9 ms·

Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.

thrownaway561 3y ago
https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
snide 3y ago
100% agree on Kagi. Happy customer. Thought it would be just another one of my attempts to use Duck Duck Go that dies after two weeks of !g usage. Turned out Kagi just works. The biggest improvement / gains is on mobile, where you suddenly don't need to scroll through 5 screens of ad results to get to the content.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I wonder if part of why its better is due to other users providing feedback about results, but also you can pin results from specific domains to the top. Like I can pin any results from StackOverflow, instead of the garbage StackOverflow rip off sites Google keeps giving me, its pretty obvious its ripping off SO because I just read the same thing word for word on StackOverflow three links ago. Thanks Google.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > I wonder if part of why its better is due to other users providing feedback about results, but also you can pin results from specific domains to the top. I think that matters very little. Kagi had excellent quality results for me from the start, in a huge variety of topics in several languages. Their user base is probably 90% American hacker, and I'm getting good results on queries they would never use.
- baja_blast 3y ago
  Yeah, me personally I am more upset with how irrelevant and bad Google search results have become than I am worried about privacy. I know and have accepted that Google invades my privacy, but the trade off used to be I could find whatever I am searching for, but now I can't find anything on Google and it has made my job so much harder. The Google search algorithm from 5 years ago was amazing, why they decided to change it for the worse is something I will never understand! And no I do not blame SEO entirely since that existed 5 years ago, what I am often looking for but can no longer find is information that has nothing to do with any products. It's not ads that I need to page through, but unrelated and bad results that are limited. I do not want to see the same results from page 1 on page 3.
hrbrmstr 3y ago
100% ^^this^^
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
What happens if GOOG acquires Kagi?
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I'm sure many folks, including me, would be willing to help Vlad organize a private acquisition if he suddenly had some pressing need to sell.
  - IAmGraydon 3y ago
    Don’t you work for Google or is that a different Michael Zuo?
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I don't, but it's possible someone else does. I signed up for HN before it was popular to include middle initials or other fancier forms for the username, I'll update my profile though.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I love the idea I challenge you to find a group of rich folks who will fund such a thing - and will not simply demand the same profits as current structures do. I just tried this with ~30 wealthy individuals/family funds that I have great relationships with and literally everyone said some form of the following: “I am not going to liquidate my current investments that are on IPO trajectory for something that by definition will not IPO, and my investments are to ensure my kids go to private school/colllege fund/etc…” You need to convince people, who currently think that the goal of making/having money is to insulate them and their families from reality, to instead choose to make/have slightly less money so that somebody else can have an easier/better experience in a way that is still concomitant with commercial transactions.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Huh, is this story a metaphor/allegory for something? Why not 'challenge' yourself if you've already done quite a bit of groundwork? Or at least the comment suggests you've already put more thought into this than me.
lghh 3y ago
Weird question that I have that I'd love anyone who makes a Kagi account to trial after reading the parent comment to answer: When you make your account, you're given the option to customize. When you do, you can pick things like color theme and how URLs are displayed. On the right hand side of the page there is a preview of what your Kagi searches will look like. In my example, the demo Kagi search is Magic The Gathering. I play a lot of Magic The Gathering. I spend most of my time online searching for things related to MtG or brewing decks, second only to things related to software development. I imagine it's coincidence. MtG is a pretty nerdy hobby and Kagi seems like a pretty nerdy product. However, it made me uncomfortable enough to ask: Is that what it shows for everyone? Or is there some tracking going on already that is being demoed? It's almost certainly the former given the positioning of Kagi in the search market, but I'd like to be sure.
- joshmlewis 3y ago
  Yes it's what showed for me as well and I've never played or searched it. Just a coincidence.
  - xenocratus 3y ago
    Just as an extra data point - same here, got shown MtG results, never played it (though I might have searched about it a few times way back).
- jamal-kumar 3y ago
  I'm kind of blown away by how popular that game has gotten over the past few years in North America. I think the pandemic really accelerated the popularity of that and D&D, people are still doing these things after all of that. Even saw someone playing over the phone the other day. I don't seem to remember it being so popular but now it's more than ever and hardly a surprise tbh
  - lghh 3y ago
    The two biggest reasons for this are that the format Commander has specifically blown up in popularity and Wizards of the Coast making a first-party desktop/mobile client MtG Arena to compete with games like Hearthstone. Commander is a 4-player casual format that's has as much in common with more typical board games as it does with traditional MtG. Arena is likely what you saw someone playing on their phone. Funnily enough, it doesn't support Commander!
m3kw9 3y ago
“ Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex”. They pay google to do this?
- jjice 3y ago
