24 ms·

Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

167 points by bluish29 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago
One thing that'd be nice is if they saved your selection of temperature scales. Currently they always show Celsius by default, but let you switch to Fahrenheit if you dare. I know that preferring Fahrenheit makes me a reprobate, but is this a hill they want to die on? Are they being paid by Big Metric? I'm logged in, go ahead and save it to my profile.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  Looks like it's on the backlog https://kagifeedback.org/d/862-weather-always-defaults-to-celcius https://kagifeedback.org/d/862-weather-always-defaults-to-ce...
- sph 3y ago
  Big Metric is a group of French scientists from the 18th century going around with a 1 metre long, 1 Kg heavy stick of pure platinum, hitting people's shins whenever they hear nonsense like "it's cold, it's only 50 degrees this morning" or "is that a 39 and 3/8ths inch stick in your hand?"
DanHulton 3y ago
Oh wow, these are legitimately all good improvements. Some are things I'd use, some are, I'm sure, going to appreciated by others, but what's pointedly not anywhere on this list (except cheekily in a few screenshots) is any sort of AI-powered nonsense. I know they mentioned a while back that they were working on some tooling of that sort, but boy am I happy that (in this release at least), they focused on features that genuinely improve and extend the search experience. Happy to keep paying for this.
- evanrelf 3y ago
  It's possible a form of AI (depending on your definition of the term) is powering some of these features, but it's used as an implementation detail, not a marketing term, which I appreciate.
- stavros 3y ago
  What's the problem with AI, and why is it nonsense?
  - mulmen 3y ago
    AI is hot right now. It’s literally a buzzword. When projects add AI to something that doesn’t need it that’s nonsense. So the claim is not that all AI is nonsense. The claim is that Kagi is refreshing for not using AI nonsensically.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > AI is hot right now. It’s literally a buzzword It's also a buzzword with no commonly-accepted definition. (If something is commonly accepted, it's that the term escapes common definition.) This motivates a race-to-the-bottom mixed with a sort of Gresham's law. The worst actors go the furthest. And then they drive the good actors away from the term. "AI-powered X" is quickly approaching red flag territory for me, though I doubt that will be the case for the general population for some time.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Time to give Kagi another go, Google is ruined for me, I just can’t use Microsoft products. Will try again.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I use Kagi exclusively. The results are just as bad as googles, but isn’t covered in spam. Given the sorry state of search quality in the SEO garbage world we live in, that’s high praise. I’m happy to spend the money every month.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Thanks, I felt similar last time I used it. Wasn’t magic like I remember Google being. I wonder what happened to Google? My theory is maybe their own systems have become too complex for them to understand and tune now. But they’ve invested so heavily into “AI” they don’t known where else to go in order to fix it ? I’ve here seen or experienced a search product quite like Google used to be. It truly felt like magic in it’s day.
    - stavros 3y ago
      What happened is that it got gamed, and lost the game. Spammers are better at getting ranked than Google is at detecting them, and the Web has died as a result.
    - funkaster 3y ago
      Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be (since there were no good organic search engines). Google got in there and had a great algorithm that worked in that world. It got gamed and now content is being produced to make sure you appear on top of searches that might not even be what you were looking for.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be I have a feeling many things in the digital space are similar to this and will go the same way, code is a pretty good example. Longer term, I wonder what the generation of massive amounts of code will do to the training data.
KomoD 3y ago
The only thing I found interesting/useful was public records search
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app. Overall, while I'm still not sure whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying, I keep doing it so that they can release improvements like this one. Their quick development speed is great to see.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    > The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app. I always found Google's to be pretty bad, I like to use Yandex for reverse image search since theirs is crazy good. > whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying Honestly, searches being limited just kills it for me, I don't feel like paying per search nor $25/mo, I do close to 200-250 searches per day, sometimes >500
endisneigh 3y ago
Can never get into Kagi. You pay for privacy but if it’s ever sold your privacy will be retroactively taken and will be even more valuable since it will be known by the buyer that you pay. Better off using a VPN and duck or Brave imho. In any case these improvements do look very good. Public record search is cool. Lenses improvements look interesting as that seems the be the most unique feature.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Your privacy can't be retroactively taken: Kagi does not store your search history. The only search history you have is local, your own web browser.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - paiute 3y ago
    I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.
    - sickmate 3y ago
      This is not correct. ISPs cannot see the actual URL being requested. Your DNS provider can see the hostname. The ISP may be able to see the hostname unless encrypted SNI is in place. The ISP can see the IP address you are connecting to.
      - gregw134 3y ago
        You seem to know more about this than I do, but my layperson's takeaway from the Snowden revelations is that the NSA records every url we browse. Are you saying that's incorrect?
fafzv 3y ago
https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or four times per day". They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.
- csomar 3y ago
  I was a customer for a few months until they decide to raise it. I do, on average, 30-40 searches per day. I'll need the $25 plan and while they are (subjectively) better than Google, I couldn't really justify the price bump.
