or HN? :-)
I also just don’t want to see tons of advertisements pretending to be results and figuring out which is which. Google also seems to be particularly susceptible to SEO garbage. Between their own ads pretending to be relevant and SEO garbage pretending to be relevant, I find myself scrolling through pages upon pages of advertisements hoping to find some signal. With Kagi I spend much less time discerning between garbage trying to capture my attention and something about what I’m looking for.
(I’d note here, as a bit of a non sequitur, that if/when something like chatgpt becomes more accurate and can provide references and do information retrieval better, I’ll be happier to use that at an even higher price point than Kagi. I find the ability to ask a question and get an answer even better than searching for documents that contain symbols in my term and personally assessing the contents for clues about an answer to my actual question. ChatGPT reminds me of the moment I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on some
webpage someone sent me in 1998 - the tedium of answering questions had reduced dramatically.
That said, I think the semantic understanding required to answer questions in the ChatGPT way will allow for even more nuanced personalization, and I’m afraid even more insidious (1)’s.)
I've been using kagi as a paid customer since August 2022. My experience is that for programming related tasks it is much faster to find a useful answer/discussion/site. The most compelling experience I've had with it was during a road trip across Europe. Using the country selector allowed me to find succinct search results for signs, shops and regional attractions. The few times I did comparison searches using google.co.* search the results were more confusing than the kagi results.
Just made a programming related search and got useful results instead of the SEO optimized crap I get with Google. Just this, without taking into account privacy, justifies the subscription for me.
I'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.
For the same search quality they have now, and in a world where Kagi exists for $10, no.
I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case.
If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.
I understand your pain completely. I actually wrote a custom extension for myself where instead of using Google search, it'll automatically redirect and use the Wikipedia search.
I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine.
Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.
Not for the current state of Google. Their results have been dropping in quality for over a decade now (I wrote a blog post about this back then, so it’s been on my mind ever since). They’ve slowly lost the war against SEO and the search features they’ve built are more about keeping you on Google than helping you improve the quality of results.
Google would never let you tweak their results. You can use third party addons but they expose your browser activity to an unacceptable degree, and I don't even know if there is a collection of addons that can tweak Google results to match kagi's.
> It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time.
I've been using DDG happily for years and only fell back to Google at most 5 times during the last two years and I think half of the times it wasn't even useful to me.
Maybe it is the way how I write queries?
Nowadays I find Google's result page just confusing, so I disagree with calling Google better.
I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it's the first alternative search engine (tried the Brave's one and DDG) that does not make me go back to google every other search.
On the flips side, though, getting a "you cannot search anymore until you've paid" message was quite a shock to me. Like - I paid for it to try it out. It worked well, so it wasn't really a "nobody told me there would be a subscription" kind of shock, but more like on that second month I got the "wait, am I actually paying for the access to a search engine?" realization.
Makes you notice how much we are getting conditioned to the "out business for your data" business model.
Kagi would be smart to offer a few tiers of service to encourage paid adoption. Have a pricey one time lifetime fee that goes up in price each year. Have a reasonable flat one time fee to increase the number of searches over free so that folks not ready for a subscription will jump at the opportunity. Add a "member since 20xx" icon to log in screen to let folks show how long they've been a member. Sell t-shirt, hoodie, laptop stickers, phone case, coffee mug swag to increase awareness. Make it easy to organize bookmarks, share search results and curate search lists.
They essentially already do this. They expose how much you've costed them as a customer, and if it's more than what you've paid in subscription fees, you can tip the difference.
I think they are transparent about how much each query costs them and are trying to run a sustainable business. I personally prefer paying for that- basically a market rate for search, than trying to jump on to a growth hacking scheme of lifetime memberships or merch subsidies.
Part of the challenge is getting people to see the true cost of the free services they consume. The internet today defaults to the "all you can eat buffet" post-scarcity world.
The kagi team are transparent about what it actually costs them (in cash) for searches you make. If they go down the advertising route, they'll just become another Google, as the incentives are not aligned.
