Glad they found a way to to walk back the limited search count (especially when so many things you wouldn't think counted did). Might have to re-enable my account now.
Happy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is.
When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Now? Never.
10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.
There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.
Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!"
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
Yet.
Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.
When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.
I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.
Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.
In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.
The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.
Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.
(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)
Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:
> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account
The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.
“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.
Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?
No it's the actual word. "google it" allows for a liaison between the two words because "google" technically ends with an l sound (a consanant) and "it" begins with with a vowel - "googlit". It's also a soft sorta rolling consanant, which helps. In the case of "kagi it", "kagi" ends in an I and "it" begins in an I. That means you have to make a hard stop between the two words and pronounce clearly to differentiate between one I and the other otherwise you lose the words entirely. The two words fail to flow into each other in any way, making them feel less like a pair. Phrases that are easy and satisfying to say in the sense that they are actually just easy to get your mouth around are more likely to catch on. This is definitely something they should consider more carefully.
One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.
What happened to simply using the verb “search”? Or phrases like “look it up”? It shouldn’t really matter (typical conversation) which search engine a person is using.
My biggest question - and the one that will drive me to subscribe right now is how "harmful" "misinformation" and "malinformation" is treated today, and how it will be in the future.
I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.
A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.
If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.
Or covid vaccines.
Or anything.
If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.
I'm also curious about this, but if the claim that it's mostly a proxy for Google with some way to rerank results is true, then it wouldn't solve that problem.
Yandex is pretty great for that. It's trash. Everything it spits out is trash. But sometimes you're looking for trash. If you're looking for some old offensive meme or whatever you can pretty easily find it in Yandex Image Search, for example.
> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?
Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct.
Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).
So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
I can see a potential problem here in that a sizeable win from a random bet is likely to encourage some people to keep making these bets in future, with inevitable consequences.
At least with sports betting skill can make money. Just betting on the first place team to win over the last place team for example, it won't always win, but typically will. Of course bookies know this and so the payoff isn't enough to make a living on (if you can figure out the exception and bet only on the last place teams that win you can live well). Statistics are generally well studied in sports, but if you study how a team is coached you can find cases where they have a better than statistical chance to win a game they are expected to lose. Most people betting sports either always bet for their team, or bet on statistics, so if you can exploit something else.
You can buy a lottery ticket for every single big jackpot for a year and lose less than your average options trader. The value is the feeling you get that you and your family might not have to work for the rest of your lives. That feeling is clearly and obviously worth a dollar a day.
I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.
If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.
The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.
But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
Look at the numbers of the people playing lotto/scratch-offs. Look at where they are being sold. These are targeted at a specific group of people. You can try to whitewash it all you want, but it only makes you look naive. Especially that last sentence of yours. I'm really struggling to not get banned for commenting to this, but I'd suggest taking some rose tinted glasses off and taking a real look at this issue.
Not only have I never heard that definition used, I don't see how that definition makes any sense in context. The older, more commonly used meaning is clearly the one being used here.
Well that is why I asked. I have heard whitewashing used quite a few times in this way, though usually in the context of film or TV. I very well could have just missed it in the moment.
Again, this is why I asked how it was the race-based version of whitewashing rather than immediately going into a debate. I wanted to clarify my understanding and see if I missed anything before jumping down someone's throat, would have been nice to get the same courtesy here.
The poor people who buy a $5 ice-cream sundae every day are the ones addicted to food ... people are not making a freely reasoned choice to spend money gambling, poor people are in a vulnerable position and lottery runners exploit that with heavy advertising to ensure people are hooked on the idea they can improve things by spending money on what seems like hope.
> But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?
A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?
Even those who don’t think ads affect them are mistaken. And if you extirpate ads completely from your life the tax is your time and effort to do so. That’s one of the most toxic mantras, it even seems purposefully misguiding.
I mostly agree, but I've been blocking ads however ways I can for years now, and I'd say a few minutes of setup has saved me HOURS of dealing with ads at this point.
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
I wish I'd been able to get the pihole to work as easily as it sounded. It looked cool. But it was incompatible with the router from the ISP I had at the time, and rather than also buy and setup a new router, I just packed it away. Now I have a new ISP with a different router, and I'm sure it's incompatible too.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like.
It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.
Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.
That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!
I know this is late but I did a PiHole for years as well. But then I needed another solution for being out of the house, and my housemate later complained they wanted to see Facebook ads…
And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).
It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.
Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.
So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.
Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)
When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.
Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”
Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.
It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.
Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.
I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website).
Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features.
I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue.
There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried.
Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.
The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam).
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
They have. It's a lot better now than when they started out. They have incrementally been improving it. The reason why it gets pushed down is because a lot of people have a natural distate for the ads and the fact that it's a content farm. But if you have good ad blocking I don't see the harm in using it as long as you understand what it is.
They went from being bad compared to everything else to now feeling good compared to everything else.
Basically they stayed static and the rest of the internet worsened around them and our perspectives are now skewed.
What used to feel like a spammy content farm is actually not that bad now that we have seen real spammy content farms, like the SO clones that just take SO posts, rip out important css elements so it is harder to read, and slap as many ads as the ad networks allow them around it and then throw up exit intent banners and crypto-mining javascript.
Now just a normal content farm feels like a breath of fresh air when we deal with those garbage sites as alternatives.
Way back when they first started, they used to have content that was outright blatantly wrong and dangerous if followed. It's definitely much better in that respect now.
This is correct. They haven't been treading water. They have consciously tried hard to edit out the flagrantly incorrect content that used to be on the site.
I agree with you about w3schools; they've improved a lot since they first started out, and cleaned up a lot of problems. I think it's just fine to use for that purpose. A lot of technologists look down their noses at w3schools and vilify them just because they consider it a content farm.
In theory it does, but pretty much nobody uses it in this manner except for W3C, so that is the association for most people who recognize it in the first place.
Interesting to see reddit on the block list, I have issues with the way they’ve been operating but I do often find myself explicitly adding site:reddit.com to google searches, since it seems like one of few places online where there is still non-sponsored conversation about diverse topics. RIP old-school forums.
I'm doing the same thing, but specifically for reviews/recommendations. I can't remember the last time I had even an inkling of trust for a review published on a website. Reddit is basically the only source I have for potentially trustworthy opinions about products
IMO, this is no longer the case. Basically any new thread is getting astroturfed by marketing teams, and it seems like Reddit started doing SEO to promote newer threads, so the days of reliable reddit reviews seem to be over
Definitely true. Marketing teams at multiple roles paid third parties to advertise on Reddit. Even tongue in cheek comments about incidents are marketing.
Subreddits that are about buying things (/r/buyitforlife, /r/frugalmalefashion) are done. Same with any askreddit thread that's like "What's a product for under $x that changed your life" or something like that.
I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.
If you're not logged in to Reddit (and Facebook, etc), you often don't get the content that shows in the snippet of the SERP. Google don't always have a cached page now.
I'm ... surprised and have mixed emotions that though msn.com is listed, no Yahoo domains make any of the blocked / raised / lowered / pinned lists. I'm reading that as a sign of total irrelevance.
I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google.
I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.
I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.
I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit.
And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
Google's been losing in blind comparisons for over a decade (experiments:
- Both have google branding -> competitor wins
- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins
- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins
Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.
Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.
Bing beats Google for certain queries - most notably when I invoke the AI chat.
And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.
Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.
I switched to Ecoasia when BG3 released and a search for “BG3 wiki” didn’t turn up the actual wiki site on Google. Maybe it’s because it’s on a .wiki subdomain (I’m only 90% sure that’s what it’s at since I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s on some “odd” subdomain), but Google returned a plethora of useless wiki sites that were frankly so terrible it hurt. I believe the Duck had largely the same issue, but Ecoasia didn’t.
Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.
I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.
Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.
The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.
hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam.
For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again.
Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
I never got why these even ever appear in Google search results (or any search results, really). It feels like it would be super trivial to identify sites that are scraped copies of other sites. Granted, without foreknowledge, the engine doesn't know which is the original. But at the very least this can be determined by a human once, and then the problem goes away forever for that particular site.