  I believe DuckDuckGo does (or at least they did) this with Bing. Starting a new scraper at a scale that users would need to be useful for what they're used to is such a huge jump. I'm sure if Kagi continue to grow they'd prioritize their own scraping too, but that's just not feasible at first.
  - giancarlostoro 3y ago
    Back in the day I'd suggest doing it via Alexa top sites, but now that Alexa is gone, I'm not sure what strategy I would use, but I would want to hit sites that are like the "top 10000 most popular" first, and scrape every inch I could.
    - elaus 3y ago
      I think Kagi is going in the opposite direction: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web They try to highlight small, personal websites instead of the big mainstream sites. (This was a HN submission 2 weeks ago)
      - giancarlostoro 3y ago
        I saw that, but that's kind of useless when you kind of want something like SO or similar results, something Google keeps failing at.
- jerrre 3y ago
  that's what that means yeah, but not necessarily present it in the same way
jamal-kumar 3y ago
You sold me. Fuck google, I have work to do. Thanks for the tip! Nice realizing that they've basically been wasting my time for a while now and that there's a decent alternative available.
hospadar 3y ago
Can’t second this emotion hard enough, love it, have never looked back, almost never bail out to !g - still use g maps for most location stuff, but all my web search is very comfortably living on kagi
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
delboni 3y ago
Does anyone knows how Kagi performs on country specific search or even search in another languages?
- jaktet 3y ago
  One personal anecdote. It did not do that great for Norway/Norwegian, I ended up switching back to google when trying to find some stuff in stores. For recipes and stuff it was fine.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  It works fine in French for me. I really like that I can have international search by default, and specify a country when needed using a bang like !fr.
- janaagaard 3y ago
  Working fine for me with Danish as my primary language. But I think that I mostly search for English content, so unsure how your experience will be. But could you not just pay for a month and try it? I don’t think their plans bind you for a longer than a month.
anymouse123456 3y ago
This. Kagi is incredible and worth every penny simply for being able to remove the SEO scam and tire fire that is Pinterest from all image search results.
netsroht 3y ago
Being logged in while making search queries in search engines poses significant privacy risks. The searches can paint a comprehensive profile of the user, and these data often remain stored for extended periods. There's a chance this information might be shared with third parties. Coupled with other user data, these logged-in searches can pave the way for targeted advertising, sophisticated predictive analysis, and potential exploitation by governments or malicious entities. In the event of data breaches, the user's logged-in search histories can be exposed. Furthermore, users typically don't have clear insight into how their data is utilized when logged in. I hope Kagi introduces an anonymous access feature. For instance, it could incorporate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). These are cryptographic techniques where one party (the prover) can confirm to another (the verifier) that a claim is accurate without disclosing any additional information. This is especially beneficial for authentication scenarios where it's essential to avoid sharing extra details. To implement zero-knowledge authentication for quota API access: 1. Token Creation: - Each month, users receive a token tied to their identity and quota. - The token can be split for use on multiple devices using cryptographic methods. 2. API Access: - Clients present a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to confirm they have a valid token and haven't used up their quota. The server verifies this without seeing the exact details. 3. Client Synchronization: - Each client tracks its quota usage. - Synchronization can be peer-to-peer or through a centralized, encrypted server to prevent double spending of the quota. 4. Quota Renewal: - Monthly, old tokens expire, and new tokens are issued. Challenges: - ZKPs can be resource-intensive. - Token security is crucial; there should be a way to handle lost or compromised tokens. - The system should prevent quota "double-spending" across devices. - If a centralized server is used for synchronization, it should operate with encrypted data. This way Kagi would only know who their customers are but not what kind of searches they make.
- boredpudding 3y ago
  Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user. There's no way around it. In your case, Kagi would need to trust the client with the balance, which would be insecure. There's only one solution, and that is that you need to put a bit of trust in Kagi. Compared to the major one, Google, you can chose between one that promises to not store data, and one that promises it does (and does a lot). It's always a bit sad that here on HN, when companies try to do better than bigger players, there's always people who think it isn't enough. It has to be absolutely impossibly perfect.
dominick-cc 3y ago
I would love to see some of these privacy-focused providers like Kagi and Tutanota/Protonmail align themselves into a "bundle"-type offering (think video game humble bundles) where for like $35/month you got access to a bunch of useful tools like this. It would really expose a lot of people to services they aren't super familiar with already, so even if it was at a slight discount to the provider, they would acquire a lot of new users I bet.
- effingwewt 3y ago
  Indeed. I'm tired of data brokers masquerading as other things (search, email, whatever). Signed up for Kagi today and have been looking for a permanent gmail solution. Had this bundle been available today I'd have jumped on it.
bloopernova 3y ago
Do you ever go past the 1,000 search "limit"? I'm considering signing up; it would be one fewer service I'm relying on google for.
- boredpudding 3y ago
  I was quite afraid of this, but apparently I'm around 700-800 searches a month and I search quite a lot during my work. Kagi is also working on removing the 1000 limit on the 10$ subscription and offering unlimited searches. Switching from the 5 $ plan to 10 $ was super smooth by the way, so if you want to try for less $, the 5 $ for a month is enough so you can get used to the product and know if you like it or not (and that's besides the 100 free you get while signing up for a trial).
