14 ms·

Kagi – Paid Search Engine

229 points by Yeri 4y ago

infinitezest 4y ago
I don't know what y'all are searching for but DDG works for me pretty consistently.
gamegoblin 4y ago
Switched to Kagi 2 months ago, can't recommend it enough. It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time. I haven't googled a single thing since switching to Kagi. Easily worth the $10/mo to not have my search history monetized, and to work with a company whose incentives are maximally aligned with giving me the content I am searching for. Kagi also has nice features like personalized upweighting/downweighting of certain websites. The Kagi team is also super responsive to feedback. I've submitted a few bug/feature requests that have gotten fixed within a week or two. It's amazing that a small team can compete with google.
- poszlem 4y ago
  "It's not worse" is exactly how I feel using Kagi. I REALLY wanted to like DuckDuckGo. But it simply did not work for me most of the times. I have no idea what Kagi does to make it "not worse" but just by being "not worse" and "not google" at the same time it's kind of better.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  re: weighting, can you weight sections of sites? Like subreddits? edit: oh man, if i could paid and get API access for my own apps.. that would be killer. Slowly extend it to stuff like IOT or AI integrations that i normally don't want to give cloud providers.. this would be really cool
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > if i could paid and get API access for my own apps Assuming it's paid per search, just screen-scrape the thing? There's no reason they'd care what client you use to access it if you're paying for each request.
    - gamegoblin 4y ago
      Kagi actually provides programmatic API access: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-api/overview.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-api/overview.html
      - unshavedyak 4y ago
        Turns out this is only for the Team Plan, which seems far worse than the individual plan for individuals.
    - unshavedyak 4y ago
      Well i'm not going to pay and jump hoops like screen scrape. My question was more that if i'm paying, i'd also love first-class API access. Sounds like they give it, sweet!
- foreverCarlos 4y ago
  Kagi is in fact better for me very frequently. I customized it to my liking and it shows better results than Google. Sure, I would be able to find the same content on Google, but that would require using keywords for site or file type. With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
- mediumdeviation 4y ago
  I have to say their own homepage does not inspire confidence - it currently shows three sample search results, and clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. For comparison DDG shows a bunch of headphone review sites, all of which seems reasonably reputable. In fact all three of these have some odd results - - "steve jobs"'s fifth result is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs at a 2003 conference, but the result is linked to a seemingly random 2606s timestamp and it is right below the Videos section with much more relevant videos - "python exceptions"'s second result is a blog post about Python exceptions being anti-patterns. I've not used Python in a while but that seems very wrong, and a terrible result to show to someone who might be learning Python or looking up how Exceptions work.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. On the other hand, having such an obvious mistake on the homepage makes me trust more that they believe in their product enough to give you raw, real results (which may sometimes include stale content such as a parked domain) rather than a manually-crafted "perfect" results page that wouldn't be representative of the real product at all.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    Kagi is great for the kind of searches I do -- mainly searching for wikipedia articles, stackoverflow questions, etc. If I ever want to buy a product I don't know much about, I usually spend some time reading the megathread on whatever niche subreddit there is on the topic. When I search Kagi for "best headphones" the first link on the page is to /r/HeadphoneAdvice, which is probably where I'd want to go. There are some not as good results down the page, but I never would have even seen them because the 1st link is what I wanted. For "python exceptions" the top links are all to the python.org docs about exceptions, which is almost certainly what I wanted with that generic search. If I search "steve jobs" or really <any famous person or event>, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time, and that is the #1 result. I've gotten increasingly frustrated with google in the last few years that they've gone away from this behavior for lots of searches. Sometimes the wikipedia article isn't even on the first page. So, for my use cases, Kagi is behaving totally optimally for all these searches.
- Euphorbium 4y ago
  Ddg sucks big time, but I found brave search not worse than google like 70% of the time, 20% times it is better and 10% it is worse.
  - sndean 4y ago
    I wonder if Kagi gets significantly better results than Brave's? I almost entirely moved to Brave from DDG, and the difference is like night and day, but could Kagi's search really be worth $10/month? I could use some more Brave vs. Kagi comparisons.
    - freediver 4y ago
      Curious too, perhaps you can do one yourself?
- CurrentB 4y ago
  I keep seeing comments like this when Kagi is brought up. One of them motivated me to try kagi about a month ago. I would love to replace google and try out every alternative search engine I encounter. I admit it will be hard to replace. I'm a programmer and searching is basically a sixth sense for me at this point. I'm frequently frustrated with google results but have never found anything less frustrating. I signed up for kagi, ran out of the free searches in 2 days, my initial impression was "not better than google" and never looked back. I probably would have tried for a few more days if the trial was longer. Still more likely than not that I would have crawled back to google, but it did seem like not enough time to fully evaluate. For instance, the upweight/downweight feature you mention is intriguing but I didn't really get a chance to see any benefits of it.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    Software engineers - the breed that goes to extremes and compromises a lot just to avoid… paying for software. I agree partially that they could have a longer trial but on the other hand, $10 without any sort of contract is a low enough barrier to give it a whirl.
    - CurrentB 4y ago
      I'd be thrilled to pay for such a service if I found it even remotely sticky, and I genuinely wanted it to be. I just found it mediocre. If some of their features' benefits compound over time it seems like it would be better to have a lengthier trial period.
      - mccorrinall 4y ago
        What results does have it to echo in order to not be mediocre for you?
      - freediver 4y ago
        Kagi free plan includes 50 free searches every month, so the trial period is basically infinite.
- dzek69 4y ago
  Have you ever tried startpage.com? I can't use anything else then google for more than a day - for me every other search engine returns worse results than google, especially in my native language (polish), but startpage seemed to be best choice if I ever had to switch
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Startpage used to be Google with personalization off. So the results tended to be "better". (Haven't checked if this is still the case.) It's still !s on DDG and Kagi.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  Honest questions: 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? 2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit? I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.
  - vlmutolo 4y ago
    > 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible. 2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
    - poszlem 4y ago
      > It disaligns the incentives. This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads? The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad. Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked. (for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability) A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
- tablets 4y ago
  I've been using kagi as a paid customer since August 2022. My experience is that for programming related tasks it is much faster to find a useful answer/discussion/site. The most compelling experience I've had with it was during a road trip across Europe. Using the country selector allowed me to find succinct search results for signs, shops and regional attractions. The few times I did comparison searches using google.co.* search the results were more confusing than the kagi results.
  - adalacelove 4y ago