It's googles fault. They are the ones who make this a viable business model. They pay the ads, and they pollute their search results with this garbage.
100% Google who are destroying this part of the internet.
At this point it's just safer to treat any content newer than about a year ago as highly suspect. Bots and fake content have been around for years, but things changed when ChatGPT and the copycats went live.
Funny that you mention this game. bg3.wiki, the community wiki had a lot of troubles with SEO. It got ignored or pushed down in the search results for a very long time, while the awful Fextralife wiki that includes a Twitch view botting iframe on every pages was always first.
The blue ribbon chef was said to be the cream of the cream, so the restaurant owner was happy for him to have white card over the place. He arranged an outside the work of fatty liver, a main course of rooster of wine with eat all, and as the blow of mercy: burned cream; the full menu was a feat of strength! He made sure to wish the diners good appetite. However, when the owner visited from her foot on the ground she turned into a terrible child and demanded mouth amusers and crescents. She hated the decorative objects of art made of chewed paper.
(When we steal from French, we don't translate it to English, it becomes English).
How can the search engine not able to tell who the original is? Originals always exist earlier, not to mention SO.com domain rank is way higher than those spammed sites that existed for less years.
I just did exactly this search on Google. The first result was this -[0] which is exactly spot on. Not sure if it is because I use Brave browser which also blocks ads on websites.
My goodness, I thought you were exaggerating. I've been using ad blockers for so long, I forgot the web had this many ads. Or has it just gotten worse over time?
I think it depends on the site. I remember early 00s where many download sites would have ads with a download button, or pop-ups that blasted sound like YOU JUST WON. Now I think that sorta thing has been normalized to even non shady sites. My primary use of ad blocker is so that I don't get random autoplaying videos.
I wonder if adblockers have contributed to this. In theory we users can reward non-horrible advertisers by whitelisting their ads, but in practice we tend to block as much as possible. The remaining ad-viewing audience will be partly composed of people who are ethically opposed to adblocking or are held back by a lack of tech knowledge, but it will also be relatively insensitive to ads (both in the sense of being able to put up with a lot, and in the sense of requiring a lot to attract their attention).
How can you be ethically opposed to something that ruins your experience? It’s obviously their choice, I just can’t imaging browsing without adblock, I’m ethically opposed to the pages filled with crap I guess.
Those who go through the effort to make good web content, and who pay the costs for a web server deserve to be paid. So ethically I should not block ads.
I block them anyway because ads also have an ethical contract with me that they have broken. They need to not take up too many resources on my computer, not make noise when the website otherwise has no noise content, not install malware, and be for legitimate products not scams. Probably more as well, but the above are things I regularly caught ads doing before I got an ad blocker.
If Chrome, Edge, Safari all came with uBlock by default, what percentage do you think would be "ethically opposed" enough to disable the extension? How many would turn it right back on?
Well, I still remember times when 50% of google results weren’t ads.
Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.
And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit.
Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.
Wow. I just loaded it and then turned off the adblocker and reloaded it. It's like you need another search engine just to find the content in the page hidden amongst all those ads.
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
Yes people are. And it’s the least technically literate people with “outdated” machines and bad connections that slug through the web like this. They don’t know what to trust and often fall prey to deceptive tactics.
The result on Google is indeed correct, but I was posting a trivial example that was supposed to show the variety of answers/sources not the accuracy of the top one. For that, they're fairly similar, although Kagi seems to prefer the higher signal-to-crap ratio.
This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation.
I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.
Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.
At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.
Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.
Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi? I don't use Pinterest, and never really encounter it on a daily basis, but some of my friends really like the site. Tbf, they might use stackoverflow more, but seeing Hacker News on the top 5 doesn't seem to reflect the average web user's usage...
I wonder if it is also biased in the sense that it's only certain people who customise these things. And that it's only the most common ones. You would never see my favourite car forum listed here, but bumping it in search results is where I see value with the feature.
There was a time where Google image search was dominated by Pinterest results but clinking through never took you to the photo. And most of the photos were rehosting of the original so you wouldn't get that either.
I only recently discovered pinterest as a useful site, but only because a friend convinced me to create an account. It only becomes usable with an account and it even makes fun, but most people are probably like I was and don’t want to create an account and are annoyed of pinterest hijacking the „save image“ function, redirecting you when you don’t have an account and nagging you with a login wall. It really only becomes great if you give in (only took me 5 years or so).
Of course they are biased. Just look at how NYTimes is both blocked and upvoted on Kagi. Some people like a source and others don’t, it’s that simple really.
I used pinterest and still hate(d) when it popped up on search.
Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center
Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.
I had to quit doing so, because I discovered that it didn't just exclude listed domains, but performed a totally different search. Locations or local results were largely missing, when I excluded some domains.
That's curious, please expand on this. Do you really mean it performed a search for different thing? If so - have you figured how it differed?
Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?
When I search for “pizza hut”, I get: the info panel that shows Wikipedia intro and company social media profiles on the right, locations results and integrated map view as the second result. When I search for “pizza hut -site:pinterest.com”, I get none of those. In addition, results are listed in a different order.
if this was the main cause, the expected result would be lots of highly-upvoted bad answers, as opposed to lots of scarcely-upvoted bad answers that somehow rank highly in Google searches
Quora has plenty of potential for making consistent profit without whoring itself out, but consistent profit isn't enough in the post-Freedman world that we live in
I wouldn't say that's the problem I've observed. around 2015 or so I remember consistent useful Quora answers from Quora. it was Yahoo answers but better because people could justify with qualifications. I actually had an account briefly
then I'm not exactly sure when, but definitely by 2018, every answer I ever see on Google is either incorrect, answering the wrong question, or in broken English. commonly all three at once
I don't recall ever seeing a product placement, although admittedly I stopped clicking a long time ago
my educated guess is that due to some likely seo-related concern they deleted/archived/unlisted their old good quality answers in favour of newer more seo-friendly answers
it may not even be their fault, it's possible that Google's algorithm just doesn't drag up older answers from their website, but given my experience with the decision-making in the brief time I was a user there (e.g. removing the ability to add a description to questions) I suspect not
Due to linkrot, a lot of images that stood on independent websites, are now only available on Pinterest, which scraped and cached them before the original site went dark. Clicking through to the original links these days often leads to 404s.
It's telling that the top sites on that list accurately map to companies that have been the most "successful" at blitzing the incentive structures of the current internet economics model.
I don't understand why people hate Pinterest in image search results. If the image is relevant to my search then I don't care who's hosting it. Can somebody explain to me what the problem is here? https://0x0.st/HO57.webm
(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)
I don't like pinterest because the images have no metadata. If I see something I'm interested in--like a piece of furniture--I have no way of knowing how to get more info on it.
Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.
Counterpoint: That feature has very little utility to all but a tiny fraction of users. Those users can readily find other means (e.g. extensions) to achieve the same thing. In the interest of simplicity, it was the right call to remove this. I imagine it was pitched for its ability to gather feedback on search quality, but the type of people using the feature aren't representative.
SO, MDM are the good results together with the blog Kagi gave in 5th place. In google you got the first two then a lot of spam and not the other good results.
Is this after you've done a lot of blocking (or other customisation)? For me the top Kagi results are mostly similar to the Google ones, and when I scroll down a bit Kagi doesn't save me from articles with openings like
> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.
That's still an example of better quality results that should be quantifiable, that's ranking. We have things like precision@n/NDCG@n/etc. where it should be straight forward to show a metric for some smaller n where Kagi beats Google since it doesn't show some set of irrelebant/low quality results interspersed.
But with an extension I can have a personal garbage block list or hide/collapse website preview without removing the result completely that works on other search engines
Btw, can you hide text preview on Kagi instead of removing the domain completely (in case you're not certain the website is garbage and sometimes want to check the results, but just want them less visible)?
Maybe for you that is better, but I want word negation to work, and "verbose" to actually require words I specify to be on the page. Word stemming would be good as an option.
Sure, I'd like Booleans to work again, and intitle:.
That said, Google could probably make an inferred search interpretation work well if they wanted to return results that were good for the user rather than return results that optimise their ad revenue.