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    excellent, thank you for the information :)
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    That would be great. The $5 price point is the most I'd pay for search, but 300 searches per month is just not worth it in any sense. If all of the tiers moved down one step, or if Kagi offered a discount for annual membership, I could see it working for me.
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  I do 500-600 a month pretty regularly. They provide stats.
metadaemon 3y ago
Happy customer here! Been paying for a year with no complaints. Amazing search engine -- kind of like how Google used to be years ago before they started injecting more ads into search.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I’ve replaced most of my google searches with LLM discussions and some bullshit checking I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist everything else I use google for are just addresses so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed
- freediver 3y ago
  LLMs can not yet replace good web search. There are whole categories of queries whera a LLM is more or less helpless with. Think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware, 'grep the web' style queries just to name the few. For example: nyt crossword cheap iem reddit starbucks near me M7FFALP Likely, a good search product in the future will be a combnation of both.
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    have you tried this on phind.com? it'll create multiple queries to find and organize data and it's very good and saying it doesn't know something rather than give a BS answer.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    > everything else I use google for are just addresses > LLMs can not yet replace good web search ... think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware amusing.
- vdqtp3 3y ago
  > I usually only need to understand a concept You should know by now that LLMs will and do lie in subtle ways that are not apparent to non-experts. Using them to understand complicated concepts is a great way to "learn" incorrect information. To be fair, the same can be said for humans, but humans are worse at bullshitting.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    I’m aware I really just need to converse about a topic for more inquisitive-ness and to form structured thoughts It will tell me if I’m conflating concepts, before bullshitting about the ways theyre different. Thats fine, my blind spot would have been that I was conflating a concept for the next decade. In that regard its the same or better than a human I don't need it to be the source of truth, I need it to be conversational. It can make urban legends just like a person does, I don’t care, just give me a way to talk about a concept and decide if I want to learn more and it does that extremely well
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I tried it a little but honestly thinking about having a limit of searches made me anxious every time I thought about searching like “is this really necessary” and so I went back to google.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  I can offer that I am constantly online and using Kagi across my devices for all searches and so far have not come close to using up my quota.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Why not just ignore that the limit exists? If you hit it, you can always fall back to another search engine, after all, so it shouldn't be cause of anxiety.
- yzydserd 3y ago
  Kagi searches are soon to be unlimited (fair use policy?) for the $10 plan. If I understand correctly, this may happen around October 2 when other new features are released. I use search a lot in my workflow and my usage is showing 2k/month. I expected it would have been 3-4k.
dcminter 3y ago
I'm just trying Kagi out now, having done about 2 searches of my initial free 100. So far one was better than google and the other no worse. The "no worse" one was for something where I already suspect there aren't any good results to find. Fingers crossed, but I have a good feeling about it. If it goes well the pricing seems fair.
kup0 3y ago
Another happy customer here as well. I use at work and home and plan to start using on mobile browsers also. The ability to essentially "weight" particular domains (pin, block, or anywhere in between) has saved me so much time. There are certain searches I do (music-related in particular) where I always want particular sites (metal-archives, bandcamp, etc) to be the first results, and having that as an option is great. It means that searches that I perform often have a result within the first 1-5 results that is exactly what I want. No ads, way less SEO spam, and the ability to completely remove domains from results if I think I need to tweak it further. For most of my searches I previously used Google for- Kagi makes Google's results look laughably bad. I've also been using it at work for tech searches (linux, redhat, etc) and it has saved me time there too. I use a "family" account- and have one work account and one home account that way I can have different settings for different environments (would be neat if this could be built into non-family accounts though... like "personas" or "profiles" or something...) because I'm overpaying a bit to have the two account setup and don't reach the search cap. I think I'm okay with that though, because having the cap so high means I've removed the "running out of searches" anxiety from my usage of the service.
notemaker 3y ago
How does it fare for bilingual users?
replwoacause 3y ago
This is the answer. I’ll never use Google search again.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Kagi copied the same lame-ass google search experience. Search engines should be able to support even those who are not SEO experts and not the first ones to arrive and sit on specific keywords. What I mean under that, if you have multiple good, exhaustive answers for a query, why not offer varying/random good results, so every link would have a chance? Let people break out of their bubbles. Same power pyramid scheme. Yukk.

