4 ms·

I know a lot of people here thought Kagi wasn't worth it, but I'm an early adopter who has been a happy customer for some time now. Search is really important

I know a lot of people here thought Kagi wasn't worth it, but I'm an early adopter who has been a happy customer for some time now. Search is really important to me, and it isn't just about looking up businesses or Wikipedia pages. I read lots of academic papers and just want it to be easy to separate the wheat from the chaffe. Kagi makes that really easy with its lenses. Sure, Brave search has something similar, but I like Kagi's interface better and having to pay them gives me the sense their service won't just be deprecated or significantly changed at the whim of a CEO trying to satisfy advertisers or whatever. Having insight into how many ads and trackers on a page is nice too, as well as being able to demote and block certain domains. It's nice that I can block a domain and it's also blocked on my phone. What's especially important to me is the ability to wrap my queries in quotes for literal string matches. Granted, no search engine is perfect at this anymore because the web has become so huge, but Kagi seems to be the only search engine I use that gets string matches right more of the time and doesn't give me fake results when there are no actual matches. That's what pisses me off about The Google. And though I once used DDG, I found that the quality of search started getting worse and now it seems like quotes barely even work with that search engine now. I hope Kagi succeeds. It doesn't need to compete with The Google. Just be good enough for those willing to pay for it.

solardev 3y ago
What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?
- DavideNL 3y ago
  Like Brave Search Goggles: https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles "Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index."
- justusthane 3y ago
  It's basically a way to restrict search results to particular websites. So you could create a "programming" lens including Stack Overflow and Github, for example, and a search using that lens would only return results from those sites.
  - solardev 3y ago
    So how would that apply to academic searches? Do you manually create a lens for the journals and arxiv etc.?
    - justusthane 3y ago
      I assume so.
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      There's actually a built-in Academic lens they provide, although I haven't really used it much, favoring my own "Research" lens. It's not very sophisticated, but since I'm mostly into research related to health, I use this a lot: arxiv.org, nih.gov, researchgate.net, *.edu
  - prometheon1 3y ago
    Can lenses be shared with other users? And is there some kind of shared repository for them where we could crowdsource for example a lens with the urls of all Python docs of popular packages?
    - freediver 3y ago
      They can be shared in a Team plan, we are still thinking how to do this in a safe way for individual users (to protect against malicious intent).
digging 3y ago
I forgot I signed up for a free Kagi account a while back and reading some of these comments has reminded me to start using it. I don't need it to offer a huge leap in quality as long as it's actually good and doesn't degrade in quality. G search is right out for me because I avoid any G products whenever possible. Also it's quite bad these days. So I primarily use DuckDuckGo, except it's honestly not that good either. And I'm very suspicious of how much money they have for advertising with a free, privacy-focused product. It just doesn't feel sustainable. I could be wrong! Maybe their non-personalized ads are more sustainable than Kagi's subscription model. But the search kind of sucks. Actually, sometimes I do end up using `!g` to improve my results (rather: to actually get relevant results), and it feels bad. So I'm going to switch over to Kagi and see if that can deliver the results I want/need. If so, I'll happily pay. I might even pay $25/mo... it's a lot for a subscription, but it's not a lot when compared to my monthly income, so if it makes me job easier it will feel like a fair trade.

solardev 3y ago

What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?

DavideNL 3y ago
Like Brave Search Goggles: https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles "Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index."
justusthane 3y ago
It's basically a way to restrict search results to particular websites. So you could create a "programming" lens including Stack Overflow and Github, for example, and a search using that lens would only return results from those sites.
- solardev 3y ago
  So how would that apply to academic searches? Do you manually create a lens for the journals and arxiv etc.?
  - justusthane 3y ago
    I assume so.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    There's actually a built-in Academic lens they provide, although I haven't really used it much, favoring my own "Research" lens. It's not very sophisticated, but since I'm mostly into research related to health, I use this a lot: arxiv.org, nih.gov, researchgate.net, *.edu
- prometheon1 3y ago
  Can lenses be shared with other users? And is there some kind of shared repository for them where we could crowdsource for example a lens with the urls of all Python docs of popular packages?
  - freediver 3y ago
    They can be shared in a Team plan, we are still thinking how to do this in a safe way for individual users (to protect against malicious intent).

digging 3y ago

I forgot I signed up for a free Kagi account a while back and reading some of these comments has reminded me to start using it. I don't need it to offer a huge leap in quality as long as it's actually good and doesn't degrade in quality. G search is right out for me because I avoid any G products whenever possible. Also it's quite bad these days. So I primarily use DuckDuckGo, except it's honestly not that good either. And I'm very suspicious of how much money they have for advertising with a free, privacy-focused product. It just doesn't feel sustainable. I could be wrong! Maybe their non-personalized ads are more sustainable than Kagi's subscription model. But the search kind of sucks. Actually, sometimes I do end up using `!g` to improve my results (rather: to actually get relevant results), and it feels bad. So I'm going to switch over to Kagi and see if that can deliver the results I want/need. If so, I'll happily pay. I might even pay $25/mo... it's a lot for a subscription, but it's not a lot when compared to my monthly income, so if it makes me job easier it will feel like a fair trade.