Why stop there? The best mind-reading search engine is one that doesn't even let me type queries, it tells me what I need to know before I even know I need to know it. The fact that all search engines still have query fields tells me they all still suck at reading my mind.
> when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy
OMG. Why doesn't Google filter out the likes of geeksforgeeks for instance? How is it possible that it always come before the genuine SO answer?
Even without offering the possibility to filter out a domain (which they had, and later removed), how does the ranking algorithm not see those horrible, zero value clones??
I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.
My theory is that google went from ads in search results to ads on visited pages. By buying doubleclick etc they are suddenly incentivised to drive traffic to ad-supported websites.
Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.
But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?
Aha. Couldn't help but scratch my own itch. I wonder if DDG has a deal with Google where they get a cut of the ad profit if they are mentioned as a `ref` in the doubleclick ad request.
:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1>m=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F
&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do?
&hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4
Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.
I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.
To reproduce:
1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website
2. click on the link
3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.
Most other search engines train with a target of google or with some form of reward which is bootstrapped on google rankings. It makes Bing results implicitly have the same behavior as Google. DDG and others just use BingAPI so googles incentives pass on through.
That doesnt make much sense to me. Google's interests are not microsoft's or DDG's interests and to hold up Google as some sort of ground truth in what the optimal search results for a given query are is, as proven by Kagi, highly deluded and also quite subjective.
If true however, it does go to show that Google is really a monopolist in the search space as well... and to substantiate this claim would go a long way into proving that.
We could test this. Take a few hundred search queries, strip the pages that display Google ads, and see if the remainder of the search result is better or worse.
We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"
With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.
It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.
I don't doubt it, but obviously something's going wrong between the human-generated training data and the SERP, else why are we getting utter crap back?
(Or, as I said, it's our idea of what constitutes a good result that's wrong).
Adblockers are not a defense against this, as those results are genuine search results.
I run uBlock origin (of course), am extremely aware that geeksforgeeks exist and is utter shit, and yet I get fooled now and again, which makes me very angry at that website, Google, myself, and the world in general...
If I ran a seal-clubbing business I'd have to club seals to make money.
The whole argument is that those sites don't exist to provide a good service yet sadly need to show ads to keep the lights on.
I’m just wondering to whom those ads get shown… not arguing that anyone should turn off their adblocker and keep them running
They are working hard to trick people into clicking on their links, but won’t most people who click those links be running an ad blocker? Are unsophisticated web users searching for questions answered on stack overflow?
I get those in Google as well. But tbh, I don't care. If I'm looking for "current time in JavaScript", I don't care if the answer comes from stackoverflow or any of it's clones. It's not like I want to interact with that site somehow. I just want answers. If I want interaction, I obviously go to stackoverflow directly.
It might matter that I'm using Ad-blockers, so maybe if I didn't, those sites would feed me obnoxious popups and malware, but as it stands, I don't see any difference...
When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched)
Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is.
It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.
I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow.
I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc
Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
> But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google.
Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.
- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.
- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.
- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
Quotes are supposed to be for verbatim searches, so having the search engine "fix spelling" (in quotes because a lot of the time it's not a misspelling, just a specialized term or something like that) in them is kinda counterproductive and it's incredibly annoying when Google does that.
If you get zero results, you'd probably see the mistake prettty fast, right?
I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.
And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine
The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI
> The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.
I wasn't sure because this never bothered me so I did a little experiment by searching for
"does it warn about mispellings"
(Note the intentional misspelling above.)
And here is the result:
We haven’t found anything.
There are no results that match all your keywords exactly.
Check your spelling, try different keywords, or try without quotes:
does it warn about mispellings
Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.
When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
Thanks for checking! This result is too verbose (first two sentences mean the same, but also aren't needed since you already see no results), and then instead of the "check your spelling" it should just, you know, check my spelling :) and show an active link to the quoted query with typos corrected
And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok
When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective.
I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.
In my experience it's far, far better than google search. The ability to boost some domains and block others is invaluable.
But also, because you're the customer not the product, you don't have to contend with Google's ad-driven search results and their privacy violating bs. Totally worth the money.
(Kagi user since the beta, paying user since they started offering subscriptions.)
- it combines the top 10 this or that list into listicles that are aggregated into their own section and I find to often be full of spam
- it lets you block or deprioritize any site you want like quora, medium, Forbes, that often give me useless or incorrect info or are just their to boost so
- it lets you prioritize sites you like in the search ranking
- it doesn’t have blocked or censored keywords
- it lets you specify by date or time quickly and easily which I find to be beneficial and google seems to hide it constantly move around in news
It’s weaker for like looking up a phone number or hours for a local eatery, but in general I like it better.
Yes, its results are far better than Google’s. Google results are full of SEO spam, marketing pages, etc. Kagi tends to surface official documentation, blog posts, online discussion/Q&A. Overall, it does a very good job highlighting “real” content rather than “artificial” content. Plus, you can personalize it by boosting/downranking/blocking sites, creating regex rewrite rules on URLs, etc.
I've been using Kagi for about a year now as well and have been very happy. I find that I still go back to Google when I am ready to purchase a product or find a local service. In this case, I find that I'm generally happy with the people who are paying money for search placement (either directly to Google or for hardcore SEO) and find I can get less "fly-by-night" type companies that way.
that's funny as the fly-by-night companies in my experience are the ones spending all of their efforts to win the SEO to get those clicks where the established companies can be found by less sleazy methods
That's awesome that it's so flexible. Can you search using symbols? Like if I'm trying to search "what is %" will it bring back results regarding the percentage sign, or results that start with the words "what is"?
That's my major problem with google. Sometimes I need to search info on a symbol, and I don't know what it's called yet, so I have to perform another search, just to perform the one I actually care about.
It looks like the like the blog post linked to by Features links to plain search page URLs, which only work for logged-in users. I used the Share feature to get a sharable link. I guess that page needs to be updated.
I've sometimes found that including quotes around the symbol gives me more relevant results since Google should interpret that as "find results that contain this exact string". However I just tried it with your % example and the results were unchanged, I have found this to work myself in other instances so perhaps it's a mixed bag
God trying to look up what some string of characters in a random programming language is feels like a Sisyphean task in Google. Try getting Google to understand what a typed hole in Haskell is without knowing it's called a typed hole
I search a lot for programming topics and when I get frustrated I switch to Google and get literally the same results. I’d say it’s pretty good for web search and keeps up to date.
The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
Mainly tech/programming stuff for which Kagi is outstanding. Lately I've searched a lot about a city (restaurants, places to visit, events, ...) I moved in and it works for that too.
> 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable.
This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.
Some platforms actually do account for this by having special "developing countries" discounts, or some other euphemism like that. IIRC Gumroad is one that supports this.
I think most people have a negative kneejerk reaction to asymmetrical pricing when they're the ones paying more. Generally for most things, the cost of delivering a product or service doesn't vary too much based on factors like local living wages, so at the end of the day, you're paying more margin than some other people are. In some cases, maybe your group is flat-out subsidizing other groups.
It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary.
Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
Some people will even go out of their way to abuse a pricing scheme to get things for far cheaper. See cdkeys selling Xbox live cards from Argentina, for example
Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.
By this logic they should increase their prices to $1,000,000/mo. They are not a charity, right? Why would they sell it for a measly $10?
The point is, pricing is adjusted to maximise profitability. If lowering the price for a specific market increases your profitability, you would go for it. There is a sweet spot, but it is not the same for every customer. You need segmentation to fully utilise the potential.
Keep in mind that executing the searches has a cost for Kagi.
I remember I could see my usage which was about 700 searches per month and which costed ~8$ I think. My subscription was 10$ so 2$ would go to pay their devs and to R&D. So they can't really go lower then 10$ for specific markets.
> When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Same. I still do attempt a Google fallback if I don't easily find what I want on Kagi, but every single time, the Google results aren't what I'm looking for either.
One of Kagi's core principles seems to be that they don't try to guess what you want. Their "Personalized Results" settings just ask you to tell them which domains you like and which you're tired of seeing. It makes sense that they'd ask you for your locale rather than guessing it from your IP or asking for location access.
As someone who's sick and tired of the way Google tries and fails to guess what I want—to the point of now ignoring me when I try to tell it what I want with search operators—I appreciate this philosophy!
I've been a paying customer for more than a year, in my experience DDG is not even in the same league as Kagi. DDG provides a noticeably worse search experience than Google for most queries, whereas Kagi is either just as good or often better than Google.
Been paying for a long while now, I expect I'll keep paying a lot longer. It's very, very good.
Occasionally, I'm on someone else's computer where I'm not signed in to Kagi, and I try DDG first, but I frequently resort to pulling out my phone and just searching there.
Echoing what others have said. When I used DuckDuckGo, I would have to resort to using Google all the time because Google's results were often better. Since switching to Kagi, I never feel the need to use Google anymore.
Been paying for Kagi for about a year now. It’s great and worth it. As good as google for search, but with much better tools and basically zero ad spam.
I've heard about it, signed up the other day, didn't use it. I tried it today on a medical condition that's been hard to get good info on, and while it wasn't the first hit, there was a great reference fairly high up that I didn't find on Google. I'm working on budgeting for yet another subscription as I figure kagi will be my next go-to if AI doesn't outstrip it first. And probably even then(sometimes you have to use the Dead Internet).
i really wanted to ditch google and gave my best shot to DDG and just couldn't use it, had to go to !g all the time.
been paying for Kagi close to a year and I only do !g when I am proactively seeking to look at SEO spam
Previously i used DDG and fell back to Startpage/Google constantly. With Kagi, i can't remember the last time i did that. I also get a lot of value out of FastGPT (a labs search thing from Kagi).
Overall, i'm very happy with my starter subscription.
It sounds hyperbolic, but using Kagi reminds me of back in 98 or 99 when I first discovered Google. I can get results I want every single time without wading through garbage.
Basically all I want is a search engine that does what I tell it to do, and doesn't try to be smarter than me, because it is not. My killer Kagi feature is the forum search. The only way to get real human opinions on things, rather than regurgitated blogspam that's pervasive on Google and even more on DDG and other smaller engines.
I think Kagi sounds interesting but the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types. E.g. I am interested but can't be bothered to pursue it as it seems like an unnecessary additional SAS model cost to my monthly budget.
How does search quality really change my life?
Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.
How much time do you waste wading through bad search results?
Would you pay $10/mo to fix that problem?
For me, the answer has been yes. I don't think that is true of everyone (but maybe some people can live in the free plan limits!)
I started with the free plan, made it my default search engine and then tried to measure how often I felt like I had "lost something" once my free tier was up. And yeah, having to go back to Google or DuckDuckGo felt like I lost a really good tool and was using a mediocre replacement.
Ask this to someone who remembers when Google first appeared.
I am not a Kagi user, but am seriously considering it after a number of months having to dig through at least 8 results of paywalled or possibly AI-generated pages for almost every Google query; seriously, I just did a search for 'python concatenate list' on google and it was worse than I expected - the official docs weren't even on the first two pages and even the helpful Stack Overflow answers were the 5th result down - give it a go, the results are trash.
I google things at least 20 times a day, and probably so do you. I would pay for something that can cut out the bollocks - if Kagi can follow through, they'll have a customer.
Yep, I think I’m going to try Kagi. I am so, so tired and exhausted of every search result on Google being “the top X in ${this_month_of_this_year}” with a list of Amazon affiliate links. I append Reddit to the searches for products now, but notice on higher margin items you can click into Reddit user history of people giving their “opinion” and see that every post they make is about that particular product.
Just tried that same query without the quote marks on Kagi.
The first result is an info box from Stack Overflow showing use of the + operator to join two lists (with a link to source).
Then 4 more relevant SO posts (which are more nuanced and specific than the generic query, like concatenating into a single string, or concatenating without creating a copy.
Then a small inset box as a "blast from the past" with 4 older blog posts, at least 2 of which look pretty relevant here just from the title.
Then 5 more SO posts (again more nuanced and specific variants of the underlying question), and a digital ocean post on 6 ways to concatenate a list in Python.
> the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types
There are lucrative bundling opportunities.
I am waiting fora corporate product; it's notable that Google Workspace still subjects you to ads in search. That's not only a data leak. It's also a constant attention tax on your knowledge workers.
You might want the blog to prominently link back to https://kagi.com. "Home" took me to https://blog.kagi.com, I tried clicking on the pricing table image, etc. but nothing got me to the actual product.
I had to manually enter https://kagi.com to see the product behind the blog.
I pay $5/mo. for 30GB at FastMail, and $10/mo. for Kagi Search.
I switched away from Gmail years ago; the risk of getting locked out of my digital identity with no recourse is worth more than $5/mo. Not having my electronics receipts, plane tickets and newsletters datamined for an improved ad experience is just a perk.
There are tons of information workers who are dependent on search in their work – or if they're not, could work much better with good quality search.
The examples are really too many to list, but it really depends on the person. When it comes to not spending a dollar, people will create the most incredible and reality-defying reasons. So I'd expect 99% of Google users to keep using Google, or maybe even stop using web search when Google becomes completely unusable. Then they'll say "I have no need to search for things anyway".
Right, but then it doesn’t make sense for me as one of those information workers to pay for it. It’s not clear that I can get $120/year of value out of it.
Why isn't it clear? You can try it for free, or even pay for just a month in order to see if the quality is good enough. Then you know for sure if it's worth the price or if it isn't.
Because unless my salary increases by more than $120 as a direct result of using Kagi, it’s not a good use of my money. It’s the same reason I don’t pay for nicer chairs in my office.
If a better search engine makes employees more productive, the target customer is the business, not the employee.
I'd wager Kagi has a lot of benefit in learning and finding solutions to issues where you don't know the correct terminology AND in tech where a lot of non-tech content is available (f.e. analytics)
With chairs it's also less of a benefit in regards to productivity but health and comfort. I'm also still rocking a 150€ chair from IKEA, totally viable and comfortable, but I do see the benefit in a chair that has a lot of configuration options because I am slightly too large for mine. Still means one needs to know how to configure it properly (which is 90% of the health change)
Hard to quantify comfortability since it really indirectly affects mentality.
Then again, I'm not really using search a lot when working so Kagi is obviously also nothing for me
A lot. I make dozens and dozens of searches on an average day.
I'm also somewhat cheap when it comes to subscriptions.
Throwing $10/mo. for something I can get "for free" is not a light choice. But...
1) I don't like Google's philosophy, I don't like being the product, I like being a customer
2) Google Search results have gradually gotten worse, mostly because of SEO spam
3) I don't really trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage, their model is essentially also advertising
I still use Google Search / Maps when I want to buy something, i.e., when I want ads.
I prefer to not go to the mall for recreation or work either.
Search quality improves my life. Like actually I'm a happier searcher since Kagi and I search more frequently because I have increased confidence that I'll get meaningful results. I don't grumble like I used to every time I had to wade through a pool of SEO shit spam. But that's just me.
Hmm most of the things I used search for are now covered by ChatGPT (for which I use the api which costs cents).
I don't think web search is still important enough for me to pay for. A year ago it would have been. I originally signed up with kagi but I wasn't too impressed and then they came with the limited plans and that was it. Not sure if I'll go back now.
And yeah like the article says it was priced for "silicon valley bros". Even $10 is a lot on a Spanish salary still. But it's doable and 300 for $5 is a decent deal IMO. I wouldn't do that many.
Not the op but I use chatblade[0] on the cli, chatgpt-next-web[1] as webgui and quivr[2] for multimodal stuff files/images/audio/video. atm everything goes over a azure openai endpoint but would love to infere an llm locally.
At work we're always told to use the Azure one because our CIO is elbow deep in Microsoft's ass.
But I wonder.. one funny thing is that everyone at Microsoft is referring to OpenAI as an 'acquisition' whereas as far as I know they only have a <50% interest?
I use the ChatGPT bot for matrix mainly. I've tried some other frontends that are more like ChatGPT web but I keep going back to matrix because it's just so handy. I have all my other chats in there too, through bridges.
I use the OpenAI playground because I'm paranoid that third party frontends will steal my API keys and I don't have enough time to audit the code or set up firewall rules.
If it's useful, I recently open-sourced a simple GPT-4 TUI [1], which I use many times a day. And since this is a Kagi post, I might as well plug my (extremely simple) Kagi CLI [2], which uses their FastGPT API under the hood.
Much better imo and much cheaper unless you do 200 chats per day or something :P
Why is it better? More integration capabilities. You're not limited to the webpage and app, you can use it anywhere you want. Not constantly kicking me out to log in again every few days (their web does this). The ability to select the model and temperature (a measure of how creative the LLM is). Also the default model seems to be much more recent.
And the price. If you use it sparingly you might be paying as little as 20 cents a month instead of 20 dollars. Not exaggerating but it depends on the size of questions and responses. But really to make it cost as much as that 20$ per month with the API you really have to go hell for leather with it.
If you're even a moderate user of chatGPT, the equivalent cost of using the smallest GPT4 model would run you a hell of a lot more. Let's actually run the numbers.
The cost of the GPT-4 API is ballpark around $0.05 / 1000 tokens. If you want to include a rolling context window, you will easily hit 1000+ tokens if not a huge amount more.
ChatGPT pro gives you 50 GPT-4 queries every three hours. If you're using it all day you might average about 100 daily queries. Using a dedicated GPT4 API would run you approximately five dollars a day for the same thing - that's $150 a month as opposed to flat cost of $20.
How hard is it to hit 100 queries in a day? Pretty damn easy when you realize that most queries aren't usually standalone - instead they involve a back and forth approach which necessitates a rolling context window and you explore the problem space.
When a query (plus back and forth) might cost as much as $0.25, paying for GPT-4 via the API would only net you a whopping 80-100 queries per month before you exceeded the cost of a pro subscription.
The API certainly has its advantages over the web based ChatGPT, but price is definitely not one of them.
Fair enough, but I generally use GPT-3 (3.5). Because I didn't really see much benefit from GPT-4 when I had the subscription. I really didn't find it a whole lot better. The one thing I did use was the bing web lookup but they disabled that, that's when I cancelled my subscription.
I really hate the web interface also. It's constantly kicking me out, so I have to log back in and rewrite my query. And it keeps switching back to GPT-3 which is one of the reasons I ended up using that. Using it with my own tooling is just so much better.
And I don't really use it that much. I just don't have a lot that I need it for yet. I definitely don't even get to the 100 a month :)
Also I don't use it as hard every day. On the weekend I don't tend to even touch it. But you're right, your mileage may vary wildly here.
Good point though I should revisit GPT-4 again. See if it's improved.
Thanks for this insight! Based on this, I am better off with the ChatGPT monthly subscription. I tend to use it a lot with a lot of back and forth. I regularly hit the 50 GPT-4 queries.
I don't even bother using GPT-3.. it's not good enough for my use.
How many is unlimited? Presumably they don't get unlimited searches for $10 and, inevitably, someone will use more than they planned for. How much more than they expected is considered "fair use" or however they want to term it and why can't I know that before I sign up instead of guess I'm within what they are thinking?
Whatever the cap is, I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you or making you do a captcha for every search. Pretty much all search services have some cap, after which they will put up roadblocks to slow you down
When trying out Kagi (prior to unlimited searches) my monthly Google searches were significantly higher than the cap. While some definitely do get CAPTCHAs, I wasn't. Adjusting this to the new unlimited price and it would still seem to be negative profit for them, hence the question.
For $10 their cost for someone constantly typing new searches is significantly negative. It's surprisingly expensive for them to do a search and doing 1 search every 30 seconds for 8 hours is ~3x more than the cap of their $5 tier. I'm not saying that's a reasonable usage case for me I'm just saying the limit on profitability occurs SIGNFICANTLY sooner than "as fast as you can type for a month".
While I think your questions are definitely relevant, in practice, you search less than you think.
I consider myself as a heavy search engine user but, based on Kagi stats, I was surprised how much less I actually searched compared to my estimate. My actual range is about 500-800 queries a month when I originally estimated upwards 1500 queries a month.
I tried Kagi and ended up hitting limits. Unlimited sounds nice, especially since I don't need to worry about how I'm "running out of searchers" so to say, but only once I know how much it actually is instead of just assuming "well, most people don't search much".
You can block domains you don't want to see results from. With that feature I'm not sure it even needs to deliver better results than Google to be compelling.
This is great news. I've been paying for a couple months now and I've been happy with the results and the previous limits weren't something I even needed to worry about in the end (I did worry at the start but only because I had no idea how many searches I do to gauge which plan I needed).
This is great - I have been a happy subscriber for almost a year I think.
My biggest complaint with Kagi is not their fault - it's the inability to set custom search engines on Safari (and no, I'm not interested in installing a custom browser extension).
if you don't want to install a browser extension then safari having customizable search engines wouldn't help you anyways. you would need to login to the account which is additionally functionality that wouldn't be provided without the extensioj
If you're on Mac or iOS (which you will be if you use Safari), the team from Kagi also develop Orion. It's a browser, heavily focused on keeping to WebKit principles, and obviously supports custom Search engines by default.
It's not a 100% clone of Safari, but it's now matured far beyond a "scratching their own itch" project to enable custom search engines - it gives you the performance and power efficiency of safari, with the option to run most Firefox or Chrome extensions (by implementing the extension APIs in WebKit).
The iOS version isn't quite as mature as the Mac version (which is definitely usable as your main browser), but it's getting there.
It's far less profitable than the advertising model. Unfortunately, most tech companies are VC-backed and optimize for profits.
It also introduces adoption friction for users who are used to things being "free" on the internet, which hurts the hypergrowth shareholders want to see.
Here is Kagi's quick answer [0], where its AI "extracts and summarizes the important content from the search results including links to the source material":
"Kagi supports dark mode functionality to reduce eye strain.[1][2] Users can select between the Royal Blue or Moon Dark default themes in their appearance settings. Additionally, the Orion browser powered by Kagi includes dark mode that can be toggled on websites.[3]"
Yes, even multiple themes. You can choose between detection of the system preference, light and dark mode. The setting is bound to your account, which I like, but I don't search much on my phone outdoors.
Also happy Kagi customer. It is my default search and I get much less fluff in the results than I did with big G. So happy it respects search modifiers!
They offer crypto payments, and you can cycle accounts through throwaway emails.
Vlad has addressed this several times; it’s a planned use case. They offer it because though they don’t keep logs they don’t expect everyone to trust that.
I can’t find the comment but he just addressed it a couple days ago here on HN.
I respect your desire to downvote me but I respectfullu disagree after signing up and using them.
"Bad HN stuff" is lazy argument. They sell google searches and their value is "we promise". Bad HN stuff is how the HN crowd loves to hate on commercial VPN providers who have the same business model but the Kagi dude speaks and talks like your crowd so you rally around this product.
As if DDG didn't do the same thing for free. ADs were never the problem, the way ads work in search was the problem.
One of the first lessons I learned on the internet is never to trust online services on their word alone and that what you post online (search in this case) is there to stay forever.
You know what made me swtich from indifferent to opposing Kagi? After my trial ended, i kept searching for stuff in my nav bar, historical hits come up and when I select them, boom, Kagi paywall!
That's why my challenge to Kagi is if they ask money for what DDG and like a dozen other competitors offer for free with privacy promises similar to Kagi, then at least offer insurance and put their money where their mouth is if they're going to ask for people's money.
Also, search results after you stop paying shouldn't go back on paywall, you paid already for it!
I commented fully expecting to get downvoted as I do now, but you haven't countered my fairly reasonable assertions.
I'm currently paying for Kagi. It's nice. But, so far I feel like it may only be like 2% better than Google, probably not enough to keep me long term.
A lot of times the results are better on Kagi than Google, but not by much. It makes sense they're similar since Kagi uses Google's index (among others).
True, but a bit of a moot point if both search engines will indiscriminately route you to those websites anyways. It's not like I'm opting-out of that issue by using DuckDuckGo right now.
