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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

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

"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.