- Sakos 3y ago
  They literally provide sources for those claims. I have no idea how you can say with a straight face that they're dishonest. They're very clear and transparent about how their plans are limited. It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5. They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges. Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do. edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.
  - stavros 3y ago
    The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.
    - 3y ago
radicalriddler 3y ago
Unfortunately I stopped using Kagi just due to it not being worth the money for me personally. But look at the company using bearblog.dev, that's awesome. bearblog.dev remains one of my favorite services I've found through HackerNews.
- esafak 3y ago
  Same here. Too expensive after the pricing change and their browser is irredeemably buggy. I gave them a chance. On to neeva.
  - radicalriddler 3y ago
    I was more talking about their search. It was fine, but it wasn't worth the money for me. The browser didn't really pique my interest on release but I wouldn't expect it to be great on release (they're still a small company, but they're doing some really ambitious stuff which is cool)
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    > their browser is irredeemably buggy Seconded. I gave it a few months, but it just wouldn't improve by itself. To be fair: With a detailed bug report (via Discord, making it excruciatingly hard to find duplicates/follow up), the problem would often be fixed in the next release. But it wasn't 1 or 2, it was more like 20 easily spotted issues. Come on, I can't do all of your testing. I think I've never said it this clearly because I don't want to offend (I still very much like the browser's concept), but it was just too painful for regular use for me. This about a year ago. Your comment seems to indicate that it hasn't changed.
    - freediver 3y ago
      Fair enough. We do have over 2,000 open issues [1] for the browser, so buggy is probably an understatement. But we are getting there. More than 1,500 issues have been addressed. And Orion is the fastest browser on Mac and completely zero telemetry at that. Give us a bit more time.. [1] https://oriongeedback.org https://oriongeedback.org
richardbarosky 3y ago
"Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews." This is a breath of fresh air. Ever since CNN Underscored started being a thing, I've grown to dislike more and more the swamp of affiliate link promoting content. Some concent creaters on YouTube for example (like randomfrankp), are able pull it off, but deeply affects the credibility of most content.
mtlynch 3y ago
I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for four months for both work and personal use, and it's been a great experience. The only time I find myself re-doing a search in Google is when I want to look something up in Google Maps, but everything else, Kagi is on par with Google or better. I really like that Kagi lets me filter out blogspam results and sites that are just remixing content from StackOverflow.
- CapmCrackaWaka 3y ago
  I have been using Kagi with good results too, but some things it completely shits the bed with. I wanted to find the AWS portal, so I searched for "AWS". First result, American Welding Society. Fine. Second is a medium article about AWS. The third is a reddit post about AWS. On down and down, the AWS website doesn't show up on the first page. So I searched "AWS Portal". Again, the AWS website does not show up. This is still happening for me. Just checked, I haven't blocked their domain. It's honestly such an outlier, I wonder if they intentionally blocked results from the AWS domain from showing up.
  - freediver 3y ago
    That sounds very odd indeed. I just checked and my results look as expected: https://ibb.co/hmWNbyK https://ibb.co/hmWNbyK Do you mind sharing more information about this on kagifeedback.org so that we can have a look?
    - Benjamin_Dobell 3y ago
      Perhaps the changes made in the announcement we're all commenting on have improved the situation. I had a few search terms (intentionally niche) that are now showing up as top results where as they didn't in the past. Very happy with the changes. Now it's just the price holding me back. I just refuse buy metered services. I've had unlimited bandwidth for years despite my usage consistently falling below the cheaper top limited usage download tier. I just don't want to think about usage — it's an unwanted distraction when something is critical to my workflow. However, $25/mo is just too much for this service. I can see why they need to charge that at the moment due to economies of scale (or lack there-of). However, even $10/mo would be pushing it for this service. $25/mo is a long way off the mark. Can buy a VPN, support an open source ad blocker, and have money spare to pay for a couple of streaming subscriptions each month.
toss1 3y ago
>>down-ranking sites with a lot of ads and trackers more aggressively This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move! Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site. It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine... Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!
malikNF 3y ago
> Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews." Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to game the system over time.
- freediver 3y ago
  Which is why we can not say how, but please check and let us know if the reviews sound unbiased :)
thewebcount 3y ago
I’ve been using Kagi for almost a year now and love it. I’m on the early-adopter plan, but just checked and haven’t been anywhere near my included number of searches in the last 6 months. I probably do some searches with DDG on my work machine, so I’d probably being doing less than twice as many as I actually am if I set up my work machine to use Kagi. (But I like to keep work and home stuff separate.) Overall very impressed with it and also using the Orion browser and loving it.
j3s 3y ago
to anyone doubting: kagi really is that good. it has completely replaced my google usage - i haven't used google.com to search for anything in months. feels so good!!
Josteniok 3y ago
I was an early adopter of Kagi but I cancelled the moment they started messing with the plans. I know I'd have the early adopter flag but I just felt betrayed by the messaging and I also don't want to use a search engine where I'm trying to think about how many searches I'm making and if I'm going over a certain number. The updates in the article look pretty good but I can't get past those two issues.