Yeah, I'm strictly talking about search results. That's the main thing I care about. No ads is nice, but if I can't find information I need then that's not very useful to me.
Being able to block domains (without an extension) makes Kagi at least 30% better on its own. Maybe more. It's absolutely a killer feature and one that Google themselves used to have.
I've thought about it several times, enough that I did track my searches for a week. Between work, hobbies, and just life I searched (overwhelmingly DDG and Bing) over a thousand times in a week. (A evening of prep for my tabletop RPG racked up over a hundred all by itself.)
I've bailed on Google - wading though the flood of SEO'd garbage just stopped being worth it. Bing and DDG have been mostly working, but I definitely feel like they're missing something. $10 a month is definitely worth it to try it out, and if it works for me, worth it to keep paying. I'd been hesitating because worrying about my search count seemed like a substantial negative for me.
Be sure to look into the results customization options. You may not need them, but they can also make the engine feel so much more tuned to your needs.
I really enjoy Kagi's caching image search; it often lets me avoid visiting websites when I'm just looking for graphics. Going on Kagi and reading summaries and viewing cached material gives me the "I don't feel like going out" vibe, but on the Internet. One step closer to offline.
982 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 560 ms ] threadPrevious discussion about the prior change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078392 (226 Comments)
Have you done a formal price optimization? There are no priced competitors to pressure you to stick to a price point so you have leeway to experiment.
When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Now? Never.
10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.
There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
Yet.
Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.
When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.
I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.
Also Kagi lets me blacklist domains myself if I want stricter rules than Kagi already provide.
Anyway, you or someone else will probably start a new search engine, and we will start again. It's best to enjoy it until that happens.
In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.
The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.
Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.
(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)
> * Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
https://kagi.com/privacy
Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:
> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account
The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.
That is the thing, Kagi does not capture the data. Not only we do not need it, but it would just be a liability for us, with no benefit.
Please refer to our privacy policy for more details: https://kagi.com/privacy
“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.
Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?
One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.
I don’t think it really matters as long as meaning is there.
Though ‘Google’ is starting to mean ‘ad infested trash’, so maybe the word will lose favour.
I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.
A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.
If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.
Or covid vaccines.
Or anything.
If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.
But I think we’re in a different situation when people are willing to pay monthly for search.
There is also exactly 0 risk involved here for a consumer. If this product stops being worth your time and money, just stop using it?
It’s not comparable to say, buying a service or product that you build on top of. No lock-in in that sense.
Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).
So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
But what I can't stand is the self perceived moral superiority of people who are like "haha, lottery is for idiots!"
I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.
If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.
The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.
But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_(censorship)
I may have simply misread the GP and picked the wrong meaning, but I was going with this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/whitewashing-words-...
Again, this is why I asked how it was the race-based version of whitewashing rather than immediately going into a debate. I wanted to clarify my understanding and see if I missed anything before jumping down someone's throat, would have been nice to get the same courtesy here.
I fail so see how providing you with the correct meaning is "jumping down your throat".
What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?
A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?
Arguably, they'd be better off having had 3X the entertainment for their dollar.
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.
That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!
The Unifi line solves this, and while it has some rough edges, it is so great. 9/10.
And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).
It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.
Obviously you can also use an ad blocker, but I think DuckDuckGo deserves more credit for making it a first-party option.
So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.
Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)
When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363287602_Coping_wi...
Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.
The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features.
I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue.
There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.
The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...
Top Blocked (from most blocked):
pinterest.com/.co.uk/.ca/.de/.fr/.com.au/.es facebook.com foxnews.com tiktok.com quora.com w3schools.com breitbart.com dailymail.co.uk appsloveworld.com instagram.com githubplus.com geeksforgeeks.org libhunt.com twitter.com msn.com healthline.com solveforum.com 9to5answer.com alternativeto.net giters.com wikihow.com nypost.com codegrepper.com issuehint.com cnn.com educba.com coder.social linkedin.com geekrepos.com kknews.cc bleepcoder.com amazon.com programcreek.com forbes.com newbedev.com drivereasy.com medium.com lightrun.com you.com reddit.com webmd.com blog.csdn.net nytimes.com washingtonpost.com
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
This has some of the context https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.co...
But looks like w3schools has cleaned up their act in the past decade.
They went from being bad compared to everything else to now feeling good compared to everything else.
Basically they stayed static and the rest of the internet worsened around them and our perspectives are now skewed.
What used to feel like a spammy content farm is actually not that bad now that we have seen real spammy content farms, like the SO clones that just take SO posts, rip out important css elements so it is harder to read, and slap as many ads as the ad networks allow them around it and then throw up exit intent banners and crypto-mining javascript.
Now just a normal content farm feels like a breath of fresh air when we deal with those garbage sites as alternatives.
W3schools is refreshing specifically because its content is all tutorial-based, they aren't any paywalls or dickbars insisting you subscribe by email.
I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.
I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.
I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.
I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
Here's their current list of offices:
https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/
So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)
- Both have google branding -> competitor wins
- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins
- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins
Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.
(Then again Google results today are so abysmal that it wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is now dramatically better.)
And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.
Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.
Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.
I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.
Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.
The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.
:-)
For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
You can do it with uBlacklist [1]. See also [2].
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
[2]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
I never got why these even ever appear in Google search results (or any search results, really). It feels like it would be super trivial to identify sites that are scraped copies of other sites. Granted, without foreknowledge, the engine doesn't know which is the original. But at the very least this can be determined by a human once, and then the problem goes away forever for that particular site.
100% Google who are destroying this part of the internet.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse
(When we steal from French, we don't translate it to English, it becomes English).
[0] - https://tecadmin.net/get-current-date-time-javascript/#:~:te...
How can you be ethically opposed to something that ruins your experience? It’s obviously their choice, I just can’t imaging browsing without adblock, I’m ethically opposed to the pages filled with crap I guess.
I block them anyway because ads also have an ethical contract with me that they have broken. They need to not take up too many resources on my computer, not make noise when the website otherwise has no noise content, not install malware, and be for legitimate products not scams. Probably more as well, but the above are things I regularly caught ads doing before I got an ad blocker.
Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
Friendly reminder that google had this feature a decade ago then removed it. Hopefully someone in the C-Suite got a few back pats for that decision.
https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...
I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.
At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.
Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.
https://kagi.com/stats
Pinterest is a scourge on the modern web, worse than any other.
yes, obviously.
but also: Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of...
I don’t use the site itself but the irritating thing is a first page full of useless Pinterest links when searching for something.
Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center
Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.
Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?
PS: I'm blocking all ads.
then I'm not exactly sure when, but definitely by 2018, every answer I ever see on Google is either incorrect, answering the wrong question, or in broken English. commonly all three at once
I don't recall ever seeing a product placement, although admittedly I stopped clicking a long time ago
my educated guess is that due to some likely seo-related concern they deleted/archived/unlisted their old good quality answers in favour of newer more seo-friendly answers
it may not even be their fault, it's possible that Google's algorithm just doesn't drag up older answers from their website, but given my experience with the decision-making in the brief time I was a user there (e.g. removing the ability to add a description to questions) I suspect not
(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)
Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.
https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
I get the same in Kagi clicking your link above.
Both the 1st and 3rd result is SO. 2nd result is MDM.
I’m confused, so what’s different between paid Kagi and free Google search then?
(Note: I’m not hating on Kagi, I’m just genuinely wanting to understand)
> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.
and
> Time, a measure of the passing of moments.
Btw, can you hide text preview on Kagi instead of removing the domain completely (in case you're not certain the website is garbage and sometimes want to check the results, but just want them less visible)?
The best kind of search engine is the kind that can read your mind (by inferring your intention or something)
Sure, I'd like Booleans to work again, and intitle:.
That said, Google could probably make an inferred search interpretation work well if they wanted to return results that were good for the user rather than return results that optimise their ad revenue.
OMG. Why doesn't Google filter out the likes of geeksforgeeks for instance? How is it possible that it always come before the genuine SO answer?
Even without offering the possibility to filter out a domain (which they had, and later removed), how does the ranking algorithm not see those horrible, zero value clones??