thrownaway561 3y ago

https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/

snide 3y ago

100% agree on Kagi. Happy customer. Thought it would be just another one of my attempts to use Duck Duck Go that dies after two weeks of !g usage. Turned out Kagi just works. The biggest improvement / gains is on mobile, where you suddenly don't need to scroll through 5 screens of ad results to get to the content.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
I wonder if part of why its better is due to other users providing feedback about results, but also you can pin results from specific domains to the top. Like I can pin any results from StackOverflow, instead of the garbage StackOverflow rip off sites Google keeps giving me, its pretty obvious its ripping off SO because I just read the same thing word for word on StackOverflow three links ago. Thanks Google.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > I wonder if part of why its better is due to other users providing feedback about results, but also you can pin results from specific domains to the top. I think that matters very little. Kagi had excellent quality results for me from the start, in a huge variety of topics in several languages. Their user base is probably 90% American hacker, and I'm getting good results on queries they would never use.
baja_blast 3y ago
Yeah, me personally I am more upset with how irrelevant and bad Google search results have become than I am worried about privacy. I know and have accepted that Google invades my privacy, but the trade off used to be I could find whatever I am searching for, but now I can't find anything on Google and it has made my job so much harder. The Google search algorithm from 5 years ago was amazing, why they decided to change it for the worse is something I will never understand! And no I do not blame SEO entirely since that existed 5 years ago, what I am often looking for but can no longer find is information that has nothing to do with any products. It's not ads that I need to page through, but unrelated and bad results that are limited. I do not want to see the same results from page 1 on page 3.

hrbrmstr 3y ago

100% ^^this^^

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

What happens if GOOG acquires Kagi?