browningstreet 3y ago
I’m not going to count my searches and pay for tiers. Honestly, I could live without caring about search. It feels like another thing that could go by the wayside, like music albums. I have Apple Music because it comes with my family plan, and I have YouTube Music because it comes with YouTube Premium. If I had to pay just for a music service — like Spotify — they wouldn’t get my money. Even if it’s the better music streaming option in my car. But my car also plays Apple Music. The dark pattens and ubiquity of some of these verticals means not having to care too much and still getting most of what I want. I don’t really want to care about search the way some people care about vinyl.
- toastal 3y ago
  Do I have to be the guy to say that I still listen to music as whole albums and store my music for offline? Artists in a lot of genres still release the album as 'the music', where a song is like one chapter of the book and you wouldn't just read one chapter. I only stream during the discovery phase for new music and even then it's usually: one track good, okay then it's time to try the whole album. There has always been folks that prefer records to radio and it feels absurd to me that this would be going away.
  - browningstreet 3y ago
    I think individually we all have the right/option to make our choices, but I'm speaking to the market makers. If you want to be a vinyl shop (Kagi, Bandcamp), go for it. But you're not going to be Spotify -- or the Apple Music Store ($0.99 per track, remember?) -- in a world of TikTok and bundled music platforms. And I have my personal version of vinyl, I listen a lot to soma.fm and Radio Paradise. It's very interesting to me personally how few other services like those really exist out in the world. There are things like DI.FM and Mixcloud, but I don't know anything else like Radio Paradise (music channels, forums, etc). I've scoured all the channels and platforms expose on TuneIn and the like, and there aren't quite as many variants as I would personally expect. So the niche music world isn't even as numerou$ as you'd want a long tail to be.
- dcow 3y ago
eitland 3y ago
Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now. Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers. For me it has value in two different ways: 1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you. 2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out. I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas. I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search: - Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic) - I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way. I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.
  - viraptor 3y ago
cvalka 3y ago
Please note that the founder worked for GoDaddy!
- vntok 3y ago
  So?
  - cvalka 3y ago
    One of the worst companies in the history of the Internet era.
- freediver 3y ago
  Yes from 2016-2018, amazing people, easily my best corporate experience.
  - cvalka 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Zuiii 3y ago
    In what sense if you don't mind me asking? Technical know-how, ethics?
    - freediver 3y ago
      Culture, care about people, genuinely friendly coworkers.
smusamashah 3y ago
How good is Kagi at searching for very very old parts of the web? Sometimes I use google to search in some old date range e.g. between 2000-2005?
- skinkestek 3y ago
  They build on top of Google and Bing and adds its own index as well so it should be reasonable, but I haven't tested. However, I think it should be easier to filter down searches to only show these results as Kagis advanced search operators mostly work reliably (and if they don't you can file a bug).
philip-b 3y ago
I have 3 questions. - How is your search in languages other than English and local to countries other than the US and Europe? In particular, I am interested in Russian and Turkish. I remember that previously (a year or two ago) it was not very good. Also, does your GPT based search work for other languages? - How is phind.com related to kagi? I remember that at some point, I was searching for something on phind and got an error saying that Kagi is out of capacity or something like that. - What underlying search providers do you currently use?
dcow 3y ago
I am a happy paying customer and I love your product. Thank you for continuing to improve it. I LOVE paying for a good product. It's so weird.
pt_PT_guy 3y ago
Awesome features! Nice! Now work on reducing your costs and making each subscription with 5x more searches a month :D. I was a subscriber and I absolutely hate the feeling of "spending" searches every time I search
Veen 3y ago
Amusingly, I searched for Kagi's founder and the new public records search section in the main results showed his citation for failing to stop at stop sign and a 2020 patent for "a search interface [that] allows the selection between multiple presentation modes". https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05 https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05
- freediver 3y ago
  It is amusing - and just for accuracy it was 'failing to stop at a stop sign, on a bicycle'.
TradingPlaces 3y ago
User since beta, subscriber since he started charging, and my primary search engine since January. About 500 searches a month. Very happy customer. I do a monthly sweep of subscriptions to make sure we are using all of it, and I never think about dropping Kagi. It keeps getting better, not worse like every other search engine, and the reason is because the user is the customer, not advertisers. Every ad-supported medium turns to shit, no matter where it starts out.
Zuiii 3y ago
Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know a project that indexes webpages as I visit them in my browser? I revisit a lot of sites often and would like a private search engine that can search the content I have previously visited. I'm downloading and rendering the web page on my browser anyway, so it seems like a giant waste not to index it while the page is open.
jaclaz 3y ago
I will throw this on the table (and quickly hide my hand behind my back): If the price model (IMHO correctly) is connected to the actual costs of the search, why not make a "searches account"? You pay 5$ per month as a "baseline" and each first of the month 200 searches are credited on your account. Then, if you use less than 200 searches, at the end of the month you have a credit that goes over to next month. If your credit goes to 0 within a month, you can buy "packets" of searches, 5$ for 200, 10$ for 500, or something like that, and recharge your account.

