4 ms·

I'm really on the fence about Kagi. Results are good, but I'm just so accustomed to search being free.

jackson1442 4y ago
It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past year I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has become a place that serves the advertisers more than the users. Adding more and more ads to the top of the feed, doing effectively nothing to combat SEO spam (that generally has AdSense on the site), etc. Kagi comparatively feels like a search engine that serves me as the user. It's a hard difference to spot, but the results _feel_ higher quality because I've curated them to suit what I actually want to see when I search the web. If there's a site that's unreadable due to adblock-block nonsense or is generally very low quality, I can block it and move on. If there's something that generally has good content, I can raise it to prioritize it in results, or if it's something that I know I'll want to see a lot of (like AWS documentation when relevant), I can pin it to the top of the feed.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  > It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past year I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has become a place that serves the advertisers more than the users. Not hard at all to articulate... Google is not a search engine, but an ad platform. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ "It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us?"
user3939382 4y ago
I like paying because I know my interests as the user are Kagi’s priority. With these “free” solutions of course the priority is the advertisers which is often at conflict with users.
eitland 4y ago
For most techies in the west at least the price of Kagi should be next to nothing. I personally will happily pay $10 a month for a search engine that works and takes search quality seriously and has its incentives aligned with my best interest. And no, Google, Bing and DDG are utterly broken for many of the searches I do every week and I have written about it a number of times here and elsewhere since 10 years ago.
knoebber 4y ago
I'm a happy paying user... I almost never have to !g. I tried DDG before kagi, and it just seemed like a worse version of google to me. I definitely prefer the kagi results.
anotherhue 4y ago
I'd encourage you to consider how nice things can be when the user's incentives align with the company's. Kagi is wonderful.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Here is what I notice when I read https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy "THE COLLECTIVE LIABILITY OF Kagi AND THE INDEMNIFIED PARTIES UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT EXCEED $500 (FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS)." Why not limit liability to amounts received under the agreement. If the customer spends US$1000 on searches, then Kagi breaches the agreement, the customer can only recover "$500". WTF. Why is this so one-sided. That's left as a question for the reader. There have been attempts in the past to insulate web searchers from Google's data collection but I do not recall anyone charging fees, openly engaging in data collection themsleves and asking paying customers to agree to a ridiclously low limitation of liability. Two examples: https://www.macworld.com/article/204924/googlesharing.html https://www.macworld.com/article/204924/googlesharing.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle In these cases, one was trusting a potentially random person running a proxy, for lack of a better term. However no account, no credit card or other payment was required. But that is not what Kagi offers. It requires disclosing one's identity via payment and account creation. It requires assenting to data collection. No way to opt-out. And to top it off, it requires agreeing to an pernicious limitation of liability. In theory, having a paid agreement with a search engine website operator seems like it could be useful. The customer could, e.g., have an enforceable agreement with the website operator that prohibits the operator from certain activities, e.g., collecting data about the customer's use of the website and using it for financial gain or in a manner detrimental to the customer. If the operator breaches the agreement, then she can sue the operator. What does Kagi actually promise to do or not do under this agreement. It promises: "We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us and we promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form. Kagi's entire business is funded by its users and Kagi has no intention or interest in manipulating or monetizing user information in any way." Why is "your data" not defined. For example, data that Kagi and its partners collect from your use of Kagi is arguably not "your data", it's Kagi's data. If it's Kagi's data then it can be shared with anyone "in any way, shape of form." Further, why is "user information" not defined. Is data collected about how