MichaelZuo 3y ago
I'm sure many folks, including me, would be willing to help Vlad organize a private acquisition if he suddenly had some pressing need to sell.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  Don’t you work for Google or is that a different Michael Zuo?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I don't, but it's possible someone else does. I signed up for HN before it was popular to include middle initials or other fancier forms for the username, I'll update my profile though.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I love the idea I challenge you to find a group of rich folks who will fund such a thing - and will not simply demand the same profits as current structures do. I just tried this with ~30 wealthy individuals/family funds that I have great relationships with and literally everyone said some form of the following: “I am not going to liquidate my current investments that are on IPO trajectory for something that by definition will not IPO, and my investments are to ensure my kids go to private school/colllege fund/etc…” You need to convince people, who currently think that the goal of making/having money is to insulate them and their families from reality, to instead choose to make/have slightly less money so that somebody else can have an easier/better experience in a way that is still concomitant with commercial transactions.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Huh, is this story a metaphor/allegory for something? Why not 'challenge' yourself if you've already done quite a bit of groundwork? Or at least the comment suggests you've already put more thought into this than me.

lghh 3y ago

Weird question that I have that I'd love anyone who makes a Kagi account to trial after reading the parent comment to answer: When you make your account, you're given the option to customize. When you do, you can pick things like color theme and how URLs are displayed. On the right hand side of the page there is a preview of what your Kagi searches will look like. In my example, the demo Kagi search is Magic The Gathering. I play a lot of Magic The Gathering. I spend most of my time online searching for things related to MtG or brewing decks, second only to things related to software development. I imagine it's coincidence. MtG is a pretty nerdy hobby and Kagi seems like a pretty nerdy product. However, it made me uncomfortable enough to ask: Is that what it shows for everyone? Or is there some tracking going on already that is being demoed? It's almost certainly the former given the positioning of Kagi in the search market, but I'd like to be sure.

joshmlewis 3y ago
Yes it's what showed for me as well and I've never played or searched it. Just a coincidence.
- xenocratus 3y ago
  Just as an extra data point - same here, got shown MtG results, never played it (though I might have searched about it a few times way back).
jamal-kumar 3y ago
I'm kind of blown away by how popular that game has gotten over the past few years in North America. I think the pandemic really accelerated the popularity of that and D&D, people are still doing these things after all of that. Even saw someone playing over the phone the other day. I don't seem to remember it being so popular but now it's more than ever and hardly a surprise tbh
- lghh 3y ago
  The two biggest reasons for this are that the format Commander has specifically blown up in popularity and Wizards of the Coast making a first-party desktop/mobile client MtG Arena to compete with games like Hearthstone. Commander is a 4-player casual format that's has as much in common with more typical board games as it does with traditional MtG. Arena is likely what you saw someone playing on their phone. Funnily enough, it doesn't support Commander!

m3kw9 3y ago

“ Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex”. They pay google to do this?

jjice 3y ago
I believe DuckDuckGo does (or at least they did) this with Bing. Starting a new scraper at a scale that users would need to be useful for what they're used to is such a huge jump. I'm sure if Kagi continue to grow they'd prioritize their own scraping too, but that's just not feasible at first.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Back in the day I'd suggest doing it via Alexa top sites, but now that Alexa is gone, I'm not sure what strategy I would use, but I would want to hit sites that are like the "top 10000 most popular" first, and scrape every inch I could.
  - elaus 3y ago
    I think Kagi is going in the opposite direction: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web They try to highlight small, personal websites instead of the big mainstream sites. (This was a HN submission 2 weeks ago)
    - giancarlostoro 3y ago
      I saw that, but that's kind of useless when you kind of want something like SO or similar results, something Google keeps failing at.
jerrre 3y ago
that's what that means yeah, but not necessarily present it in the same way

jamal-kumar 3y ago

You sold me. Fuck google, I have work to do. Thanks for the tip! Nice realizing that they've basically been wasting my time for a while now and that there's a decent alternative available.