167 points by bluish29 3y ago

One thing that'd be nice is if they saved your selection of temperature scales. Currently they always show Celsius by default, but let you switch to Fahrenheit if you dare. I know that preferring Fahrenheit makes me a reprobate, but is this a hill they want to die on? Are they being paid by Big Metric? I'm logged in, go ahead and save it to my profile.

gamegoblin 3y ago
Looks like it's on the backlog https://kagifeedback.org/d/862-weather-always-defaults-to-celcius https://kagifeedback.org/d/862-weather-always-defaults-to-ce...
sph 3y ago
Big Metric is a group of French scientists from the 18th century going around with a 1 metre long, 1 Kg heavy stick of pure platinum, hitting people's shins whenever they hear nonsense like "it's cold, it's only 50 degrees this morning" or "is that a 39 and 3/8ths inch stick in your hand?"

DanHulton 3y ago

Oh wow, these are legitimately all good improvements. Some are things I'd use, some are, I'm sure, going to appreciated by others, but what's pointedly not anywhere on this list (except cheekily in a few screenshots) is any sort of AI-powered nonsense. I know they mentioned a while back that they were working on some tooling of that sort, but boy am I happy that (in this release at least), they focused on features that genuinely improve and extend the search experience. Happy to keep paying for this.

evanrelf 3y ago
It's possible a form of AI (depending on your definition of the term) is powering some of these features, but it's used as an implementation detail, not a marketing term, which I appreciate.
stavros 3y ago
What's the problem with AI, and why is it nonsense?
- mulmen 3y ago
  AI is hot right now. It’s literally a buzzword. When projects add AI to something that doesn’t need it that’s nonsense. So the claim is not that all AI is nonsense. The claim is that Kagi is refreshing for not using AI nonsensically.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > AI is hot right now. It’s literally a buzzword It's also a buzzword with no commonly-accepted definition. (If something is commonly accepted, it's that the term escapes common definition.) This motivates a race-to-the-bottom mixed with a sort of Gresham's law. The worst actors go the furthest. And then they drive the good actors away from the term. "AI-powered X" is quickly approaching red flag territory for me, though I doubt that will be the case for the general population for some time.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Time to give Kagi another go, Google is ruined for me, I just can’t use Microsoft products. Will try again.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I use Kagi exclusively. The results are just as bad as googles, but isn’t covered in spam. Given the sorry state of search quality in the SEO garbage world we live in, that’s high praise. I’m happy to spend the money every month.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Thanks, I felt similar last time I used it. Wasn’t magic like I remember Google being. I wonder what happened to Google? My theory is maybe their own systems have become too complex for them to understand and tune now. But they’ve invested so heavily into “AI” they don’t known where else to go in order to fix it ? I’ve here seen or experienced a search product quite like Google used to be. It truly felt like magic in it’s day.
  - stavros 3y ago
    What happened is that it got gamed, and lost the game. Spammers are better at getting ranked than Google is at detecting them, and the Web has died as a result.
  - funkaster 3y ago
    Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be (since there were no good organic search engines). Google got in there and had a great algorithm that worked in that world. It got gamed and now content is being produced to make sure you appear on top of searches that might not even be what you were looking for.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be I have a feeling many things in the digital space are similar to this and will go the same way, code is a pretty good example. Longer term, I wonder what the generation of massive amounts of code will do to the training data.

KomoD 3y ago

The only thing I found interesting/useful was public records search

pzmarzly 3y ago
The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app. Overall, while I'm still not sure whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying, I keep doing it so that they can release improvements like this one. Their quick development speed is great to see.
- KomoD 3y ago