    Just made a programming related search and got useful results instead of the SEO optimized crap I get with Google. Just this, without taking into account privacy, justifies the subscription for me.
- nugget 4y ago
  I'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.
  - rvba 4y ago
    For Google from 5 years ago. Their current product is worse than few years ago.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    For the same search quality they have now, and in a world where Kagi exists for $10, no. I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case. If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.
    - Taywee 4y ago
      Why not use Firefox's search engine keyword to just make it use Wikipedia directly, or duckduckgo with !w ?
    - spoils19 4y ago
      I understand your pain completely. I actually wrote a custom extension for myself where instead of using Google search, it'll automatically redirect and use the Wikipedia search.
    - cpleppert 4y ago
      I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine. Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  > It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. This is a great way to put it. DDG feels worse than Google, which is why I would always use !g. I rarely use Google nowadays.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Google would never let you tweak their results. You can use third party addons but they expose your browser activity to an unacceptable degree, and I don't even know if there is a collection of addons that can tweak Google results to match kagi's.
- ls15 4y ago
  > It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time. I've been using DDG happily for years and only fell back to Google at most 5 times during the last two years and I think half of the times it wasn't even useful to me. Maybe it is the way how I write queries? Nowadays I find Google's result page just confusing, so I disagree with calling Google better.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  I have nothing to add except I've also had it for 2 months and fully agree in every point. I wanted DDG to work, but I had to !g so often. I'm also using their Orion browser and finding it quite a pleasure to use, a litt buggy, but good enough for a daily driver.
poszlem 4y ago
I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it's the first alternative search engine (tried the Brave's one and DDG) that does not make me go back to google every other search. On the flips side, though, getting a "you cannot search anymore until you've paid" message was quite a shock to me. Like - I paid for it to try it out. It worked well, so it wasn't really a "nobody told me there would be a subscription" kind of shock, but more like on that second month I got the "wait, am I actually paying for the access to a search engine?" realization. Makes you notice how much we are getting conditioned to the "out business for your data" business model.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Been watching this with much interest since it launched, have always thought there was a market for this type of product.
sinoue 4y ago
Kagi would be smart to offer a few tiers of service to encourage paid adoption. Have a pricey one time lifetime fee that goes up in price each year. Have a reasonable flat one time fee to increase the number of searches over free so that folks not ready for a subscription will jump at the opportunity. Add a "member since 20xx" icon to log in screen to let folks show how long they've been a member. Sell t-shirt, hoodie, laptop stickers, phone case, coffee mug swag to increase awareness. Make it easy to organize bookmarks, share search results and curate search lists.
- version_five 4y ago
  I think they are transparent about how much each query costs them and are trying to run a sustainable business. I personally prefer paying for that- basically a market rate for search, than trying to jump on to a growth hacking scheme of lifetime memberships or merch subsidies.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  How about, pay per search?
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    The Kagi Teams plan is essentially pay-per-search: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    They essentially already do this. They expose how much you've costed them as a customer, and if it's more than what you've paid in subscription fees, you can tip the difference.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      And what if it's less?
  - howenterprisey 4y ago
phosphorco 4y ago
Curious how folks think this compares to Neeva? For whatever reason, didn't quite stick with that one.
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  I'm going to give Kagi the fairest shake I can, but so far I've found Neeva's UI better and results just as good.
jsnell 4y ago
Previous discussions in the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: The Age of PageRank Is Over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 - Nov 2022 (373 comments) Kagi/Orion status update: First three months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 - Sept 2022 (191 comments) Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments) Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments)
shepherdjerred 4y ago
I've paid and used Kagi for about six months. I used DDG for a while, but I found myself putting !g after every query (especially when looking for answers relating to programming). With Kagi I very, very rarely need to use Google. It has some nice features, like lenses, URL rewriting, and the ability to bump sites to the top. I have a lens for programming. It shows only certain sites, like GitHub and Stack Exchange, and I enable it when appropriate. For URL rewriting, I have Kagi set to rewrite URLs from Twitter and Reddit to my own self-hosted instances of Nitter [0] and Teddit [1], so that when I open a Kagi result that would've gone to twitter.com, it goes to nitter.mydomain.com, which lets me use Twitter without an account. Lastly, I use the site bumping feature to move Wikipedia results to the top. [0]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1]: https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit
- raybb 4y ago
  Kagi is great for letting you customize your own bangs (!g, etc). One thing I'd like to do, that's pretty specific, is having a site with my own bangs that do specific things like for example: open the url in archive.is and archive.org or open OpenLibrary.org and GoodReads. Similar nice functionality might include stripping of spaces for certain queries. Does anyone know of a tool like this? Otherwise, it would probably be simple enough to build my own and have a kagi bang that directs to it as needed.
  - g_p 4y ago
    The team behind kagi are also building a browser (Orion). One of the new features that's been teased could likely be put to use doing something like this... Think natural language input to a browser.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      I tried out Orion, but I wasn't really impressed by it.
    - sebazzz 4y ago
metadat 4y ago
Previous submissions (note: they're frequent): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kagi.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kagi.com
- leonidasv 4y ago
  There's a 114-point submission from 2016[1] that's about Kagi, an eCommerce platform that launched in 1994 and ceased operations that year[2], that existed in that same domain[3]. Found it mildly interesting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 [2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud/ https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.com/index.php http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.c...
autotune 4y ago
Can anyone else compare this to you.com, which is a similar concept in regards to increased privacy? I plan to sign up for Kagi tomorrow, but having used Kagi until I ran out of search on the free version, you.com seems to offer more features specifically in regards to YouChat and ability to preview certain results. It's also free for right now but wonder if they plan to go the ad-supported route in the feature, which would be a deal breaker for me over just paying a monthly plan like you do with Kagi.
- richardsocher 4y ago
  If there's a lot of interest, we'd be happy to offer a monthly paid plan also. It's interesting. Only on HN do we hear users asking to pay for an otherwise free service. Majority of our users everywhere else would never pay for search. youChat will get a lot better in the coming months I think it would be wonderful! Richard from you.com here.
  - machiaweliczny 4y ago
    I think gradient on results page are distracting. You guys should do some UI review of results page. For me it's too distracting and hard to read the results. Same with the logos at bottom they steal all attention. EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.
    - richardsocher 4y ago
      Thanks. We'll look into both of these (plans and design).
  - autotune 4y ago
    Maybe consider making an "ad-supported, free" model, and a "premium" plan without ads? As long as advertising doesn't end up in the premium plan at any point it's the best of both worlds.