hospadar 3y ago

Can’t second this emotion hard enough, love it, have never looked back, almost never bail out to !g - still use g maps for most location stuff, but all my web search is very comfortably living on kagi

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

delboni 3y ago

Does anyone knows how Kagi performs on country specific search or even search in another languages?

jaktet 3y ago
One personal anecdote. It did not do that great for Norway/Norwegian, I ended up switching back to google when trying to find some stuff in stores. For recipes and stuff it was fine.
benhurmarcel 3y ago
It works fine in French for me. I really like that I can have international search by default, and specify a country when needed using a bang like !fr.
janaagaard 3y ago
Working fine for me with Danish as my primary language. But I think that I mostly search for English content, so unsure how your experience will be. But could you not just pay for a month and try it? I don’t think their plans bind you for a longer than a month.

anymouse123456 3y ago

This. Kagi is incredible and worth every penny simply for being able to remove the SEO scam and tire fire that is Pinterest from all image search results.

netsroht 3y ago

Being logged in while making search queries in search engines poses significant privacy risks. The searches can paint a comprehensive profile of the user, and these data often remain stored for extended periods. There's a chance this information might be shared with third parties. Coupled with other user data, these logged-in searches can pave the way for targeted advertising, sophisticated predictive analysis, and potential exploitation by governments or malicious entities. In the event of data breaches, the user's logged-in search histories can be exposed. Furthermore, users typically don't have clear insight into how their data is utilized when logged in. I hope Kagi introduces an anonymous access feature. For instance, it could incorporate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). These are cryptographic techniques where one party (the prover) can confirm to another (the verifier) that a claim is accurate without disclosing any additional information. This is especially beneficial for authentication scenarios where it's essential to avoid sharing extra details. To implement zero-knowledge authentication for quota API access: 1. Token Creation: - Each month, users receive a token tied to their identity and quota. - The token can be split for use on multiple devices using cryptographic methods. 2. API Access: - Clients present a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to confirm they have a valid token and haven't used up their quota. The server verifies this without seeing the exact details. 3. Client Synchronization: - Each client tracks its quota usage. - Synchronization can be peer-to-peer or through a centralized, encrypted server to prevent double spending of the quota. 4. Quota Renewal: - Monthly, old tokens expire, and new tokens are issued. Challenges: - ZKPs can be resource-intensive. - Token security is crucial; there should be a way to handle lost or compromised tokens. - The system should prevent quota "double-spending" across devices. - If a centralized server is used for synchronization, it should operate with encrypted data. This way Kagi would only know who their customers are but not what kind of searches they make.

boredpudding 3y ago
Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user. There's no way around it. In your case, Kagi would need to trust the client with the balance, which would be insecure. There's only one solution, and that is that you need to put a bit of trust in Kagi. Compared to the major one, Google, you can chose between one that promises to not store data, and one that promises it does (and does a lot). It's always a bit sad that here on HN, when companies try to do better than bigger players, there's always people who think it isn't enough. It has to be absolutely impossibly perfect.

dominick-cc 3y ago

I would love to see some of these privacy-focused providers like Kagi and Tutanota/Protonmail align themselves into a "bundle"-type offering (think video game humble bundles) where for like $35/month you got access to a bunch of useful tools like this. It would really expose a lot of people to services they aren't super familiar with already, so even if it was at a slight discount to the provider, they would acquire a lot of new users I bet.

effingwewt 3y ago
Indeed. I'm tired of data brokers masquerading as other things (search, email, whatever). Signed up for Kagi today and have been looking for a permanent gmail solution. Had this bundle been available today I'd have jumped on it.

