11 ms·

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)

by ezekg 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago
I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results. Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.
- gnuj3 4y ago
  Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.
  - suslik 4y ago
    To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.
  - Maximus9000 4y ago
    > When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).
    - infamia 4y ago
      Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.
  - brodo 4y ago
    I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar. At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.
  - nsilvestri 4y ago
    Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.
    - freediver 4y ago
      We haven't rolled out our local results yet. It is work in progress, ETA 2 weeks to shipping first version.
    - gnuj3 4y ago
      By local I meant like when I’m searching for Adidas trainers or garden fence panels it will bring up shops that sell it in UK and a lot of them are local as they have physical shop in my location. With DDG I was getting shops from America even when I had UK setting switched on. For example tool shops like Screwfix or Toolstation never came up in DDG whereas Kagi shows them on first page. I didnt mean like places to eat near me etc. sorry. Not something I really do to be honest.
- rfrey 4y ago
  From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
- PeterPumpkin45 4y ago
  A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search. It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term. It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Kagi does not have local search results (yet). Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org > It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise. If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now. The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned. The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else. Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular). Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey) Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath
Belphemur 4y ago
Being using it through the beta and moved toward their annual subscription :) Also you can give more importance to some website in the search result, create your own search template. It's so feature rich, and to make things easier they provide and extension to set your default search engine for you.
- ayushnix 4y ago
  I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.
  - Belphemur 4y ago
    I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price. Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day... $120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...
    - xtracto 4y ago
      My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.
lolinder 4y ago
Beat me to it! Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first. Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I used to just download the MDN docs to my computer so I can search locally. Offline search beats everything. You don't need the Internet to search.
MauranKilom 4y ago
Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?
- heretogetout 4y ago
  I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MauranKilom 4y ago
    But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
    - pitched 4y ago
      Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
Does it support IE6? (Google does, and it's a browser I enjoy using.)
- 0des 4y ago
  for those who need a double scoop of agencies to go with their agency.
- rajamaka 4y ago
  Why would anyone support a deprecated browser?
  - prepend 4y ago
    Because customers like it and they want to retain or attract those customers. (Basically the same reason any company does anything)
- matyasrichter 4y ago
  Is this the next iteration of the "I browse with javascript disabled" HN comment?
- freediver 4y ago
  We didn’t try yet but Kagi works the same with JS disabled. JS is there to enhance UX, not create it. Let us know.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    That is a good start!
Patrol8394 4y ago
Landing page : signup or login No thank you
digitalsin 4y ago
I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet. I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.
- Normille 4y ago
  There are other, better, free options. See my comment above. Startpage + GHHBD.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Normille 4y ago
...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines. I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user." PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady. PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...' [0] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
- function_seven 4y ago
  About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice! I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that. $10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.
  - prepend 4y ago
    It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me. $10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people. There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world. I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs. I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”
quickthrower2 4y ago
Wow it costs them 1c per search to service your request!
jarek83 4y ago
Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop
- freediver 4y ago
  What are the ideal results for “best laptop”?
  - hoorible 4y ago
    This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no? FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.
    - freediver 4y ago
      There are two schools of thought on how to answer this query: Here is #1 result on Google: https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-laptops-1304361 https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best... Here is #1 result on Kagi: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles. We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.
corrral 4y ago
I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back. Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it. (don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)
- ezekg 4y ago
  You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.
tgv 4y ago
I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Except Qwant and Brave are their own search engines, unlike DuckDuckGo who sources Bing. The first two add diversity to the search engine industry.
- prophesi 4y ago
  The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing. https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.
bl_valance 4y ago
It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tandr 4y ago
$1-2 per month would be worth it for me. But $10 per month just for search - no, it is not, sorry.
mimimi31 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.
- freediver 4y ago
  Kagi accepts debit cards.
  - mimimi31 4y ago
    It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard [2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay
    - freediver 4y ago
      Paypal support coming soon!
fallat 4y ago
uBlacklist is actually better than Kagi for a multitude of reasons. http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi-but-lessons-learned.txt http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi... Expresses it a bit better...
babypuncher 4y ago
I've been using Kagi for almost two months and I absolutely love it. Well worth the $10/mo they started charging a couple weeks ago.
redox99 4y ago
I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google. Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.
e-dt 4y ago
I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)

by ezekg 4y ago

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results. Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.