  > The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app. I always found Google's to be pretty bad, I like to use Yandex for reverse image search since theirs is crazy good. > whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying Honestly, searches being limited just kills it for me, I don't feel like paying per search nor $25/mo, I do close to 200-250 searches per day, sometimes >500

endisneigh 3y ago

Can never get into Kagi. You pay for privacy but if it’s ever sold your privacy will be retroactively taken and will be even more valuable since it will be known by the buyer that you pay. Better off using a VPN and duck or Brave imho. In any case these improvements do look very good. Public record search is cool. Lenses improvements look interesting as that seems the be the most unique feature.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
Your privacy can't be retroactively taken: Kagi does not store your search history. The only search history you have is local, your own web browser.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paiute 3y ago
  I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.
  - sickmate 3y ago
    This is not correct. ISPs cannot see the actual URL being requested. Your DNS provider can see the hostname. The ISP may be able to see the hostname unless encrypted SNI is in place. The ISP can see the IP address you are connecting to.
    - gregw134 3y ago
      You seem to know more about this than I do, but my layperson's takeaway from the Snowden revelations is that the NSA records every url we browse. Are you saying that's incorrect?

fafzv 3y ago

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or four times per day". They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.

csomar 3y ago
I was a customer for a few months until they decide to raise it. I do, on average, 30-40 searches per day. I'll need the $25 plan and while they are (subjectively) better than Google, I couldn't really justify the price bump.
Sakos 3y ago
They literally provide sources for those claims. I have no idea how you can say with a straight face that they're dishonest. They're very clear and transparent about how their plans are limited. It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5. They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges. Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do. edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.
- stavros 3y ago
  The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.
  - 3y ago

radicalriddler 3y ago

Unfortunately I stopped using Kagi just due to it not being worth the money for me personally. But look at the company using bearblog.dev, that's awesome. bearblog.dev remains one of my favorite services I've found through HackerNews.

esafak 3y ago
Same here. Too expensive after the pricing change and their browser is irredeemably buggy. I gave them a chance. On to neeva.
- radicalriddler 3y ago
  I was more talking about their search. It was fine, but it wasn't worth the money for me. The browser didn't really pique my interest on release but I wouldn't expect it to be great on release (they're still a small company, but they're doing some really ambitious stuff which is cool)
- solarkraft 3y ago
  > their browser is irredeemably buggy Seconded. I gave it a few months, but it just wouldn't improve by itself. To be fair: With a detailed bug report (via Discord, making it excruciatingly hard to find duplicates/follow up), the problem would often be fixed in the next release. But it wasn't 1 or 2, it was more like 20 easily spotted issues. Come on, I can't do all of your testing. I think I've never said it this clearly because I don't want to offend (I still very much like the browser's concept), but it was just too painful for regular use for me. This about a year ago. Your comment seems to indicate that it hasn't changed.
  - freediver 3y ago
    Fair enough. We do have over 2,000 open issues [1] for the browser, so buggy is probably an understatement. But we are getting there. More than 1,500 issues have been addressed. And Orion is the fastest browser on Mac and completely zero telemetry at that. Give us a bit more time.. [1] https://oriongeedback.org https://oriongeedback.org

richardbarosky 3y ago

"Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews." This is a breath of fresh air. Ever since CNN Underscored started being a thing, I've grown to dislike more and more the swamp of affiliate link promoting content. Some concent creaters on YouTube for example (like randomfrankp), are able pull it off, but deeply affects the credibility of most content.