people use Kagi considered "user information". If not, then it can be manipulated and monetised in every way. Beyond the two statement about being good stewards, this entire "policy", like most "tech" company privacy policies, only states what the operator already does or does not do. At the same time it makes no warranties, so any statements about what it does or does not do could be grossly misleading or even false. There could be, and almost certainly is, other relevant information about what it does with the data it collects that is not disclosed. A common tactic is to claim data is only used to improve the "product" or "service". Yet it is never disclosed exactly how this data is used to do that. What if the customer disagrees that such usage is actually improving the product/service. It leaves enormous discretion to the operator to use collected data however it sees fit. The customer cannot grant or deny consent for using data in some specific instance. She is not even informed about the instance, e.g., "We used would like to use your data to do X." Other than the statement above about stewardship and keeping data for itself, does the operator does make any promises that it will do or refrain from doing anything in the future. "We do X" is not a promise. "We will do X" is a promise. How does the operator satisfy its performance under this agreement. For example, what if the website stops working. The only thing it has agreed to do is "be good stewards" of data it collects, whatever that means. Performance is satisfied by being god stewards. Nevermind actually providing a product or service. It appears the goal of the operator is to collect data. The "product" is only a means by which to do so. This collection will be financed by user fees. As the GoogleSharing and Scroogle examples demonstrate, it is possible to provide web search without collecting data.
karaterobot 4y ago
I'm in the opposite camp. One thing Kagi did for me was to remove that mental barrier you're talking about — I'm now okay with paying for a search engine if it keeps me from being the product. My problem is that lately Kagi has felt a bit like Google in that no matter what I'm searching for, retailers and low-quality blogspam seems to be at the top of the results. At this point, if there was another paid search engine, I'd probably jump over to that one.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Fortunately, at least some of those cases are solvable on Kagi using the domain-level ranking overrides - so if the blogspam is coming from the same set of domains, just set their ranking override to "Lower" or "Block", and/or set the legitimate results (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow) to "Raise" or "Pin". The thing I don't understand is... how come this is even a selling point? This is an obvious feature that was loudly demanded by people since time immemorial. It's something you realize you want five minutes into using your first search engine. Yet for some reason, neither Google nor Bing nor DDG nor literally anyone else I know of has ever implemented it. It took until ~2020 for Kagi to do it, and for me it's ~40% of reason I'm a paying user (the other ~40% is because they implemented a feature I proposed on their feedback board: the ability to rewrite result URLs via regular expressions - something I wanted to avoid having to use an extension to turn "reddit.com" results into "old.reddit.com" automatically).
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    > how come this is even a selling point? There is an extension I used to use which did it for Google, though it's been long enough that I don't remember what it's called. I think that it is an okay workaround, but if I need to trim out this kind of stuff, I consider it a problem with the underlying system. It would be nice to be able to import or subscribe to someone else's list of domain-level overrides. But at a certain level, if you're subscribing to Kagi, you're probably looking to avoid that stuff by default, and you should just not have to deal with it in the first place.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past year I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has become a place that serves the advertisers more than the users. Adding more and more ads to the top of the feed, doing effectively nothing to combat SEO spam (that generally has AdSense on the site), etc. Kagi comparatively feels like a search engine that serves me as the user. It's a hard difference to spot, but the results _feel_ higher quality because I've curated them to suit what I actually want to see when I search the web. If there's a site that's unreadable due to adblock-block nonsense or is generally very low quality, I can block it and move on. If there's something that generally has good content, I can raise it to prioritize it in results, or if it's something that I know I'll want to see a lot of (like AWS documentation when relevant), I can pin it to the top of the feed.