gnuj3 4y ago
Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.
- suslik 4y ago
  To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.
- Maximus9000 4y ago
  > When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).
  - infamia 4y ago
    Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.
- brodo 4y ago
  I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.
- hedora 4y ago
  Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar. At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.
- nsilvestri 4y ago
  Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.
  - freediver 4y ago
    We haven't rolled out our local results yet. It is work in progress, ETA 2 weeks to shipping first version.
  - gnuj3 4y ago
    By local I meant like when I’m searching for Adidas trainers or garden fence panels it will bring up shops that sell it in UK and a lot of them are local as they have physical shop in my location. With DDG I was getting shops from America even when I had UK setting switched on. For example tool shops like Screwfix or Toolstation never came up in DDG whereas Kagi shows them on first page. I didnt mean like places to eat near me etc. sorry. Not something I really do to be honest.
rfrey 4y ago
From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
PeterPumpkin45 4y ago
A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search. It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term. It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
- freediver 4y ago
  Kagi does not have local search results (yet). Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org > It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise. If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now. The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned. The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.
- deltree7 4y ago
  HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else. Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular). Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey) Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath

Belphemur 4y ago

Being using it through the beta and moved toward their annual subscription :) Also you can give more importance to some website in the search result, create your own search template. It's so feature rich, and to make things easier they provide and extension to set your default search engine for you.

ayushnix 4y ago
I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.
- Belphemur 4y ago
  I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price. Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day... $120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...
  - xtracto 4y ago
    My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.

lolinder 4y ago

Beat me to it! Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first. Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.

kccqzy 4y ago
I used to just download the MDN docs to my computer so I can search locally. Offline search beats everything. You don't need the Internet to search.

MauranKilom 4y ago

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?

heretogetout 4y ago
I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
  - pitched 4y ago
    Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

Does it support IE6? (Google does, and it's a browser I enjoy using.)

0des 4y ago
for those who need a double scoop of agencies to go with their agency.
rajamaka 4y ago
Why would anyone support a deprecated browser?
- prepend 4y ago
  Because customers like it and they want to retain or attract those customers. (Basically the same reason any company does anything)
matyasrichter 4y ago
Is this the next iteration of the "I browse with javascript disabled" HN comment?
freediver 4y ago
We didn’t try yet but Kagi works the same with JS disabled. JS is there to enhance UX, not create it. Let us know.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  That is a good start!

Patrol8394 4y ago

Landing page : signup or login No thank you

digitalsin 4y ago

I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet. I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.

Normille 4y ago
There are other, better, free options. See my comment above. Startpage + GHHBD.
deleted 4y ago
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Normille 4y ago

...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines. I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user." PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady. PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...' [0] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

function_seven 4y ago
About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice! I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)
dinkleberg 4y ago
You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that. $10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.
- prepend 4y ago
  It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me. $10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people. There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world. I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs. I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”

quickthrower2 4y ago

Wow it costs them 1c per search to service your request!

jarek83 4y ago

Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop

freediver 4y ago
What are the ideal results for “best laptop”?
- hoorible 4y ago
  This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no? FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.
  - freediver 4y ago
    There are two schools of thought on how to answer this query: Here is #1 result on Google: https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-laptops-1304361 https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best... Here is #1 result on Kagi: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles. We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.

corrral 4y ago

I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back. Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it. (don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)

ezekg 4y ago
You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.
- corrral 4y ago
  Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.

tgv 4y ago

I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).

ASalazarMX 4y ago
Except Qwant and Brave are their own search engines, unlike DuckDuckGo who sources Bing. The first two add diversity to the search engine industry.
prophesi 4y ago
The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing. https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.

bl_valance 4y ago

It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.

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tandr 4y ago

$1-2 per month would be worth it for me. But $10 per month just for search - no, it is not, sorry.

mimimi31 4y ago

Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.

freediver 4y ago
Kagi accepts debit cards.
- mimimi31 4y ago
  It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard [2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay
  - freediver 4y ago
    Paypal support coming soon!

fallat 4y ago

uBlacklist is actually better than Kagi for a multitude of reasons. http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi-but-lessons-learned.txt http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi... Expresses it a bit better...

babypuncher 4y ago

I've been using Kagi for almost two months and I absolutely love it. Well worth the $10/mo they started charging a couple weeks ago.

redox99 4y ago

I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google. Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.

e-dt 4y ago

I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.