mtlynch 3y ago

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for four months for both work and personal use, and it's been a great experience. The only time I find myself re-doing a search in Google is when I want to look something up in Google Maps, but everything else, Kagi is on par with Google or better. I really like that Kagi lets me filter out blogspam results and sites that are just remixing content from StackOverflow.

CapmCrackaWaka 3y ago
I have been using Kagi with good results too, but some things it completely shits the bed with. I wanted to find the AWS portal, so I searched for "AWS". First result, American Welding Society. Fine. Second is a medium article about AWS. The third is a reddit post about AWS. On down and down, the AWS website doesn't show up on the first page. So I searched "AWS Portal". Again, the AWS website does not show up. This is still happening for me. Just checked, I haven't blocked their domain. It's honestly such an outlier, I wonder if they intentionally blocked results from the AWS domain from showing up.
- freediver 3y ago
  That sounds very odd indeed. I just checked and my results look as expected: https://ibb.co/hmWNbyK https://ibb.co/hmWNbyK Do you mind sharing more information about this on kagifeedback.org so that we can have a look?
  - Benjamin_Dobell 3y ago
    Perhaps the changes made in the announcement we're all commenting on have improved the situation. I had a few search terms (intentionally niche) that are now showing up as top results where as they didn't in the past. Very happy with the changes. Now it's just the price holding me back. I just refuse buy metered services. I've had unlimited bandwidth for years despite my usage consistently falling below the cheaper top limited usage download tier. I just don't want to think about usage — it's an unwanted distraction when something is critical to my workflow. However, $25/mo is just too much for this service. I can see why they need to charge that at the moment due to economies of scale (or lack there-of). However, even $10/mo would be pushing it for this service. $25/mo is a long way off the mark. Can buy a VPN, support an open source ad blocker, and have money spare to pay for a couple of streaming subscriptions each month.

toss1 3y ago

>>down-ranking sites with a lot of ads and trackers more aggressively This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move! Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site. It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine... Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!

malikNF 3y ago

> Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews." Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to game the system over time.

freediver 3y ago
Which is why we can not say how, but please check and let us know if the reviews sound unbiased :)

thewebcount 3y ago

I’ve been using Kagi for almost a year now and love it. I’m on the early-adopter plan, but just checked and haven’t been anywhere near my included number of searches in the last 6 months. I probably do some searches with DDG on my work machine, so I’d probably being doing less than twice as many as I actually am if I set up my work machine to use Kagi. (But I like to keep work and home stuff separate.) Overall very impressed with it and also using the Orion browser and loving it.

j3s 3y ago

to anyone doubting: kagi really is that good. it has completely replaced my google usage - i haven't used google.com to search for anything in months. feels so good!!

Josteniok 3y ago

I was an early adopter of Kagi but I cancelled the moment they started messing with the plans. I know I'd have the early adopter flag but I just felt betrayed by the messaging and I also don't want to use a search engine where I'm trying to think about how many searches I'm making and if I'm going over a certain number. The updates in the article look pretty good but I can't get past those two issues.

browningstreet 3y ago

I’m not going to count my searches and pay for tiers. Honestly, I could live without caring about search. It feels like another thing that could go by the wayside, like music albums. I have Apple Music because it comes with my family plan, and I have YouTube Music because it comes with YouTube Premium. If I had to pay just for a music service — like Spotify — they wouldn’t get my money. Even if it’s the better music streaming option in my car. But my car also plays Apple Music. The dark pattens and ubiquity of some of these verticals means not having to care too much and still getting most of what I want. I don’t really want to care about search the way some people care about vinyl.