nunez 4y ago
I'd like to use Kagi but I can't make it a default search engine in Safari. Until then, DuckDuck it is!
- foreverCarlos 4y ago
  You absolutely can! I got working after installing the extension and restarting Safari.
  - nunez 4y ago
    Oh snap; okay! i'll try it!
    - foreverCarlos 4y ago
      There can be weird issues if you use other extensions, especially content blockers. So in my case I had to enable AdGuard Pro first and only then Kagi.
AOsborn 4y ago
I can't help but feel that the pricing is backwards. I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly. Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year. Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up. Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.
- Terretta 4y ago
  This is absolutely worth $10 a month. For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.
  - phs 4y ago
    Agreed. It seems most comments in here find the quality noticeably better than G or DDG (I know I do.) Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    If it did indeed get bought by Apple, I'd go back to DDG. Apple doesn't need to buy everything and in my opinion they're not the saviour.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      If they can white label CloudFlare as part of their iPrivacy for everyone with iCloud+, they could white label kagi as well. The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default. That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.
Spivak 4y ago
I've been having a good time with Kagi but I can't figure out how "In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" can be possible. That's on the order of Midjourney, DALL-E, and Davinci-003 and they're shoveling GPUs into furnaces to power their servers.
- g_p 4y ago
  I understand they're having to pay for access to crawler results, to avoid the cost of indexing and crawling the entire web (though they do some themselves).
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    Would it very quickly at those costs become cheaper for them to crawl the most popular 10 million websites themselves and only use external providers as backfill?
Mortiffer 4y ago
recently i had a legit use for going past the 10th page of google, after which it wants to give me no more into. I tried the same query on kagi only got 2 pages.... I don't see if the premium actually gets u more
- infinityio 4y ago
  as far as I'm aware, you wouldn't get more with premium - kagi doesn't return as many search results as competitors From their FAQ: > We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.
user3939382 4y ago
I switched to it the last month or so. Got sick of DDG blatantly ignoring my query terms, Google’s results are filled with so many special result formats and SEO spam I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore, never mind the creepiness factor of Google. Kagi’s results have been great. My biggest complaint is that it’s a weird name, which is really a compliment.
slaw 4y ago
I tried Kagi and it is not better than Google or DDG, IMHO not worth any money. I use Google by default and Yandex when I am looking for PDFs, images, repair instructions, pages not indexed by Google at all.
- gandalfgreybeer 4y ago
  First time I've heard of Yandex. The way you've described it, I might hopefully find it useful for the academic PDFs I've been seeing less and less in Google.
  - slaw 4y ago
    I am not sure about academic PDFs. It is like old google, it searches for keywords, doesn't try any AI guessing what you mean and doesn't blacklist domains like google.
    - aaaa4444 4y ago
      Yandex is also very good at reverse image search.
nnx 4y ago
> it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. $0.0125 per search seems awfully high. Do they think this cost can be compressed as more users use Kagi thanks to economies of scale?
- mdaniel 4y ago
  I would be interested if the distributed model that's allegedly used by Presearch.com would work for Kagi, since the members seem like they would have financial disincentive to poison search results. That said, I only know enough of how Presearch works from their whitepaper, because trying it out seemed like some tomfoolery and I couldn't figure out if the risk would be the same as me running a Tor exit node
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  They are using Google Cloud for APIs and AWS for DNS.... That's two costs that could be reduced with alternative providers. I wonder if the API calls to external providers could be cached. I am also wondering if they are also using expensive big-tech VMs in the background? I am feeling costs could be reduced.
  - dceddia 4y ago
    I don’t know anything about the services they use to provide results, but I’ve seen some services (geocoding lookups, google maps tiles, …) where they explicitly forbid caching.
    - worldofmatthew 4y ago
      You would have thought that the people behind Kagi would look for sources that allow it.
- jpalomaki 4y ago
  I assume a big portion of the money goes to Google for their search API. Initially I could not even believe, Google offered this kind of paid version to somebody. And I’m still a bit suspicious if they are only doing this to gather insights on how much people are willing to pay for ad-free search.
imwillofficial 4y ago
I’m a subscriber and have enjoyed it so far. I’m a firm believer that we should pay for the things we use to avoid becoming the product.
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furyofantares 4y ago
I'm 2 months into paying for Kagi. I'm so happy not having ads. I didn't really expect it to feel so different to me, but it does. Similarly, I didn't expect to feel good about paying for it. But it feels like a breath of fresh air, to be paying for a service that I deem worth the price, that isn't trying to extract money from me through a side channel. I think the results have been better for me, though in a couple cases a top ranked result was 404'ing, which I've never had on google. The UI is better imo, and I've occasionally used lenses which has been useful. I haven't ever used !g in two months. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Google of years past, I fondly remember finding it in 1998 and feeling like I had an absolute superpower not just over people not on the internet, but over people still using the other search engines. And I also am somewhat of an apologist, when people dump on Google search results getting worse over the years I'm quick to point out that it's a highly adversarial problem and they're the primary target. But 24 years later, I couldn't be happier switching to Kagi now. Frankly, while I'm quite happy with my current work, it makes me fantasize of working for them.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  I like lenses but I already wrote that someone should create market for search applications but using their index/tech. I think You.com has some search plugins but that probably could be improved. Like for example: Forums only search, travels blog search (with filtering travel destination etc.), cooking recipes search only, fashion, markets
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methou 4y ago
Happy paying customer here. I live in Japan while my main language use is English, I found that "International" option is quite useful - tech results are in English, while localilty related queries are in Japanese. There's one aspect Kagi is not improving - the "explicit" results. Personally I find it's difficult to justify the universal effort across all the platforms and "monopolies" to minimizing the explicit results for adults.
iansinnott 4y ago
Can confirm, not worse than Google. I do still use !g to use Google occasionally, but as often as not I'm disappointed in the Google results. It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).
_8j50 4y ago
Tried it. You don't get better quality of anything. You just get to pay someone to collect your search history under an account with PII and payment info also associated. You have to login each time you search stuff in private browsing. Very annoying when I go back to a tab or back to search results and I need to login to see them. It is a worse experience and I have to pay for it and I can't use cash, coin, giftcards,etc... I think they wanted to emulate proton maybe? But they don't have a free tier with at least ddg like experience and charge for premium features. Only people with a lot of disposable income who really care about privacy but also trust a company to not associate their info with their search history will use this.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > You have to login each time you search stuff in private browsing. That drove me crazy with Neeva.com, too, and I actually suggested to them that they could offer a URL with a pre-shared key in it that I could use for incognito windows, like https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d&q=%s https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-90... or (arguably superior) https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example.com/?q=%s https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example.... They still haven't fixed that :-(