I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.
Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.
But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?
:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1>m=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F &ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do? &hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4
Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.
I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.
To reproduce: 1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website 2. click on the link 3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.
If true however, it does go to show that Google is really a monopolist in the search space as well... and to substantiate this claim would go a long way into proving that.
We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"
With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.
It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.
(Or, as I said, it's our idea of what constitutes a good result that's wrong).
I run uBlock origin (of course), am extremely aware that geeksforgeeks exist and is utter shit, and yet I get fooled now and again, which makes me very angry at that website, Google, myself, and the world in general...
They are working hard to trick people into clicking on their links, but won’t most people who click those links be running an ad blocker? Are unsophisticated web users searching for questions answered on stack overflow?
I get those in Google as well. But tbh, I don't care. If I'm looking for "current time in JavaScript", I don't care if the answer comes from stackoverflow or any of it's clones. It's not like I want to interact with that site somehow. I just want answers. If I want interaction, I obviously go to stackoverflow directly.
It might matter that I'm using Ad-blockers, so maybe if I didn't, those sites would feed me obnoxious popups and malware, but as it stands, I don't see any difference...
Very happy customer here.
It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.
I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
It took me a while to get good results with it, as I was so used to skipping the first 4-5 hits as those are always adverts.
They aren’t with Kagi.
In four ways for me:
- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.
- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.
- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.
- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
What part of "Does it warn you about typos" is about "fixing quotes"???
I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.
And if you get 100s results instead of 0?
And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine
The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI
If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.
"does it warn about mispellings"
(Note the intentional misspelling above.)
And here is the result:
Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok
https://kagi.com/search?q=%22casues+of+the+civil+war%22&r=us...
But also, because you're the customer not the product, you don't have to contend with Google's ad-driven search results and their privacy violating bs. Totally worth the money.
(Kagi user since the beta, paying user since they started offering subscriptions.)
- it combines the top 10 this or that list into listicles that are aggregated into their own section and I find to often be full of spam - it lets you block or deprioritize any site you want like quora, medium, Forbes, that often give me useless or incorrect info or are just their to boost so - it lets you prioritize sites you like in the search ranking - it doesn’t have blocked or censored keywords - it lets you specify by date or time quickly and easily which I find to be beneficial and google seems to hide it constantly move around in news
It’s weaker for like looking up a phone number or hours for a local eatery, but in general I like it better.
The results are good by default. But you can change the ranking of sites in your results, so every search is custom to you.
I pin documentation sites like MDN and pkg.go.dev and penalize SEO span sites.
My results are custom to me and my workflows, it's pretty hard to go back at this point.
Kagi is one of the stickiest subscription services I have.
That's my major problem with google. Sometimes I need to search info on a symbol, and I don't know what it's called yet, so I have to perform another search, just to perform the one I actually care about.
Have you ever used Perplexity? How does Kagi compare with it?
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back but I’m not a heavy searcher. I would be curious to know your typical use cases!
The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.
It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary.
Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.
https://www.oecd.org/sdd/purchasingpowerparities-frequentlya...
By this logic they should increase their prices to $1,000,000/mo. They are not a charity, right? Why would they sell it for a measly $10?
The point is, pricing is adjusted to maximise profitability. If lowering the price for a specific market increases your profitability, you would go for it. There is a sweet spot, but it is not the same for every customer. You need segmentation to fully utilise the potential.
I remember I could see my usage which was about 700 searches per month and which costed ~8$ I think. My subscription was 10$ so 2$ would go to pay their devs and to R&D. So they can't really go lower then 10$ for specific markets.
No, it varies based on who you are. Even poor countries are full of rich people. They are usually part of the reason why their countries are poor.
My experience trying switching with duckduckgo (repeatedly) always failed; checking google, unhappy with ddg results. Kagi, not so.
Same. I still do attempt a Google fallback if I don't easily find what I want on Kagi, but every single time, the Google results aren't what I'm looking for either.
If I search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon" it comes up with a .com link. I have to search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon uk" for it to go to .co.uk.
This was an option with Google that I liked.
*Weirdly now if I search for "elac debut 6.2 amazon" it comes up with a UK link :S
As someone who's sick and tired of the way Google tries and fails to guess what I want—to the point of now ignoring me when I try to tell it what I want with search operators—I appreciate this philosophy!
edit: You can switch pro-rated, nice.
Occasionally, I'm on someone else's computer where I'm not signed in to Kagi, and I try DDG first, but I frequently resort to pulling out my phone and just searching there.
Overall, i'm very happy with my starter subscription.
I’m happy to pay for it.
DDG 6/10
Brave Search 7/10
Google 8/10
Kagi 9/10
Basically all I want is a search engine that does what I tell it to do, and doesn't try to be smarter than me, because it is not. My killer Kagi feature is the forum search. The only way to get real human opinions on things, rather than regurgitated blogspam that's pervasive on Google and even more on DDG and other smaller engines.
How does search quality really change my life?
Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.
Would you pay $10/mo to fix that problem?
For me, the answer has been yes. I don't think that is true of everyone (but maybe some people can live in the free plan limits!)
I started with the free plan, made it my default search engine and then tried to measure how often I felt like I had "lost something" once my free tier was up. And yeah, having to go back to Google or DuckDuckGo felt like I lost a really good tool and was using a mediocre replacement.
When the free plan was 50 searches, that lasted me less than a day.
Now that the free plan is 300 searches, it'd last me a few days.
It was enough for me to get hooked.
https://kagi.com/pricing
Ask this to someone who remembers when Google first appeared.
I am not a Kagi user, but am seriously considering it after a number of months having to dig through at least 8 results of paywalled or possibly AI-generated pages for almost every Google query; seriously, I just did a search for 'python concatenate list' on google and it was worse than I expected - the official docs weren't even on the first two pages and even the helpful Stack Overflow answers were the 5th result down - give it a go, the results are trash.
I google things at least 20 times a day, and probably so do you. I would pay for something that can cut out the bollocks - if Kagi can follow through, they'll have a customer.
The first result is an info box from Stack Overflow showing use of the + operator to join two lists (with a link to source).
Then 4 more relevant SO posts (which are more nuanced and specific than the generic query, like concatenating into a single string, or concatenating without creating a copy.
Then a small inset box as a "blast from the past" with 4 older blog posts, at least 2 of which look pretty relevant here just from the title.
Then 5 more SO posts (again more nuanced and specific variants of the underlying question), and a digital ocean post on 6 ways to concatenate a list in Python.
And on free duckduckgo I get "instant answer" example from SO http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1720421 Though the official docs are also not on the first few pages
(Btw, you could also use an extension to 1-click filter garbage out from search if it has a high impact on life)
There are lucrative bundling opportunities.
I am waiting fora corporate product; it's notable that Google Workspace still subjects you to ads in search. That's not only a data leak. It's also a constant attention tax on your knowledge workers.
You might want the blog to prominently link back to https://kagi.com. "Home" took me to https://blog.kagi.com, I tried clicking on the pricing table image, etc. but nothing got me to the actual product.
I had to manually enter https://kagi.com to see the product behind the blog.
HOME -- links to your homepage
BLOG -- links to your blog
So, even on your blog sub-domain/folder (blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog), have both the links (HOME | BLOG) that links to the right URL.
Oh, do you mean if you do a Google Search even though your company pays for Workspace?
I switched away from Gmail years ago; the risk of getting locked out of my digital identity with no recourse is worth more than $5/mo. Not having my electronics receipts, plane tickets and newsletters datamined for an improved ad experience is just a perk.
https://migadu.com/pricing/
There are tons of information workers who are dependent on search in their work – or if they're not, could work much better with good quality search.
The examples are really too many to list, but it really depends on the person. When it comes to not spending a dollar, people will create the most incredible and reality-defying reasons. So I'd expect 99% of Google users to keep using Google, or maybe even stop using web search when Google becomes completely unusable. Then they'll say "I have no need to search for things anyway".
If a better search engine makes employees more productive, the target customer is the business, not the employee.
