5 ms·

Kagi search engine subscription is easily my top choice (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com). I'm really glad something can finally, truly replace Google search

by D13Fd 4y ago

Kagi search engine subscription is easily my top choice (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com). I'm really glad something can finally, truly replace Google search and be just as good or better (neither Bing nor DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them). If we're talking physical products, I'd probably go with the Apple Magsafe wallet. It's a little thing but I love not having a separate wallet to keep track of every day.

rand846633 4y ago
I think we really will need more details here! Could you elaborate a bit? What would I learn if I spent 25 min researching kagi?
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Sorry, I'm far from an expert here. They started recently and just went out of closed beta I believe. I've been using it for a few months now. They have a lot of nice features pulled from Google and DDG: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.
70rd 4y ago
Would you say Kagi has escaped the Google SEO deterioration? Google has essentially gotten so bad for me that DuckDuckGo, without noticeable improvement, is now on par with Google.
- ceh123 4y ago
  Also a subscriber to Kagi. In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.
  - petepete 4y ago
    Pinterest gone from image results is worth the entry price alone.
    - disqard 4y ago
      Seconded!
    - user1029384756 4y ago
      Fyi, it’s pretty simple to add a custom filter to any decent adblocker like uBlock to prevent annoying domains from showing up in search results. I haven’t seen a Pinterest result or Stackoverflow clone in years…
  - DavideNL 4y ago
    > "you can extremely easily block domains" I just use ublacklist [1] for that. I like Kagi by the way, but my problem with it is: 1. major: I value privacy. I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.) 2. minor: The subscription cost is a little too high for my usage volume. [1] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
    - freediver 4y ago
      > I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.) You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments (like PrivacyHQ) if remaining anonymous is imperative to you. Kagi is 100% privacy respecting though, with the data you choose to trust us with (we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data).
      - dns_snek 4y ago
        Not GP but do you mean Privacy.com? As far as I'm aware it requires truthful personal information to use just like any other financial service. As such, it can still be used to link a person to their Kagi account which means it's not private or anonymous in any meaningful sense. Additionally the service is only available to US citizens. I would strongly urge Kagi to consider adding cryptocurrency payments - ideally Monero. This is coming from a paying Kagi customer. I like to put my money where my mouth is but I'm not a fan of the current payment options. I understand that Kagi is a small company in early stages, but I would expect cryptocurrency payments to be available 12 months from now.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again. But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google. I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.
- b1476 4y ago
  I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.
- NoboruWataya 4y ago
  I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.
srvmshr 4y ago
It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response. If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today. No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- freediver 4y ago
  Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations. I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts. Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use. If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach. To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do. Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure. To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Has anyone tried YOU.com? It's my new favorite search engine. Wiping Google from my searches is great.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  I keep going back and forth between you and brave. I love the concept of brave's goggles but I wish it was more like point/click and it could automagically pick the best goggle based on keywords etc.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
Anyone here use Kagi and Neeva for a similar amount of time? If so, thoughts on comparison?

by D13Fd 4y ago

rand846633 4y ago

I think we really will need more details here! Could you elaborate a bit? What would I learn if I spent 25 min researching kagi?

D13Fd 4y ago
Sorry, I'm far from an expert here. They started recently and just went out of closed beta I believe. I've been using it for a few months now. They have a lot of nice features pulled from Google and DDG: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.

70rd 4y ago

Would you say Kagi has escaped the Google SEO deterioration? Google has essentially gotten so bad for me that DuckDuckGo, without noticeable improvement, is now on par with Google.

ceh123 4y ago
Also a subscriber to Kagi. In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.
- petepete 4y ago
  Pinterest gone from image results is worth the entry price alone.
  - disqard 4y ago
    Seconded!
  - user1029384756 4y ago
    Fyi, it’s pretty simple to add a custom filter to any decent adblocker like uBlock to prevent annoying domains from showing up in search results. I haven’t seen a Pinterest result or Stackoverflow clone in years…
- DavideNL 4y ago
  > "you can extremely easily block domains" I just use ublacklist [1] for that. I like Kagi by the way, but my problem with it is: 1. major: I value privacy. I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.) 2. minor: The subscription cost is a little too high for my usage volume. [1] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
  - freediver 4y ago
    > I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.) You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments (like PrivacyHQ) if remaining anonymous is imperative to you. Kagi is 100% privacy respecting though, with the data you choose to trust us with (we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data).
    - dns_snek 4y ago
      Not GP but do you mean Privacy.com? As far as I'm aware it requires truthful personal information to use just like any other financial service. As such, it can still be used to link a person to their Kagi account which means it's not private or anonymous in any meaningful sense. Additionally the service is only available to US citizens. I would strongly urge Kagi to consider adding cryptocurrency payments - ideally Monero. This is coming from a paying Kagi customer. I like to put my money where my mouth is but I'm not a fan of the current payment options. I understand that Kagi is a small company in early stages, but I would expect cryptocurrency payments to be available 12 months from now.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.

aidenn0 4y ago
I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.
D13Fd 4y ago
I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again. But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google. I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.
b1476 4y ago
I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.
NoboruWataya 4y ago
I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.

srvmshr 4y ago

It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response. If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today. No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
freediver 4y ago
Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations. I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts. Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use. If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach. To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do. Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure. To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

Has anyone tried YOU.com? It's my new favorite search engine. Wiping Google from my searches is great.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
I keep going back and forth between you and brave. I love the concept of brave's goggles but I wish it was more like point/click and it could automagically pick the best goggle based on keywords etc.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

Anyone here use Kagi and Neeva for a similar amount of time? If so, thoughts on comparison?