First you'll get more ads onto the page to crowd out organic content. Then you'll subtly adjust what users search for, or what you return, to ensure you optimise for your highest paying ads. Then you'll hyper localise to make even more from sponsored listings etc.
If we want an internet where users aren't the product, there needs to be more transparency about what "free" things are actually costing in compute resource and similar. And ultimately a user has to either bring in more money than they cost (not ideal in developing countries where ad impressions and clicks can be worth a lot less), pay for what they use with a margin on top, or the company has to go onto the VC treadmill of promising greater future returns from eyeballs (back to advertising and data brokering again....)
Therefore while it is expensive compared with free, they're also being transparent about their real costs, and what the services that are free elsewhere (with monetisation) are actually having to make from selling ads to you to break even.
Indeed - they actually did surveys and found 70% of users wouldn't continue at $19/mo (but 30% would), so you're not alone.
Since the costs in question are per search, I think they were previously considering different pricing options, recognising that getting to ramen profitability is likely better than having more users and losing money every month (they're not venture-backed).
I thought for a second that per-search costs would incentivize them to make the search results better, but then realized that's not true of page=1 searches, only for any search page=2 and higher
Makes me wonder if there's a future where we can offload this cost to users local machines/servers. Eg if i can download a slice of their index, for a fixed price, then maybe the cost of per-search compute is better? I'd get more privacy, they'd save money (maybe), etc.
But it depends on what the true cost is. Is it indexing? Or actually searching?
> Make it easy to organize bookmarks, share search results and curate search lists.
Plus I think that bookmarks, shared search results, and curated searches (for whatever that means) are an implicit version of Page Rank, since of the bazillions of URLs in the world, ones which are bookmarked are by definition more valuable than others and should be refreshed more often and whose in and out links are also themselves probably more valuable. I'd argue the same thing for any URL that got the archive.ph treatment (if those are available) or manually saved archive.org snapshot
I've paid and used Kagi for about six months. I used DDG for a while, but I found myself putting !g after every query (especially when looking for answers relating to programming). With Kagi I very, very rarely need to use Google.
It has some nice features, like lenses, URL rewriting, and the ability to bump sites to the top.
I have a lens for programming. It shows only certain sites, like GitHub and Stack Exchange, and I enable it when appropriate.
For URL rewriting, I have Kagi set to rewrite URLs from Twitter and Reddit to my own self-hosted instances of Nitter [0] and Teddit [1], so that when I open a Kagi result that would've gone to twitter.com, it goes to nitter.mydomain.com, which lets me use Twitter without an account.
Lastly, I use the site bumping feature to move Wikipedia results to the top.
Kagi is great for letting you customize your own bangs (!g, etc).
One thing I'd like to do, that's pretty specific, is having a site with my own bangs that do specific things like for example: open the url in archive.is and archive.org or open OpenLibrary.org and GoodReads. Similar nice functionality might include stripping of spaces for certain queries.
Does anyone know of a tool like this? Otherwise, it would probably be simple enough to build my own and have a kagi bang that directs to it as needed.
The team behind kagi are also building a browser (Orion). One of the new features that's been teased could likely be put to use doing something like this... Think natural language input to a browser.
Interestingly, it's not actually a Chromium clone - it's webkit based, but with WebExtension APIs added to give compatibility with (a growing range of) Firefox & Chrome web extensions.
I am a Firefox user too, but Orion feels to hit an interesting spot on mobile in terms of the benefits of Safari's power optimisations (via using webkit), with extensions and similar.
with firefox bookmarks, you can use tags for something similar to your own bangs. For instance, I have `https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=` bookmarked and tagged as `yt`, so I can just type `yt` and then tab, and I'll be able to put in my search query like that.
You can easily do all that with alfred on mac. For example, I have a keyboard shortcut to open the current url in archive.is and the wayback archive for instance. Just a simple applescript to get the current url from chrome and then open up the two websites. Easier to manage than writing a browser extension or some kind of bookmarklet.