  - freediver 4y ago
    Kagi search extensions (open source, available on all browers) allows you to search in private windows. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html#browser_extension https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... In additional Kagi implements the same thing you suggested basically, called a private session token that allows you to be logged in by appending it to the URL if you do not want to use the extension.
mberning 4y ago
User for a couple months. Love it.
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
How does it compare to Brave Search? I know from experience that Brave Search is a lot better than DDG (and way cleaner than Google) and also supports bangs. When I was on DDG, I frequently used !g but on Brave Search, I haven't had such need (except for when I want to search for images)
- rg111 4y ago
  Seems like we live in completely different worlds. Among all the search engines I have tried, Brave search has been the crappiest- hands down. Nothing even comes close. Well, I poked around with Startpage for a day or two. Maybe it was crappier than Brave Search. DDG, Bing, etc. are miles better than Brave search. Kagi is a lot better than DDG/Bing.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    That's funny because for me, Brave Search is a better version of Google. Way more useful and relevant results than DDG ever gave me. It's also a lot cleaner too with more features. If you search the comments here, you'll see a lot of people share the same opinion as me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678326
jareklupinski 4y ago
I switched to Kagi a few months ago, and initially I was super impressed with how much faster I could find an authoritative result for exactly the technical or niche thing I needed. However over the past two weeks it seems, blog spam and SEO started creeping into my results. I use the "Lower" and "Block" controls much more today than when I first started, but I wonder if there's a better way to flag something as obviously nefarious or worthless? The "# of trackers" sidebar panel with the popularity metric help my eyes filter out the nonsense, but could the community's Lower and Block ratings be fed back into the rankings for everyone? Unless someone is actually paying $10 a month to artificially inflate their page rankings by Raising their own spam...
oa335 4y ago
I could have sworn that they were offering a “Investor” tier of subscription, $5000 for a SAFE note and unlimited subscription; I can’t seem to find it on their site though. Did anyone else see this or am I misremembering?
- Version467 4y ago
  No I remember this as well, but iirc this was back when they first rolled out a paid tier and were still experimenting with pricing. I don’t think this offer still exists and I vaguely remember that it was always meant as a temporary way to quickly generate some cash.
janalsncm 4y ago
I want this to succeed. I probably won’t hop in at the $10 price point but I probably would at $5.
weird-eye-issue 4y ago
I searched "best air purifiers" and the second result was for the home page of nutriteam.com which is apparently a water distilling company. Hmm. It seems the "best headphones" sample result is cherry picked If you try "best air purifier" then this is the second result, because surely somebody searching that wants to 3D print and assemble their own air purifier https://github.com/Kels316/DIY-Air-Purifier https://github.com/Kels316/DIY-Air-Purifier. And this is the FIRST result: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/watchdog-rejects-molekule-air-purifier-claims/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/watchdog-rejects-mol... Yeah I think I will stick with Google
- piva00 4y ago
  Now search for anything related to programming and be blessed by not seeing SEO-spam of content lifted from other places being plastered on the first pages of results :) And I get proper results for your query, not the ones you mention [0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/3bjxFYA.png https://i.imgur.com/3bjxFYA.png
dagurp 4y ago
Just parroting what others are saying. Good service but I stopped using it because $10 a month is too much IMO
piva00 4y ago
I switched to Kagi after getting extremely fed up and tired of massaging my Google queries the exact way it was needed to clear SEO-spam and useless results. It's been 4 months and I don't see myself not using Kagi anymore, it's been a blessing for any queries related to programming. I love the lenses feature and the search in discussions, so much easier to use than having my curated list of "site:<domain>" to search through on Google. It's been very worth the US$ 10/month for what's arguably the internet service I use the most: search.
ls15 4y ago
Which private payment methods does Kagi allow as a self-proclaimed "100% privacy-respecting search engine"?
quags 4y ago
That price is quite steep for search, which I’m personally using less and less, and prices out developing countries that have high growth right now. Obviously pricing and costs are the same regardless of who is searching. For my personal use I have ddg and do frequently add !g to searches - ddg hasn’t been great but not to the level of turning it off. I frequently will add Reddit to get reviews , Wikipedia for articles or stack overflow for programming. When I search I’m not logged in ( no gmail for example) so paying to have a searched where I’m logged in does not motivate me for privacy - only to pay for maybe a better company than google.
amai 4y ago
How does it compare to https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ ?
Version467 4y ago
I’ve been paying for Kagi since September (which is when they started charging for their service), and I’m really happy with it so far. The search results are noticeably not worse than googles, even for things that depend heavily on location. I really didn’t feel the need to fall back to Google more than once or twice in total. I also feel like their ranking is slightly better in that the first or second result is usually what I’m looking for, not half a page down. 10$ a month is the upper limit of what I am comfortable paying for it, I’d feel much better if it were 5$. But I really, really want Kagi to succeed. They have a great product, if they can’t make paid search work then I fear it’s not going to happen at all. So I pay 10 bucks a month for a great search engine with a great interface where I can be sure that my data isn’t sold of. Sidenote: I can also highly recommend their Orion browser for Mac. It’s based on safari (so it’s light on resources and very battery friendly), but supports chrome extensions + it has first class support for tree style tabs.
yuck39 4y ago
I beta tested Kagi (free) and was really impressed with the results it would give me. Having to login to a search engine was a bit of a pain, especially with different browser profiles and private mode. I understand that will inherently be a limitation with Kagi.
jpalomaki 4y ago
I’ve been using Kagi as pretty much only search engine on desktop for several months and I’m happy as well. This is how paid versions of free services should be. Time is valuable and I’m easily distracted - one interesting ad/link/snippet can take me to a rabbit hole. With Kagi my feeling is that there’s less of these distractions. This is also something I dislike on YouTube. I pay to get rid of ads, but still they employ the usual trickery to keep me on the site as long as possible.
antoinebalaine 4y ago
Kagi's made the internet pleasant again for me - the very low amount of noise in the search results, and removing the pervasive sensation that I was constantly getting tricked into garbage results, that's been a very positive shift. For 10$, it's been totally worth it - search remains an invaluable daily door into the internet, and good quality pay-for-search promises positive compounding effects: low noise-to-signal ratio, a potential shift in business incentives away from advertising, better access to information, a reduction of bias, etc.
oogabooga13 4y ago
I've been a paid subscriber for awhile now and I'd describe it as the fastmail to gmail. Although fastmail is quite a developed thing you can see where kagi is heading the longer they stay in the game. It's up there in value with Youtube premium for me...I will pay a reasonable price for a life without ads given the option for a service I depend on. Just me 02 cents.
lebaux 4y ago
information was always free lol
Covalent 4y ago
I've been using kagi for a couple months now and I'm a big fan. I never have to use Google to search because the results are good enough for me. And I enjoy that I'm not being pushed into affiliate links and ads all the time.
mbirth 4y ago
So the consensus seems to be that Kagi's results are "not worse or better" than Google's. So did anyone do a comparison between Kagi and SearX/SearXNG?

229 points by Yeri 4y ago

I don't know what y'all are searching for but DDG works for me pretty consistently.

Switched to Kagi 2 months ago, can't recommend it enough. It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time. I haven't googled a single thing since switching to Kagi. Easily worth the $10/mo to not have my search history monetized, and to work with a company whose incentives are maximally aligned with giving me the content I am searching for. Kagi also has nice features like personalized upweighting/downweighting of certain websites. The Kagi team is also super responsive to feedback. I've submitted a few bug/feature requests that have gotten fixed within a week or two. It's amazing that a small team can compete with google.

poszlem 4y ago
"It's not worse" is exactly how I feel using Kagi. I REALLY wanted to like DuckDuckGo. But it simply did not work for me most of the times. I have no idea what Kagi does to make it "not worse" but just by being "not worse" and "not google" at the same time it's kind of better.
unshavedyak 4y ago
re: weighting, can you weight sections of sites? Like subreddits? edit: oh man, if i could paid and get API access for my own apps.. that would be killer. Slowly extend it to stuff like IOT or AI integrations that i normally don't want to give cloud providers.. this would be really cool
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > if i could paid and get API access for my own apps Assuming it's paid per search, just screen-scrape the thing? There's no reason they'd care what client you use to access it if you're paying for each request.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    Kagi actually provides programmatic API access: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-api/overview.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-api/overview.html
    - unshavedyak 4y ago
      Turns out this is only for the Team Plan, which seems far worse than the individual plan for individuals.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    Well i'm not going to pay and jump hoops like screen scrape. My question was more that if i'm paying, i'd also love first-class API access. Sounds like they give it, sweet!
foreverCarlos 4y ago
Kagi is in fact better for me very frequently. I customized it to my liking and it shows better results than Google. Sure, I would be able to find the same content on Google, but that would require using keywords for site or file type. With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
mediumdeviation 4y ago
I have to say their own homepage does not inspire confidence - it currently shows three sample search results, and clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. For comparison DDG shows a bunch of headphone review sites, all of which seems reasonably reputable. In fact all three of these have some odd results - - "steve jobs"'s fifth result is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs at a 2003 conference, but the result is linked to a seemingly random 2606s timestamp and it is right below the Videos section with much more relevant videos - "python exceptions"'s second result is a blog post about Python exceptions being anti-patterns. I've not used Python in a while but that seems very wrong, and a terrible result to show to someone who might be learning Python or looking up how Exceptions work.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. On the other hand, having such an obvious mistake on the homepage makes me trust more that they believe in their product enough to give you raw, real results (which may sometimes include stale content such as a parked domain) rather than a manually-crafted "perfect" results page that wouldn't be representative of the real product at all.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  Kagi is great for the kind of searches I do -- mainly searching for wikipedia articles, stackoverflow questions, etc. If I ever want to buy a product I don't know much about, I usually spend some time reading the megathread on whatever niche subreddit there is on the topic. When I search Kagi for "best headphones" the first link on the page is to /r/HeadphoneAdvice, which is probably where I'd want to go. There are some not as good results down the page, but I never would have even seen them because the 1st link is what I wanted. For "python exceptions" the top links are all to the python.org docs about exceptions, which is almost certainly what I wanted with that generic search. If I search "steve jobs" or really <any famous person or event>, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time, and that is the #1 result. I've gotten increasingly frustrated with google in the last few years that they've gone away from this behavior for lots of searches. Sometimes the wikipedia article isn't even on the first page. So, for my use cases, Kagi is behaving totally optimally for all these searches.
Euphorbium 4y ago
Ddg sucks big time, but I found brave search not worse than google like 70% of the time, 20% times it is better and 10% it is worse.
- sndean 4y ago
  I wonder if Kagi gets significantly better results than Brave's? I almost entirely moved to Brave from DDG, and the difference is like night and day, but could Kagi's search really be worth $10/month? I could use some more Brave vs. Kagi comparisons.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Curious too, perhaps you can do one yourself?
CurrentB 4y ago
I keep seeing comments like this when Kagi is brought up. One of them motivated me to try kagi about a month ago. I would love to replace google and try out every alternative search engine I encounter. I admit it will be hard to replace. I'm a programmer and searching is basically a sixth sense for me at this point. I'm frequently frustrated with google results but have never found anything less frustrating. I signed up for kagi, ran out of the free searches in 2 days, my initial impression was "not better than google" and never looked back. I probably would have tried for a few more days if the trial was longer. Still more likely than not that I would have crawled back to google, but it did seem like not enough time to fully evaluate. For instance, the upweight/downweight feature you mention is intriguing but I didn't really get a chance to see any benefits of it.
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  Software engineers - the breed that goes to extremes and compromises a lot just to avoid… paying for software. I agree partially that they could have a longer trial but on the other hand, $10 without any sort of contract is a low enough barrier to give it a whirl.
  - CurrentB 4y ago
    I'd be thrilled to pay for such a service if I found it even remotely sticky, and I genuinely wanted it to be. I just found it mediocre. If some of their features' benefits compound over time it seems like it would be better to have a lengthier trial period.
    - mccorrinall 4y ago
      What results does have it to echo in order to not be mediocre for you?
    - freediver 4y ago
      Kagi free plan includes 50 free searches every month, so the trial period is basically infinite.
dzek69 4y ago
Have you ever tried startpage.com? I can't use anything else then google for more than a day - for me every other search engine returns worse results than google, especially in my native language (polish), but startpage seemed to be best choice if I ever had to switch
- Terretta 4y ago
  Startpage used to be Google with personalization off. So the results tended to be "better". (Haven't checked if this is still the case.) It's still !s on DDG and Kagi.
Yhippa 4y ago
Honest questions: 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? 2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit? I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.
- vlmutolo 4y ago
  > 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible. 2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
  - poszlem 4y ago
    > It disaligns the incentives. This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads? The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad. Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked. (for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability) A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
tablets 4y ago
I've been using kagi as a paid customer since August 2022. My experience is that for programming related tasks it is much faster to find a useful answer/discussion/site. The most compelling experience I've had with it was during a road trip across Europe. Using the country selector allowed me to find succinct search results for signs, shops and regional attractions. The few times I did comparison searches using google.co.* search the results were more confusing than the kagi results.
- adalacelove 4y ago
  Just made a programming related search and got useful results instead of the SEO optimized crap I get with Google. Just this, without taking into account privacy, justifies the subscription for me.
nugget 4y ago
I'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.
- rvba 4y ago
  For Google from 5 years ago. Their current product is worse than few years ago.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  For the same search quality they have now, and in a world where Kagi exists for $10, no. I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case. If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    Why not use Firefox's search engine keyword to just make it use Wikipedia directly, or duckduckgo with !w ?
  - spoils19 4y ago
    I understand your pain completely. I actually wrote a custom extension for myself where instead of using Google search, it'll automatically redirect and use the Wikipedia search.
  - cpleppert 4y ago
    I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine. Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
> It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. This is a great way to put it. DDG feels worse than Google, which is why I would always use !g. I rarely use Google nowadays.
raffraffraff 4y ago
Google would never let you tweak their results. You can use third party addons but they expose your browser activity to an unacceptable degree, and I don't even know if there is a collection of addons that can tweak Google results to match kagi's.
ls15 4y ago
> It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time. I've been using DDG happily for years and only fell back to Google at most 5 times during the last two years and I think half of the times it wasn't even useful to me. Maybe it is the way how I write queries? Nowadays I find Google's result page just confusing, so I disagree with calling Google better.
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
I have nothing to add except I've also had it for 2 months and fully agree in every point. I wanted DDG to work, but I had to !g so often. I'm also using their Orion browser and finding it quite a pleasure to use, a litt buggy, but good enough for a daily driver.

poszlem 4y ago

I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it's the first alternative search engine (tried the Brave's one and DDG) that does not make me go back to google every other search. On the flips side, though, getting a "you cannot search anymore until you've paid" message was quite a shock to me. Like - I paid for it to try it out. It worked well, so it wasn't really a "nobody told me there would be a subscription" kind of shock, but more like on that second month I got the "wait, am I actually paying for the access to a search engine?" realization. Makes you notice how much we are getting conditioned to the "out business for your data" business model.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Been watching this with much interest since it launched, have always thought there was a market for this type of product.

sinoue 4y ago

Kagi would be smart to offer a few tiers of service to encourage paid adoption. Have a pricey one time lifetime fee that goes up in price each year. Have a reasonable flat one time fee to increase the number of searches over free so that folks not ready for a subscription will jump at the opportunity. Add a "member since 20xx" icon to log in screen to let folks show how long they've been a member. Sell t-shirt, hoodie, laptop stickers, phone case, coffee mug swag to increase awareness. Make it easy to organize bookmarks, share search results and curate search lists.

version_five 4y ago
I think they are transparent about how much each query costs them and are trying to run a sustainable business. I personally prefer paying for that- basically a market rate for search, than trying to jump on to a growth hacking scheme of lifetime memberships or merch subsidies.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
How about, pay per search?
- galleywest200 4y ago
  The Kagi Teams plan is essentially pay-per-search: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  They essentially already do this. They expose how much you've costed them as a customer, and if it's more than what you've paid in subscription fees, you can tip the difference.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    And what if it's less?
- howenterprisey 4y ago

phosphorco 4y ago

Curious how folks think this compares to Neeva? For whatever reason, didn't quite stick with that one.

neodymiumphish 4y ago
I'm going to give Kagi the fairest shake I can, but so far I've found Neeva's UI better and results just as good.

jsnell 4y ago

Previous discussions in the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993

dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: The Age of PageRank Is Over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 - Nov 2022 (373 comments) Kagi/Orion status update: First three months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 - Sept 2022 (191 comments) Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments) Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments)

shepherdjerred 4y ago

I've paid and used Kagi for about six months. I used DDG for a while, but I found myself putting !g after every query (especially when looking for answers relating to programming). With Kagi I very, very rarely need to use Google. It has some nice features, like lenses, URL rewriting, and the ability to bump sites to the top. I have a lens for programming. It shows only certain sites, like GitHub and Stack Exchange, and I enable it when appropriate. For URL rewriting, I have Kagi set to rewrite URLs from Twitter and Reddit to my own self-hosted instances of Nitter [0] and Teddit [1], so that when I open a Kagi result that would've gone to twitter.com, it goes to nitter.mydomain.com, which lets me use Twitter without an account. Lastly, I use the site bumping feature to move Wikipedia results to the top. [0]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1]: https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit

raybb 4y ago
Kagi is great for letting you customize your own bangs (!g, etc). One thing I'd like to do, that's pretty specific, is having a site with my own bangs that do specific things like for example: open the url in archive.is and archive.org or open OpenLibrary.org and GoodReads. Similar nice functionality might include stripping of spaces for certain queries. Does anyone know of a tool like this? Otherwise, it would probably be simple enough to build my own and have a kagi bang that directs to it as needed.
- g_p 4y ago
  The team behind kagi are also building a browser (Orion). One of the new features that's been teased could likely be put to use doing something like this... Think natural language input to a browser.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    I tried out Orion, but I wasn't really impressed by it.
  - sebazzz 4y ago

metadat 4y ago

Previous submissions (note: they're frequent): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kagi.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kagi.com

leonidasv 4y ago
There's a 114-point submission from 2016[1] that's about Kagi, an eCommerce platform that launched in 1994 and ceased operations that year[2], that existed in that same domain[3]. Found it mildly interesting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 [2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud/ https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.com/index.php http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.c...

autotune 4y ago

Can anyone else compare this to you.com, which is a similar concept in regards to increased privacy? I plan to sign up for Kagi tomorrow, but having used Kagi until I ran out of search on the free version, you.com seems to offer more features specifically in regards to YouChat and ability to preview certain results. It's also free for right now but wonder if they plan to go the ad-supported route in the feature, which would be a deal breaker for me over just paying a monthly plan like you do with Kagi.

richardsocher 4y ago
If there's a lot of interest, we'd be happy to offer a monthly paid plan also. It's interesting. Only on HN do we hear users asking to pay for an otherwise free service. Majority of our users everywhere else would never pay for search. youChat will get a lot better in the coming months I think it would be wonderful! Richard from you.com here.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  I think gradient on results page are distracting. You guys should do some UI review of results page. For me it's too distracting and hard to read the results. Same with the logos at bottom they steal all attention. EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.
  - richardsocher 4y ago
    Thanks. We'll look into both of these (plans and design).
- autotune 4y ago
  Maybe consider making an "ad-supported, free" model, and a "premium" plan without ads? As long as advertising doesn't end up in the premium plan at any point it's the best of both worlds.

nunez 4y ago

I'd like to use Kagi but I can't make it a default search engine in Safari. Until then, DuckDuck it is!

foreverCarlos 4y ago
You absolutely can! I got working after installing the extension and restarting Safari.
- nunez 4y ago
  Oh snap; okay! i'll try it!
  - foreverCarlos 4y ago
    There can be weird issues if you use other extensions, especially content blockers. So in my case I had to enable AdGuard Pro first and only then Kagi.