zikduruqe 4y ago
> It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past year I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has become a place that serves the advertisers more than the users. Not hard at all to articulate... Google is not a search engine, but an ad platform. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ "It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us?"

user3939382 4y ago

I like paying because I know my interests as the user are Kagi’s priority. With these “free” solutions of course the priority is the advertisers which is often at conflict with users.

eitland 4y ago

For most techies in the west at least the price of Kagi should be next to nothing. I personally will happily pay $10 a month for a search engine that works and takes search quality seriously and has its incentives aligned with my best interest. And no, Google, Bing and DDG are utterly broken for many of the searches I do every week and I have written about it a number of times here and elsewhere since 10 years ago.

knoebber 4y ago

I'm a happy paying user... I almost never have to !g. I tried DDG before kagi, and it just seemed like a worse version of google to me. I definitely prefer the kagi results.

anotherhue 4y ago

I'd encourage you to consider how nice things can be when the user's incentives align with the company's. Kagi is wonderful.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Here is what I notice when I read https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy "THE COLLECTIVE LIABILITY OF Kagi AND THE INDEMNIFIED PARTIES UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT EXCEED $500 (FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS)." Why not limit liability to amounts received under the agreement. If the customer spends US$1000 on searches, then Kagi breaches the agreement, the customer can only recover "$500". WTF. Why is this so one-sided. That's left as a question for the reader. There have been attempts in the past to insulate web searchers from Google's data collection but I do not recall anyone charging fees, openly engaging in data collection themsleves and asking paying customers to agree to a ridiclously low limitation of liability. Two examples: https://www.macworld.com/article/204924/googlesharing.html https://www.macworld.com/article/204924/googlesharing.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle In these cases, one was trusting a potentially random person running a proxy, for lack of a better term. However no account, no credit card or other payment was required. But that is not what Kagi offers. It requires disclosing one's identity via payment and account creation. It requires assenting to data collection. No way to opt-out. And to top it off, it requires agreeing to an pernicious limitation of liability. In theory, having a paid agreement with a search engine website operator seems like it could be useful. The customer could, e.g., have an enforceable agreement with the website operator that prohibits the operator from certain activities, e.g., collecting data about the customer's use of the website and using it for financial gain or in a manner detrimental to the customer. If the operator breaches the agreement, then she can sue the operator. What does Kagi actually promise to do or not do under this agreement. It promises: "We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us and we promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form. Kagi's entire business is funded by its users and Kagi has no intention or interest in manipulating or monetizing user information in any way." Why is "your data" not defined. For example, data that Kagi and its partners collect from your use of Kagi is arguably not "your data", it's Kagi's data. If it's Kagi's data then it can be shared with anyone "in any way, shape of form." Further, why is "user information" not defined. Is data collected about how people use Kagi considered "user information". If not, then it can be manipulated and monetised in every way. Beyond the two statement about being good stewards, this entire "policy", like most "tech" company privacy policies, only states what the operator already does or does not do. At the same time it makes no warranties, so any statements about what it does or does not do could be grossly misleading or even false. There could be, and almost certainly is, other relevant information about what it does with the data it collects that is not disclosed. A common tactic is to claim data is only used to improve the "product" or "service". Yet it is never disclosed exactly how this data is used to do that. What if the customer disagrees that such usage is actually improving the product/service. It leaves enormous discretion to the operator to use collected data however it sees fit. The customer cannot grant or deny consent for using data in some specific instance. She is not even informed about the instance, e.g., "We used would like to use your data to do X." Other than the statement above about stewardship and keeping data for itself, does the operator does make any promises that it will do or refrain from doing anything in the future. "We do X" is not a promise. "We will do X" is a promise. How does the operator satisfy its performance under this agreement. For example, what if the website stops working. The only thing it has agreed to do is "be good stewards" of data it collects, whatever that means. Performance is satisfied by being god stewards. Nevermind actually providing a product or service. It appears the goal of the operator is to collect data. The "product" is only a means by which to do so. This collection will be financed by user fees. As the GoogleSharing and Scroogle examples demonstrate, it is possible to provide web search without collecting data.

karaterobot 4y ago

I'm in the opposite camp. One thing Kagi did for me was to remove that mental barrier you're talking about — I'm now okay with paying for a search engine if it keeps me from being the product. My problem is that lately Kagi has felt a bit like Google in that no matter what I'm searching for, retailers and low-quality blogspam seems to be at the top of the results. At this point, if there was another paid search engine, I'd probably jump over to that one.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Fortunately, at least some of those cases are solvable on Kagi using the domain-level ranking overrides - so if the blogspam is coming from the same set of domains, just set their ranking override to "Lower" or "Block", and/or set the legitimate results (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow) to "Raise" or "Pin". The thing I don't understand is... how come this is even a selling point? This is an obvious feature that was loudly demanded by people since time immemorial. It's something you realize you want five minutes into using your first search engine. Yet for some reason, neither Google nor Bing nor DDG nor literally anyone else I know of has ever implemented it. It took until ~2020 for Kagi to do it, and for me it's ~40% of reason I'm a paying user (the other ~40% is because they implemented a feature I proposed on their feedback board: the ability to rewrite result URLs via regular expressions - something I wanted to avoid having to use an extension to turn "reddit.com" results into "old.reddit.com" automatically).
- karaterobot 4y ago
  > how come this is even a selling point? There is an extension I used to use which did it for Google, though it's been long enough that I don't remember what it's called. I think that it is an okay workaround, but if I need to trim out this kind of stuff, I consider it a problem with the underlying system. It would be nice to be able to import or subscribe to someone else's list of domain-level overrides. But at a certain level, if you're subscribing to Kagi, you're probably looking to avoid that stuff by default, and you should just not have to deal with it in the first place.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago