Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.
I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.
I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.
Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.
I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those
Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.
I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
Thank you so much for the mention! Uruky co-founder, here. Let me know if there's some specific feature you'd like to see added (email or a reply here is fine), so we can evaluate!
I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.
I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
“I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply.”
It’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.
You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.
I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.
What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen people claim about its actual usage, esp. the ones who are not from NA, that it is either below or just average wrt Google (because, well, there's no other mainstream search service to compare against). Few of them literally just say something very closely on the lines of ".. been using for X years... happy to pay". I suspect it might as well be literally just a satisfaction thing :D
Google top 5 results: wikipedia, twitter, instagram, reddit, gocomic
DDG top 5 results: smbc-comics.com, a specific smbc-comics.com comic, gocomics, wikipedia, some listicle about smbc comics from a site I've never heard of
The Kagi results here seem pretty clearly better than the other two. smbc-comics.com doesn't seem to ever show up on Google. (I clicked through to page 10 of results.)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 57.3 ms ] thread(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.
For a price of two cups of coffee.
But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.
I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.
I wish them the best but timing is a b**.
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
It’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.
You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.
I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.
Kagi top 5 results: smbc-comics.com, wikipedia, smbc author's patreon, gocomics, instagram
Google top 5 results: wikipedia, twitter, instagram, reddit, gocomic
DDG top 5 results: smbc-comics.com, a specific smbc-comics.com comic, gocomics, wikipedia, some listicle about smbc comics from a site I've never heard of
The Kagi results here seem pretty clearly better than the other two. smbc-comics.com doesn't seem to ever show up on Google. (I clicked through to page 10 of results.)