AOsborn 4y ago

I can't help but feel that the pricing is backwards. I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly. Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year. Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up. Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.

Terretta 4y ago
This is absolutely worth $10 a month. For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.
- phs 4y ago
  Agreed. It seems most comments in here find the quality noticeably better than G or DDG (I know I do.) Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  If it did indeed get bought by Apple, I'd go back to DDG. Apple doesn't need to buy everything and in my opinion they're not the saviour.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    If they can white label CloudFlare as part of their iPrivacy for everyone with iCloud+, they could white label kagi as well. The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default. That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.

Spivak 4y ago

I've been having a good time with Kagi but I can't figure out how "In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" can be possible. That's on the order of Midjourney, DALL-E, and Davinci-003 and they're shoveling GPUs into furnaces to power their servers.

g_p 4y ago
I understand they're having to pay for access to crawler results, to avoid the cost of indexing and crawling the entire web (though they do some themselves).
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  Would it very quickly at those costs become cheaper for them to crawl the most popular 10 million websites themselves and only use external providers as backfill?

Mortiffer 4y ago

recently i had a legit use for going past the 10th page of google, after which it wants to give me no more into. I tried the same query on kagi only got 2 pages.... I don't see if the premium actually gets u more

infinityio 4y ago
as far as I'm aware, you wouldn't get more with premium - kagi doesn't return as many search results as competitors From their FAQ: > We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.

user3939382 4y ago

I switched to it the last month or so. Got sick of DDG blatantly ignoring my query terms, Google’s results are filled with so many special result formats and SEO spam I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore, never mind the creepiness factor of Google. Kagi’s results have been great. My biggest complaint is that it’s a weird name, which is really a compliment.

slaw 4y ago

I tried Kagi and it is not better than Google or DDG, IMHO not worth any money. I use Google by default and Yandex when I am looking for PDFs, images, repair instructions, pages not indexed by Google at all.

gandalfgreybeer 4y ago
First time I've heard of Yandex. The way you've described it, I might hopefully find it useful for the academic PDFs I've been seeing less and less in Google.
- slaw 4y ago
  I am not sure about academic PDFs. It is like old google, it searches for keywords, doesn't try any AI guessing what you mean and doesn't blacklist domains like google.
  - aaaa4444 4y ago
    Yandex is also very good at reverse image search.

nnx 4y ago

> it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. $0.0125 per search seems awfully high. Do they think this cost can be compressed as more users use Kagi thanks to economies of scale?

mdaniel 4y ago
I would be interested if the distributed model that's allegedly used by Presearch.com would work for Kagi, since the members seem like they would have financial disincentive to poison search results. That said, I only know enough of how Presearch works from their whitepaper, because trying it out seemed like some tomfoolery and I couldn't figure out if the risk would be the same as me running a Tor exit node
worldofmatthew 4y ago
They are using Google Cloud for APIs and AWS for DNS.... That's two costs that could be reduced with alternative providers. I wonder if the API calls to external providers could be cached. I am also wondering if they are also using expensive big-tech VMs in the background? I am feeling costs could be reduced.
- dceddia 4y ago
  I don’t know anything about the services they use to provide results, but I’ve seen some services (geocoding lookups, google maps tiles, …) where they explicitly forbid caching.
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    You would have thought that the people behind Kagi would look for sources that allow it.
jpalomaki 4y ago
I assume a big portion of the money goes to Google for their search API. Initially I could not even believe, Google offered this kind of paid version to somebody. And I’m still a bit suspicious if they are only doing this to gather insights on how much people are willing to pay for ad-free search.

imwillofficial 4y ago

I’m a subscriber and have enjoyed it so far. I’m a firm believer that we should pay for the things we use to avoid becoming the product.

deleted 4y ago

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furyofantares 4y ago

I'm 2 months into paying for Kagi. I'm so happy not having ads. I didn't really expect it to feel so different to me, but it does. Similarly, I didn't expect to feel good about paying for it. But it feels like a breath of fresh air, to be paying for a service that I deem worth the price, that isn't trying to extract money from me through a side channel. I think the results have been better for me, though in a couple cases a top ranked result was 404'ing, which I've never had on google. The UI is better imo, and I've occasionally used lenses which has been useful. I haven't ever used !g in two months. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Google of years past, I fondly remember finding it in 1998 and feeling like I had an absolute superpower not just over people not on the internet, but over people still using the other search engines. And I also am somewhat of an apologist, when people dump on Google search results getting worse over the years I'm quick to point out that it's a highly adversarial problem and they're the primary target. But 24 years later, I couldn't be happier switching to Kagi now. Frankly, while I'm quite happy with my current work, it makes me fantasize of working for them.

machiaweliczny 4y ago
I like lenses but I already wrote that someone should create market for search applications but using their index/tech. I think You.com has some search plugins but that probably could be improved. Like for example: Forums only search, travels blog search (with filtering travel destination etc.), cooking recipes search only, fashion, markets

deleted 4y ago

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methou 4y ago

Happy paying customer here. I live in Japan while my main language use is English, I found that "International" option is quite useful - tech results are in English, while localilty related queries are in Japanese. There's one aspect Kagi is not improving - the "explicit" results. Personally I find it's difficult to justify the universal effort across all the platforms and "monopolies" to minimizing the explicit results for adults.

iansinnott 4y ago

Can confirm, not worse than Google. I do still use !g to use Google occasionally, but as often as not I'm disappointed in the Google results. It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).

_8j50 4y ago

Tried it. You don't get better quality of anything. You just get to pay someone to collect your search history under an account with PII and payment info also associated. You have to login each time you search stuff in private browsing. Very annoying when I go back to a tab or back to search results and I need to login to see them. It is a worse experience and I have to pay for it and I can't use cash, coin, giftcards,etc... I think they wanted to emulate proton maybe? But they don't have a free tier with at least ddg like experience and charge for premium features. Only people with a lot of disposable income who really care about privacy but also trust a company to not associate their info with their search history will use this.

mdaniel 4y ago
> You have to login each time you search stuff in private browsing. That drove me crazy with Neeva.com, too, and I actually suggested to them that they could offer a URL with a pre-shared key in it that I could use for incognito windows, like https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d&q=%s https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-90... or (arguably superior) https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example.com/?q=%s https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example.... They still haven't fixed that :-(
- freediver 4y ago
  Kagi search extensions (open source, available on all browers) allows you to search in private windows. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html#browser_extension https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... In additional Kagi implements the same thing you suggested basically, called a private session token that allows you to be logged in by appending it to the URL if you do not want to use the extension.

mberning 4y ago

User for a couple months. Love it.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

How does it compare to Brave Search? I know from experience that Brave Search is a lot better than DDG (and way cleaner than Google) and also supports bangs. When I was on DDG, I frequently used !g but on Brave Search, I haven't had such need (except for when I want to search for images)

rg111 4y ago
Seems like we live in completely different worlds. Among all the search engines I have tried, Brave search has been the crappiest- hands down. Nothing even comes close. Well, I poked around with Startpage for a day or two. Maybe it was crappier than Brave Search. DDG, Bing, etc. are miles better than Brave search. Kagi is a lot better than DDG/Bing.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  That's funny because for me, Brave Search is a better version of Google. Way more useful and relevant results than DDG ever gave me. It's also a lot cleaner too with more features. If you search the comments here, you'll see a lot of people share the same opinion as me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678326

jareklupinski 4y ago

I switched to Kagi a few months ago, and initially I was super impressed with how much faster I could find an authoritative result for exactly the technical or niche thing I needed. However over the past two weeks it seems, blog spam and SEO started creeping into my results. I use the "Lower" and "Block" controls much more today than when I first started, but I wonder if there's a better way to flag something as obviously nefarious or worthless? The "# of trackers" sidebar panel with the popularity metric help my eyes filter out the nonsense, but could the community's Lower and Block ratings be fed back into the rankings for everyone? Unless someone is actually paying $10 a month to artificially inflate their page rankings by Raising their own spam...

oa335 4y ago

I could have sworn that they were offering a “Investor” tier of subscription, $5000 for a SAFE note and unlimited subscription; I can’t seem to find it on their site though. Did anyone else see this or am I misremembering?

Version467 4y ago
No I remember this as well, but iirc this was back when they first rolled out a paid tier and were still experimenting with pricing. I don’t think this offer still exists and I vaguely remember that it was always meant as a temporary way to quickly generate some cash.

janalsncm 4y ago

I want this to succeed. I probably won’t hop in at the $10 price point but I probably would at $5.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago

I searched "best air purifiers" and the second result was for the home page of nutriteam.com which is apparently a water distilling company. Hmm. It seems the "best headphones" sample result is cherry picked If you try "best air purifier" then this is the second result, because surely somebody searching that wants to 3D print and assemble their own air purifier https://github.com/Kels316/DIY-Air-Purifier https://github.com/Kels316/DIY-Air-Purifier. And this is the FIRST result: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/watchdog-rejects-molekule-air-purifier-claims/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/watchdog-rejects-mol... Yeah I think I will stick with Google

piva00 4y ago
Now search for anything related to programming and be blessed by not seeing SEO-spam of content lifted from other places being plastered on the first pages of results :) And I get proper results for your query, not the ones you mention [0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/3bjxFYA.png https://i.imgur.com/3bjxFYA.png

dagurp 4y ago

Just parroting what others are saying. Good service but I stopped using it because $10 a month is too much IMO

piva00 4y ago

I switched to Kagi after getting extremely fed up and tired of massaging my Google queries the exact way it was needed to clear SEO-spam and useless results. It's been 4 months and I don't see myself not using Kagi anymore, it's been a blessing for any queries related to programming. I love the lenses feature and the search in discussions, so much easier to use than having my curated list of "site:<domain>" to search through on Google. It's been very worth the US$ 10/month for what's arguably the internet service I use the most: search.

ls15 4y ago

Which private payment methods does Kagi allow as a self-proclaimed "100% privacy-respecting search engine"?

quags 4y ago

That price is quite steep for search, which I’m personally using less and less, and prices out developing countries that have high growth right now. Obviously pricing and costs are the same regardless of who is searching. For my personal use I have ddg and do frequently add !g to searches - ddg hasn’t been great but not to the level of turning it off. I frequently will add Reddit to get reviews , Wikipedia for articles or stack overflow for programming. When I search I’m not logged in ( no gmail for example) so paying to have a searched where I’m logged in does not motivate me for privacy - only to pay for maybe a better company than google.

amai 4y ago

How does it compare to https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ ?

Version467 4y ago

I’ve been paying for Kagi since September (which is when they started charging for their service), and I’m really happy with it so far. The search results are noticeably not worse than googles, even for things that depend heavily on location. I really didn’t feel the need to fall back to Google more than once or twice in total. I also feel like their ranking is slightly better in that the first or second result is usually what I’m looking for, not half a page down. 10$ a month is the upper limit of what I am comfortable paying for it, I’d feel much better if it were 5$. But I really, really want Kagi to succeed. They have a great product, if they can’t make paid search work then I fear it’s not going to happen at all. So I pay 10 bucks a month for a great search engine with a great interface where I can be sure that my data isn’t sold of. Sidenote: I can also highly recommend their Orion browser for Mac. It’s based on safari (so it’s light on resources and very battery friendly), but supports chrome extensions + it has first class support for tree style tabs.

yuck39 4y ago

I beta tested Kagi (free) and was really impressed with the results it would give me. Having to login to a search engine was a bit of a pain, especially with different browser profiles and private mode. I understand that will inherently be a limitation with Kagi.

jpalomaki 4y ago

I’ve been using Kagi as pretty much only search engine on desktop for several months and I’m happy as well. This is how paid versions of free services should be. Time is valuable and I’m easily distracted - one interesting ad/link/snippet can take me to a rabbit hole. With Kagi my feeling is that there’s less of these distractions. This is also something I dislike on YouTube. I pay to get rid of ads, but still they employ the usual trickery to keep me on the site as long as possible.

antoinebalaine 4y ago

Kagi's made the internet pleasant again for me - the very low amount of noise in the search results, and removing the pervasive sensation that I was constantly getting tricked into garbage results, that's been a very positive shift. For 10$, it's been totally worth it - search remains an invaluable daily door into the internet, and good quality pay-for-search promises positive compounding effects: low noise-to-signal ratio, a potential shift in business incentives away from advertising, better access to information, a reduction of bias, etc.

oogabooga13 4y ago

I've been a paid subscriber for awhile now and I'd describe it as the fastmail to gmail. Although fastmail is quite a developed thing you can see where kagi is heading the longer they stay in the game. It's up there in value with Youtube premium for me...I will pay a reasonable price for a life without ads given the option for a service I depend on. Just me 02 cents.

lebaux 4y ago

information was always free lol

Covalent 4y ago

I've been using kagi for a couple months now and I'm a big fan. I never have to use Google to search because the results are good enough for me. And I enjoy that I'm not being pushed into affiliate links and ads all the time.

mbirth 4y ago

So the consensus seems to be that Kagi's results are "not worse or better" than Google's. So did anyone do a comparison between Kagi and SearX/SearXNG?