toastal 3y ago
Do I have to be the guy to say that I still listen to music as whole albums and store my music for offline? Artists in a lot of genres still release the album as 'the music', where a song is like one chapter of the book and you wouldn't just read one chapter. I only stream during the discovery phase for new music and even then it's usually: one track good, okay then it's time to try the whole album. There has always been folks that prefer records to radio and it feels absurd to me that this would be going away.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  I think individually we all have the right/option to make our choices, but I'm speaking to the market makers. If you want to be a vinyl shop (Kagi, Bandcamp), go for it. But you're not going to be Spotify -- or the Apple Music Store ($0.99 per track, remember?) -- in a world of TikTok and bundled music platforms. And I have my personal version of vinyl, I listen a lot to soma.fm and Radio Paradise. It's very interesting to me personally how few other services like those really exist out in the world. There are things like DI.FM and Mixcloud, but I don't know anything else like Radio Paradise (music channels, forums, etc). I've scoured all the channels and platforms expose on TuneIn and the like, and there aren't quite as many variants as I would personally expect. So the niche music world isn't even as numerou$ as you'd want a long tail to be.
dcow 3y ago

eitland 3y ago

Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now. Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers. For me it has value in two different ways: 1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you. 2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out. I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas. I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search: - Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic) - I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way. I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.
- viraptor 3y ago

cvalka 3y ago

Please note that the founder worked for GoDaddy!

vntok 3y ago
So?
- cvalka 3y ago
  One of the worst companies in the history of the Internet era.
freediver 3y ago
Yes from 2016-2018, amazing people, easily my best corporate experience.
- cvalka 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Zuiii 3y ago
  In what sense if you don't mind me asking? Technical know-how, ethics?
  - freediver 3y ago
    Culture, care about people, genuinely friendly coworkers.

smusamashah 3y ago

How good is Kagi at searching for very very old parts of the web? Sometimes I use google to search in some old date range e.g. between 2000-2005?

skinkestek 3y ago
They build on top of Google and Bing and adds its own index as well so it should be reasonable, but I haven't tested. However, I think it should be easier to filter down searches to only show these results as Kagis advanced search operators mostly work reliably (and if they don't you can file a bug).

philip-b 3y ago

I have 3 questions. - How is your search in languages other than English and local to countries other than the US and Europe? In particular, I am interested in Russian and Turkish. I remember that previously (a year or two ago) it was not very good. Also, does your GPT based search work for other languages? - How is phind.com related to kagi? I remember that at some point, I was searching for something on phind and got an error saying that Kagi is out of capacity or something like that. - What underlying search providers do you currently use?

dcow 3y ago

I am a happy paying customer and I love your product. Thank you for continuing to improve it. I LOVE paying for a good product. It's so weird.

pt_PT_guy 3y ago

Awesome features! Nice! Now work on reducing your costs and making each subscription with 5x more searches a month :D. I was a subscriber and I absolutely hate the feeling of "spending" searches every time I search

Veen 3y ago

Amusingly, I searched for Kagi's founder and the new public records search section in the main results showed his citation for failing to stop at stop sign and a 2020 patent for "a search interface [that] allows the selection between multiple presentation modes". https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05 https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05

freediver 3y ago
It is amusing - and just for accuracy it was 'failing to stop at a stop sign, on a bicycle'.

TradingPlaces 3y ago

User since beta, subscriber since he started charging, and my primary search engine since January. About 500 searches a month. Very happy customer. I do a monthly sweep of subscriptions to make sure we are using all of it, and I never think about dropping Kagi. It keeps getting better, not worse like every other search engine, and the reason is because the user is the customer, not advertisers. Every ad-supported medium turns to shit, no matter where it starts out.

Zuiii 3y ago

Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know a project that indexes webpages as I visit them in my browser? I revisit a lot of sites often and would like a private search engine that can search the content I have previously visited. I'm downloading and rendering the web page on my browser anyway, so it seems like a giant waste not to index it while the page is open.

jaclaz 3y ago

I will throw this on the table (and quickly hide my hand behind my back): If the price model (IMHO correctly) is connected to the actual costs of the search, why not make a "searches account"? You pay 5$ per month as a "baseline" and each first of the month 200 searches are credited on your account. Then, if you use less than 200 searches, at the end of the month you have a credit that goes over to next month. If your credit goes to 0 within a month, you can buy "packets" of searches, 5$ for 200, 10$ for 500, or something like that, and recharge your account.