With chairs it's also less of a benefit in regards to productivity but health and comfort. I'm also still rocking a 150€ chair from IKEA, totally viable and comfortable, but I do see the benefit in a chair that has a lot of configuration options because I am slightly too large for mine. Still means one needs to know how to configure it properly (which is 90% of the health change)
Hard to quantify comfortability since it really indirectly affects mentality.
Then again, I'm not really using search a lot when working so Kagi is obviously also nothing for me
A lot. I make dozens and dozens of searches on an average day.
I'm also somewhat cheap when it comes to subscriptions.
Throwing $10/mo. for something I can get "for free" is not a light choice. But...
I still use Google Search / Maps when I want to buy something, i.e., when I want ads.I prefer to not go to the mall for recreation or work either.
I don't think web search is still important enough for me to pay for. A year ago it would have been. I originally signed up with kagi but I wasn't too impressed and then they came with the limited plans and that was it. Not sure if I'll go back now.
And yeah like the article says it was priced for "silicon valley bros". Even $10 is a lot on a Spanish salary still. But it's doable and 300 for $5 is a decent deal IMO. I wouldn't do that many.
[0] https://github.com/npiv/chatblade
[1] https://github.com/Yidadaa/ChatGPT-Next-Web/
[2] https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr
At work we're always told to use the Azure one because our CIO is elbow deep in Microsoft's ass.
But I wonder.. one funny thing is that everyone at Microsoft is referring to OpenAI as an 'acquisition' whereas as far as I know they only have a <50% interest?
https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~bsprague/gpt4-tui
[2] https://github.com/bcspragu/kagi
Why is it better? More integration capabilities. You're not limited to the webpage and app, you can use it anywhere you want. Not constantly kicking me out to log in again every few days (their web does this). The ability to select the model and temperature (a measure of how creative the LLM is). Also the default model seems to be much more recent.
And the price. If you use it sparingly you might be paying as little as 20 cents a month instead of 20 dollars. Not exaggerating but it depends on the size of questions and responses. But really to make it cost as much as that 20$ per month with the API you really have to go hell for leather with it.
The cost of the GPT-4 API is ballpark around $0.05 / 1000 tokens. If you want to include a rolling context window, you will easily hit 1000+ tokens if not a huge amount more.
ChatGPT pro gives you 50 GPT-4 queries every three hours. If you're using it all day you might average about 100 daily queries. Using a dedicated GPT4 API would run you approximately five dollars a day for the same thing - that's $150 a month as opposed to flat cost of $20.
How hard is it to hit 100 queries in a day? Pretty damn easy when you realize that most queries aren't usually standalone - instead they involve a back and forth approach which necessitates a rolling context window and you explore the problem space.
When a query (plus back and forth) might cost as much as $0.25, paying for GPT-4 via the API would only net you a whopping 80-100 queries per month before you exceeded the cost of a pro subscription.
The API certainly has its advantages over the web based ChatGPT, but price is definitely not one of them.
I really hate the web interface also. It's constantly kicking me out, so I have to log back in and rewrite my query. And it keeps switching back to GPT-3 which is one of the reasons I ended up using that. Using it with my own tooling is just so much better.
And I don't really use it that much. I just don't have a lot that I need it for yet. I definitely don't even get to the 100 a month :)
Also I don't use it as hard every day. On the weekend I don't tend to even touch it. But you're right, your mileage may vary wildly here.
Good point though I should revisit GPT-4 again. See if it's improved.
I don't even bother using GPT-3.. it's not good enough for my use.
Do you have any basis for this assumption?
I am fast and good at searching, but I ain’t that good. I’m going to give Kagi a try for this reason, plus ability to prefer or ban specific sites.
I consider myself as a heavy search engine user but, based on Kagi stats, I was surprised how much less I actually searched compared to my estimate. My actual range is about 500-800 queries a month when I originally estimated upwards 1500 queries a month.
Same thing with my friends.
My biggest complaint with Kagi is not their fault - it's the inability to set custom search engines on Safari (and no, I'm not interested in installing a custom browser extension).
It's not a 100% clone of Safari, but it's now matured far beyond a "scratching their own itch" project to enable custom search engines - it gives you the performance and power efficiency of safari, with the option to run most Firefox or Chrome extensions (by implementing the extension APIs in WebKit).
The iOS version isn't quite as mature as the Mac version (which is definitely usable as your main browser), but it's getting there.
It also introduces adoption friction for users who are used to things being "free" on the internet, which hurts the hypergrowth shareholders want to see.
The example (https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs) doesn't seem to respect my system theme on macOS.
Here is Kagi's quick answer [0], where its AI "extracts and summarizes the important content from the search results including links to the source material":
"Kagi supports dark mode functionality to reduce eye strain.[1][2] Users can select between the Royal Blue or Moon Dark default themes in their appearance settings. Additionally, the Orion browser powered by Kagi includes dark mode that can be toggled on websites.[3]"
[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/#summarize-result...
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/appearance.html
[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/open-source...
[3] https://blog.kagi.com/orion-new-features
When I logged in with my Google account, it detected the system setting.
* the regular wikipedia as the first result, and the mobile version of the same page as fourth one
* Links to https://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneu..., which never mentions Steve Jobs
* the above link also has the wrong date attached (Kagi thinks it was published Jul 17, 2023)
Vlad has addressed this several times; it’s a planned use case. They offer it because though they don’t keep logs they don’t expect everyone to trust that.
I can’t find the comment but he just addressed it a couple days ago here on HN.
Also, do you really think google doesn’t know who you are?
One would have to go to extraordinary lengths to hide your real name nowadays from even a talented curious searcher never mind google itself.
Even Ross Ulnricht couldn’t do it. And that boy had a LOT to lose.
i wish i could downvote this 100x. Peak bad NH stuff.
Kagi is actually one of the few good new products out there that tackle fundamental user needs.
"Bad HN stuff" is lazy argument. They sell google searches and their value is "we promise". Bad HN stuff is how the HN crowd loves to hate on commercial VPN providers who have the same business model but the Kagi dude speaks and talks like your crowd so you rally around this product.
As if DDG didn't do the same thing for free. ADs were never the problem, the way ads work in search was the problem.
One of the first lessons I learned on the internet is never to trust online services on their word alone and that what you post online (search in this case) is there to stay forever.
You know what made me swtich from indifferent to opposing Kagi? After my trial ended, i kept searching for stuff in my nav bar, historical hits come up and when I select them, boom, Kagi paywall!
That's why my challenge to Kagi is if they ask money for what DDG and like a dozen other competitors offer for free with privacy promises similar to Kagi, then at least offer insurance and put their money where their mouth is if they're going to ask for people's money.
Also, search results after you stop paying shouldn't go back on paywall, you paid already for it!
I commented fully expecting to get downvoted as I do now, but you haven't countered my fairly reasonable assertions.
A lot of times the results are better on Kagi than Google, but not by much. It makes sense they're similar since Kagi uses Google's index (among others).
Not in my experience, and what about user tracking and pervasive advertising? You don't seem to include that in your comparison.
You can use Google anonymously but you have to log in and leave your payment data with Kagi.
EDIT: apparently they accept crypto
- no ads
- one click to permablock SEO spam sites from appearing in searches
- minimal user tracking (not logged into a google account)
Kagi would likely have a better value proposition if I did more searching on mobile though.
and it seems to be working fine?
I've thought about it several times, enough that I did track my searches for a week. Between work, hobbies, and just life I searched (overwhelmingly DDG and Bing) over a thousand times in a week. (A evening of prep for my tabletop RPG racked up over a hundred all by itself.)
I've bailed on Google - wading though the flood of SEO'd garbage just stopped being worth it. Bing and DDG have been mostly working, but I definitely feel like they're missing something. $10 a month is definitely worth it to try it out, and if it works for me, worth it to keep paying. I'd been hesitating because worrying about my search count seemed like a substantial negative for me.
That's a lot!
I perform 500-900 searches a month.
I really enjoy Kagi's caching image search; it often lets me avoid visiting websites when I'm just looking for graphics. Going on Kagi and reading summaries and viewing cached material gives me the "I don't feel like going out" vibe, but on the Internet. One step closer to offline.