I have lots of custom searches accessed by a keyword, usually two letters, and I can modify the query string any way I want or take some other action with it. My 'lucky' searches use DDG to go straight to the top result on the site(wikipedia, mdn etc) but they also stuff the query into the system wide find pasteboard. If the top result isn't right I can immediately jump to a google search of the site with the search query with a keyboard shortcut.
Using AppleScript to get the current URL from Chrome is very clever. I don't use Chrome but I'm going to look into how one might do this for Firefox. Thanks for the pointer.
I used Alfred for a while and then didn't use any similar tool and now have been using raycast for about a year and quite enjoy it. They have a built-in quick links feature that lets you paste whatever to open a search but accessing the current URL could improve it so much!
Just so you know, Kagi does offer direct links to a result in archive.org; it’s under the menu (screenshot: https://send.strangecode.com/f/screenshot-2022-12-30-at-18-2... ). It would be fantastic if they let us add custom “Open in…” options; I’ll add that as a feature request!
I haven't switched due to finding the $10/month subscription too steep at the moment, but I concur that the quality of search results is high. Often higher than Google actually. Sadly, pre-pending !g to general searches on DDG is practically muscle memory by now.
Been using it since the beta and would agree about the search quality.
$10 is also to steep for cost of living in my area. Hopefully something like region-dependent pricing comes in the future (although I feel like that's going to be tough with managing expenses so I understand if that's not going to happen). I do hope this succeeds though.
There's a 114-point submission from 2016[1] that's about Kagi, an eCommerce platform that launched in 1994 and ceased operations that year[2], that existed in that same domain[3]. Found it mildly interesting.
Can anyone else compare this to you.com, which is a similar concept in regards to increased privacy? I plan to sign up for Kagi tomorrow, but having used Kagi until I ran out of search on the free version, you.com seems to offer more features specifically in regards to YouChat and ability to preview certain results. It's also free for right now but wonder if they plan to go the ad-supported route in the feature, which would be a deal breaker for me over just paying a monthly plan like you do with Kagi.
If there's a lot of interest, we'd be happy to offer a monthly paid plan also. It's interesting. Only on HN do we hear users asking to pay for an otherwise free service. Majority of our users everywhere else would never pay for search.
youChat will get a lot better in the coming months
I think gradient on results page are distracting. You guys should do some UI review of results page. For me it's too distracting and hard to read the results.
Same with the logos at bottom they steal all attention.
EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this
EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.
Maybe consider making an "ad-supported, free" model, and a "premium" plan without ads? As long as advertising doesn't end up in the premium plan at any point it's the best of both worlds.
There can be weird issues if you use other extensions, especially content blockers. So in my case I had to enable AdGuard Pro first and only then Kagi.
I can't help but feel that the pricing is backwards.
I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly.
Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year.
Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up.
Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.
For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.
Agreed. It seems most comments in here find the quality noticeably better than G or DDG (I know I do.)
Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.
If they can white label CloudFlare as part of their iPrivacy for everyone with iCloud+, they could white label kagi as well.
The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default.
That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.
It seems incredibly inefficient if each search actually costs them 1.25 cents. Obviously, I have no real idea, but I just can't imagine that Google earns even a penny per search from ads.
First search result (not a credible one but I can't find a better number) says google does 2 trillion searches per year [0], or at least on that scale. Two trillion at a penny each would be $20 Billion. And you'd expect some economies of scale, though maybe some inefficient in running their ad and tracking apparatus. No idea what google actually spends but their revenue is something like 250 Billion so $20 billion is an underestimate. Anyway, in that context, Kagi's numbers don't sound to weird.
I've been having a good time with Kagi but I can't figure out how "In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" can be possible. That's on the order of Midjourney, DALL-E, and Davinci-003 and they're shoveling GPUs into furnaces to power their servers.
I understand they're having to pay for access to crawler results, to avoid the cost of indexing and crawling the entire web (though they do some themselves).
Would it very quickly at those costs become cheaper for them to crawl the most popular 10 million websites themselves and only use external providers as backfill?
recently i had a legit use for going past the 10th page of google, after which it wants to give me no more into. I tried the same query on kagi only got 2 pages.... I don't see if the premium actually gets u more
as far as I'm aware, you wouldn't get more with premium - kagi doesn't return as many search results as competitors
From their FAQ:
> We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.
I switched to it the last month or so. Got sick of DDG blatantly ignoring my query terms, Google’s results are filled with so many special result formats and SEO spam I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore, never mind the creepiness factor of Google.
Kagi’s results have been great. My biggest complaint is that it’s a weird name, which is really a compliment.
I tried Kagi and it is not better than Google or DDG, IMHO not worth any money. I use Google by default and Yandex when I am looking for PDFs, images, repair instructions, pages not indexed by Google at all.
First time I've heard of Yandex. The way you've described it, I might hopefully find it useful for the academic PDFs I've been seeing less and less in Google.
I am not sure about academic PDFs. It is like old google, it searches for keywords, doesn't try any AI guessing what you mean and doesn't blacklist domains like google.
I would be interested if the distributed model that's allegedly used by Presearch.com would work for Kagi, since the members seem like they would have financial disincentive to poison search results. That said, I only know enough of how Presearch works from their whitepaper, because trying it out seemed like some tomfoolery and I couldn't figure out if the risk would be the same as me running a Tor exit node
I don’t know anything about the services they use to provide results, but I’ve seen some services (geocoding lookups, google maps tiles, …) where they explicitly forbid caching.
I assume a big portion of the money goes to Google for their search API.
Initially I could not even believe, Google offered this kind of paid version to somebody. And I’m still a bit suspicious if they are only doing this to gather insights on how much people are willing to pay for ad-free search.
I'm 2 months into paying for Kagi. I'm so happy not having ads. I didn't really expect it to feel so different to me, but it does. Similarly, I didn't expect to feel good about paying for it. But it feels like a breath of fresh air, to be paying for a service that I deem worth the price, that isn't trying to extract money from me through a side channel.
I think the results have been better for me, though in a couple cases a top ranked result was 404'ing, which I've never had on google.
The UI is better imo, and I've occasionally used lenses which has been useful.
I haven't ever used !g in two months. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Google of years past, I fondly remember finding it in 1998 and feeling like I had an absolute superpower not just over people not on the internet, but over people still using the other search engines.
And I also am somewhat of an apologist, when people dump on Google search results getting worse over the years I'm quick to point out that it's a highly adversarial problem and they're the primary target.
But 24 years later, I couldn't be happier switching to Kagi now. Frankly, while I'm quite happy with my current work, it makes me fantasize of working for them.
I like lenses but I already wrote that someone should create market for search applications but using their index/tech. I think You.com has some search plugins but that probably could be improved.
Like for example: Forums only search, travels blog search (with filtering travel destination etc.), cooking recipes search only, fashion, markets
Happy paying customer here. I live in Japan while my main language use is English, I found that "International" option is quite useful - tech results are in English, while localilty related queries are in Japanese.
There's one aspect Kagi is not improving - the "explicit" results. Personally I find it's difficult to justify the universal effort across all the platforms and "monopolies" to minimizing the explicit results for adults.
Can confirm, not worse than Google. I do still use !g to use Google occasionally, but as often as not I'm disappointed in the Google results.
It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).
Tried it. You don't get better quality of anything. You just get to pay someone to collect your search history under an account with PII and payment info also associated. You have to login each time you search stuff in private browsing. Very annoying when I go back to a tab or back to search results and I need to login to see them. It is a worse experience and I have to pay for it and I can't use cash, coin, giftcards,etc...
I think they wanted to emulate proton maybe? But they don't have a free tier with at least ddg like experience and charge for premium features. Only people with a lot of disposable income who really care about privacy but also trust a company to not associate their info with their search history will use this.
In additional Kagi implements the same thing you suggested basically, called a private session token that allows you to be logged in by appending it to the URL if you do not want to use the extension.
I know from experience that Brave Search is a lot better than DDG (and way cleaner than Google) and also supports bangs. When I was on DDG, I frequently used !g but on Brave Search, I haven't had such need (except for when I want to search for images)
That's funny because for me, Brave Search is a better version of Google. Way more useful and relevant results than DDG ever gave me. It's also a lot cleaner too with more features.
169 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadIt's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time.
I haven't googled a single thing since switching to Kagi. Easily worth the $10/mo to not have my search history monetized, and to work with a company whose incentives are maximally aligned with giving me the content I am searching for.
Kagi also has nice features like personalized upweighting/downweighting of certain websites.
The Kagi team is also super responsive to feedback. I've submitted a few bug/feature requests that have gotten fixed within a week or two.
It's amazing that a small team can compete with google.
edit: oh man, if i could paid and get API access for my own apps.. that would be killer. Slowly extend it to stuff like IOT or AI integrations that i normally don't want to give cloud providers.. this would be really cool
Assuming it's paid per search, just screen-scrape the thing? There's no reason they'd care what client you use to access it if you're paying for each request.
With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
In fact all three of these have some odd results -
- "steve jobs"'s fifth result is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs at a 2003 conference, but the result is linked to a seemingly random 2606s timestamp and it is right below the Videos section with much more relevant videos - "python exceptions"'s second result is a blog post about Python exceptions being anti-patterns. I've not used Python in a while but that seems very wrong, and a terrible result to show to someone who might be learning Python or looking up how Exceptions work.
On the other hand, having such an obvious mistake on the homepage makes me trust more that they believe in their product enough to give you raw, real results (which may sometimes include stale content such as a parked domain) rather than a manually-crafted "perfect" results page that wouldn't be representative of the real product at all.
When I search Kagi for "best headphones" the first link on the page is to /r/HeadphoneAdvice, which is probably where I'd want to go. There are some not as good results down the page, but I never would have even seen them because the 1st link is what I wanted.
For "python exceptions" the top links are all to the python.org docs about exceptions, which is almost certainly what I wanted with that generic search.
If I search "steve jobs" or really <any famous person or event>, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time, and that is the #1 result. I've gotten increasingly frustrated with google in the last few years that they've gone away from this behavior for lots of searches. Sometimes the wikipedia article isn't even on the first page.
So, for my use cases, Kagi is behaving totally optimally for all these searches.
I subscribe to kagi.com and neeva.com but only use neeva for consumer goods searching:
https://neeva.com/search?q=best+headphones&src=mkthome
I signed up for kagi, ran out of the free searches in 2 days, my initial impression was "not better than google" and never looked back. I probably would have tried for a few more days if the trial was longer. Still more likely than not that I would have crawled back to google, but it did seem like not enough time to fully evaluate. For instance, the upweight/downweight feature you mention is intriguing but I didn't really get a chance to see any benefits of it.
I agree partially that they could have a longer trial but on the other hand, $10 without any sort of contract is a low enough barrier to give it a whirl.
As per the comment guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
As a community we want to encourage "curious" discussion, I can't find anything curious about your comment at all.
I can't use anything else then google for more than a day - for me every other search engine returns worse results than google, especially in my native language (polish), but startpage seemed to be best choice if I ever had to switch
It's still !s on DDG and Kagi.
1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network?
2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit?
I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.
Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads?
The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad.
Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked.
(for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability)
A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
I guess it depends on your threat model, but there are also privacy concerns with a search engine you have to make a paid account for.
For a regular user who signs into Google to use Gmail, they'll be searching while signed in anyway - no real loss of privacy, and arguably much gained by not broadcasting anything into the adtech data pools.
For a very privacy conscious user who wants to be anonymous and is already taking steps like using VPNs, there is a loss in privacy due to payment info being attached. (You could argue Google accounts could be pseudo anonymous, but for most users they're anything but - location data, history, emails and search queries make them totally identified).
There are technical solutions to avoid the payment linking issue (cash in envelope, selling gift cards via retail, etc), or through using blind signature schemes to separate payment from usage. The user experience of these options is likely to be far more complex, with people losing access and customer service fiascos with people being unable to prove they signed up before etc.
Which is an option with Brave and DDG, but obviously not Kagi. Yes, obviously, this is only going to be a relatively fringe use-case that depends on the user having generally decent opsec.
No need to argue the abstract; all that matters is the specific. If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.
If Kagi is being honest, typical usage of Kagi is probably more private than typical usage of advertising-supported search engines. But I can more easily verify that using e.g. Brave Search via Tor is private.
True. But even the payment thing could be solved although most users won't care. Mullvad comes to mind: you can send them cash via mail and the payment is associated to a serial number that is simultaneously your login and password.
That's not really the point. It is up to Kagi to prove to their customers that they are trustworthy, not up to the customers to find abuses of trust.
If I -- for example -- use Tor and a private browsing window to access Google search, I have a pretty good expectation of privacy. I don't have to trust Google here; they simply cannot correlate my search with my Google account in this case, at least not 100% reliably (browser fingerprinting, etc.).
But with Kagi, they know that every search I make, regardless of how I make it, is from me (or, at least, from someone using my account), and that account is tied to my real-world identity. Sure, they could implement a more complicated payment method, where I pay a third party, and that third party blind-signs some credentials that Kagi trusts. But they haven't done that, at least as an option, and that bothers me.
When it comes to third parties, the best kind of trust is the trust that you don't have to have. I have to trust that Kagi isn't keeping a record of my search results. I would rather that I just don't have to trust anything, because there's nothing nefarious they can do.
Fair enough. Since that is a provably impossible bar, you’re basically saying nobody should do business with anyone. Which I admire from an ideological purity perspective, but don’t really have time for at this age.
If I'm doing something in private browsing mode, I fall back to DDG. Not only do I feel weird about being signed into something when I'm supposedly doing something "private", either I have to manually sign into Kagi each time I open a private browsing window, or install their extension, neither of which I really want to do.
So I'm torn; I'm not sure if I'll keep paying for the account, or cancel it and go back to DDG.
Then again, I also pay Fastmail for email, which gives them access to all my email. Arguably that's just as bad (if not worse) for my privacy than giving someone my search history. It's not clear to me why I'm ok with that, but uncomfortable when it comes to Kagi. I suppose email is inherently tied to me, whereas search results need not be? I dunno.
Regardless, this is the big issue with paying for something on the internet that you can also get for free. In some ways my search privacy can be "trustably" better with Google (via private browsing + Tor or at least a VPN) than it can ever be with Kagi, which is weird.
One of the main reasons I use Kagi is similar to why I use Firefox & Brave. I want to encourage competitors so that innovation continues to happen.
But a search business where you pay for search is more likely to be privacy-respecting than a search business where a 3rd party (advertiser) is paying for your searches, just because the business model aligns incentives.
2) or HN? :-)
I also just don’t want to see tons of advertisements pretending to be results and figuring out which is which. Google also seems to be particularly susceptible to SEO garbage. Between their own ads pretending to be relevant and SEO garbage pretending to be relevant, I find myself scrolling through pages upon pages of advertisements hoping to find some signal. With Kagi I spend much less time discerning between garbage trying to capture my attention and something about what I’m looking for.
(I’d note here, as a bit of a non sequitur, that if/when something like chatgpt becomes more accurate and can provide references and do information retrieval better, I’ll be happier to use that at an even higher price point than Kagi. I find the ability to ask a question and get an answer even better than searching for documents that contain symbols in my term and personally assessing the contents for clues about an answer to my actual question. ChatGPT reminds me of the moment I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on some webpage someone sent me in 1998 - the tedium of answering questions had reduced dramatically.
That said, I think the semantic understanding required to answer questions in the ChatGPT way will allow for even more nuanced personalization, and I’m afraid even more insidious (1)’s.)
Their current product is worse than few years ago.
I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case.
If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.
Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.
This is a great way to put it. DDG feels worse than Google, which is why I would always use !g. I rarely use Google nowadays.
I've been using DDG happily for years and only fell back to Google at most 5 times during the last two years and I think half of the times it wasn't even useful to me.
Maybe it is the way how I write queries?
Nowadays I find Google's result page just confusing, so I disagree with calling Google better.
I'm also using their Orion browser and finding it quite a pleasure to use, a litt buggy, but good enough for a daily driver.
On the flips side, though, getting a "you cannot search anymore until you've paid" message was quite a shock to me. Like - I paid for it to try it out. It worked well, so it wasn't really a "nobody told me there would be a subscription" kind of shock, but more like on that second month I got the "wait, am I actually paying for the access to a search engine?" realization.
Makes you notice how much we are getting conditioned to the "out business for your data" business model.
I think it would work better if they added ads and other forms of revenue so they can lower the price.
We all know how Google turned out, and that's despite themselves admitting early on that an ad-based search engine would have misaligned incentives.
The kagi team are transparent about what it actually costs them (in cash) for searches you make. If they go down the advertising route, they'll just become another Google, as the incentives are not aligned.
First you'll get more ads onto the page to crowd out organic content. Then you'll subtly adjust what users search for, or what you return, to ensure you optimise for your highest paying ads. Then you'll hyper localise to make even more from sponsored listings etc.
If we want an internet where users aren't the product, there needs to be more transparency about what "free" things are actually costing in compute resource and similar. And ultimately a user has to either bring in more money than they cost (not ideal in developing countries where ad impressions and clicks can be worth a lot less), pay for what they use with a margin on top, or the company has to go onto the VC treadmill of promising greater future returns from eyeballs (back to advertising and data brokering again....)
Therefore while it is expensive compared with free, they're also being transparent about their real costs, and what the services that are free elsewhere (with monetisation) are actually having to make from selling ads to you to break even.
``` Your payments to usage balance -$8.50 ```
If I have to pay $18.5/mo, it will definitely bar me from using Kagi
Since the costs in question are per search, I think they were previously considering different pricing options, recognising that getting to ramen profitability is likely better than having more users and losing money every month (they're not venture-backed).
But it depends on what the true cost is. Is it indexing? Or actually searching?
Plus I think that bookmarks, shared search results, and curated searches (for whatever that means) are an implicit version of Page Rank, since of the bazillions of URLs in the world, ones which are bookmarked are by definition more valuable than others and should be refreshed more often and whose in and out links are also themselves probably more valuable. I'd argue the same thing for any URL that got the archive.ph treatment (if those are available) or manually saved archive.org snapshot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993
The Age of PageRank Is Over - 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 - Sept 2022 (191 comments)
Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments)
Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments)
It has some nice features, like lenses, URL rewriting, and the ability to bump sites to the top.
I have a lens for programming. It shows only certain sites, like GitHub and Stack Exchange, and I enable it when appropriate.
For URL rewriting, I have Kagi set to rewrite URLs from Twitter and Reddit to my own self-hosted instances of Nitter [0] and Teddit [1], so that when I open a Kagi result that would've gone to twitter.com, it goes to nitter.mydomain.com, which lets me use Twitter without an account.
Lastly, I use the site bumping feature to move Wikipedia results to the top.
[0]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1]: https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit
One thing I'd like to do, that's pretty specific, is having a site with my own bangs that do specific things like for example: open the url in archive.is and archive.org or open OpenLibrary.org and GoodReads. Similar nice functionality might include stripping of spaces for certain queries.
Does anyone know of a tool like this? Otherwise, it would probably be simple enough to build my own and have a kagi bang that directs to it as needed.
I am a Firefox user too, but Orion feels to hit an interesting spot on mobile in terms of the benefits of Safari's power optimisations (via using webkit), with extensions and similar.
I have lots of custom searches accessed by a keyword, usually two letters, and I can modify the query string any way I want or take some other action with it. My 'lucky' searches use DDG to go straight to the top result on the site(wikipedia, mdn etc) but they also stuff the query into the system wide find pasteboard. If the top result isn't right I can immediately jump to a google search of the site with the search query with a keyboard shortcut.
I used Alfred for a while and then didn't use any similar tool and now have been using raycast for about a year and quite enjoy it. They have a built-in quick links feature that lets you paste whatever to open a search but accessing the current URL could improve it so much!
javascript:location.href = "https://archive.vn/" + location.href
Edit: feature request added at https://kagifeedback.org/d/1178-allow-custom-open-in-options...
E.g., in Firefox, bookmark
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!%s
and save it with the keyword gg (or whatever)
Now whenever you enter gg searchterm in your location bar, it's the same as searching !g searchterm on DDG.
$10 is also to steep for cost of living in my area. Hopefully something like region-dependent pricing comes in the future (although I feel like that's going to be tough with managing expenses so I understand if that's not going to happen). I do hope this succeeds though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kagi.com
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972
[2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.c...
youChat will get a lot better in the coming months
I think it would be wonderful!
Richard from you.com here.
EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.
I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly.
Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year.
Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up.
Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.
For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.
Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.
Apple doesn't need to buy everything and in my opinion they're not the saviour.
The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default.
That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trilli...
From their FAQ:
> We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.
Kagi’s results have been great. My biggest complaint is that it’s a weird name, which is really a compliment.
$0.0125 per search seems awfully high. Do they think this cost can be compressed as more users use Kagi thanks to economies of scale?
I wonder if the API calls to external providers could be cached. I am also wondering if they are also using expensive big-tech VMs in the background?
I am feeling costs could be reduced.
Initially I could not even believe, Google offered this kind of paid version to somebody. And I’m still a bit suspicious if they are only doing this to gather insights on how much people are willing to pay for ad-free search.
I think the results have been better for me, though in a couple cases a top ranked result was 404'ing, which I've never had on google.
The UI is better imo, and I've occasionally used lenses which has been useful.
I haven't ever used !g in two months. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Google of years past, I fondly remember finding it in 1998 and feeling like I had an absolute superpower not just over people not on the internet, but over people still using the other search engines.
And I also am somewhat of an apologist, when people dump on Google search results getting worse over the years I'm quick to point out that it's a highly adversarial problem and they're the primary target.
But 24 years later, I couldn't be happier switching to Kagi now. Frankly, while I'm quite happy with my current work, it makes me fantasize of working for them.
Like for example: Forums only search, travels blog search (with filtering travel destination etc.), cooking recipes search only, fashion, markets
There's one aspect Kagi is not improving - the "explicit" results. Personally I find it's difficult to justify the universal effort across all the platforms and "monopolies" to minimizing the explicit results for adults.
It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).
I think they wanted to emulate proton maybe? But they don't have a free tier with at least ddg like experience and charge for premium features. Only people with a lot of disposable income who really care about privacy but also trust a company to not associate their info with their search history will use this.
That drove me crazy with Neeva.com, too, and I actually suggested to them that they could offer a URL with a pre-shared key in it that I could use for incognito windows, like https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-90... or (arguably superior) https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example....
They still haven't fixed that :-(
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
In additional Kagi implements the same thing you suggested basically, called a private session token that allows you to be logged in by appending it to the URL if you do not want to use the extension.
I know from experience that Brave Search is a lot better than DDG (and way cleaner than Google) and also supports bangs. When I was on DDG, I frequently used !g but on Brave Search, I haven't had such need (except for when I want to search for images)
Among all the search engines I have tried, Brave search has been the crappiest- hands down. Nothing even comes close.
Well, I poked around with Startpage for a day or two. Maybe it was crappier than Brave Search.
DDG, Bing, etc. are miles better than Brave search. Kagi is a lot better than DDG/Bing.
If you search the comments here, you'll see a lot of people share the same opinion as me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967767
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678326