bloopernova 3y ago

Do you ever go past the 1,000 search "limit"? I'm considering signing up; it would be one fewer service I'm relying on google for.

boredpudding 3y ago
I was quite afraid of this, but apparently I'm around 700-800 searches a month and I search quite a lot during my work. Kagi is also working on removing the 1000 limit on the 10$ subscription and offering unlimited searches. Switching from the 5 $ plan to 10 $ was super smooth by the way, so if you want to try for less $, the 5 $ for a month is enough so you can get used to the product and know if you like it or not (and that's besides the 100 free you get while signing up for a trial).
- bloopernova 3y ago
  excellent, thank you for the information :)
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  That would be great. The $5 price point is the most I'd pay for search, but 300 searches per month is just not worth it in any sense. If all of the tiers moved down one step, or if Kagi offered a discount for annual membership, I could see it working for me.
TradingPlaces 3y ago
I do 500-600 a month pretty regularly. They provide stats.

metadaemon 3y ago

Happy customer here! Been paying for a year with no complaints. Amazing search engine -- kind of like how Google used to be years ago before they started injecting more ads into search.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I’ve replaced most of my google searches with LLM discussions and some bullshit checking I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist everything else I use google for are just addresses so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed

freediver 3y ago
LLMs can not yet replace good web search. There are whole categories of queries whera a LLM is more or less helpless with. Think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware, 'grep the web' style queries just to name the few. For example: nyt crossword cheap iem reddit starbucks near me M7FFALP Likely, a good search product in the future will be a combnation of both.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  have you tried this on phind.com? it'll create multiple queries to find and organize data and it's very good and saying it doesn't know something rather than give a BS answer.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > everything else I use google for are just addresses > LLMs can not yet replace good web search ... think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware amusing.
vdqtp3 3y ago
> I usually only need to understand a concept You should know by now that LLMs will and do lie in subtle ways that are not apparent to non-experts. Using them to understand complicated concepts is a great way to "learn" incorrect information. To be fair, the same can be said for humans, but humans are worse at bullshitting.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I’m aware I really just need to converse about a topic for more inquisitive-ness and to form structured thoughts It will tell me if I’m conflating concepts, before bullshitting about the ways theyre different. Thats fine, my blind spot would have been that I was conflating a concept for the next decade. In that regard its the same or better than a human I don't need it to be the source of truth, I need it to be conversational. It can make urban legends just like a person does, I don’t care, just give me a way to talk about a concept and decide if I want to learn more and it does that extremely well

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

I tried it a little but honestly thinking about having a limit of searches made me anxious every time I thought about searching like “is this really necessary” and so I went back to google.

alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
I can offer that I am constantly online and using Kagi across my devices for all searches and so far have not come close to using up my quota.
JohnFen 3y ago
Why not just ignore that the limit exists? If you hit it, you can always fall back to another search engine, after all, so it shouldn't be cause of anxiety.
yzydserd 3y ago
Kagi searches are soon to be unlimited (fair use policy?) for the $10 plan. If I understand correctly, this may happen around October 2 when other new features are released. I use search a lot in my workflow and my usage is showing 2k/month. I expected it would have been 3-4k.

dcminter 3y ago

I'm just trying Kagi out now, having done about 2 searches of my initial free 100. So far one was better than google and the other no worse. The "no worse" one was for something where I already suspect there aren't any good results to find. Fingers crossed, but I have a good feeling about it. If it goes well the pricing seems fair.

kup0 3y ago

Another happy customer here as well. I use at work and home and plan to start using on mobile browsers also. The ability to essentially "weight" particular domains (pin, block, or anywhere in between) has saved me so much time. There are certain searches I do (music-related in particular) where I always want particular sites (metal-archives, bandcamp, etc) to be the first results, and having that as an option is great. It means that searches that I perform often have a result within the first 1-5 results that is exactly what I want. No ads, way less SEO spam, and the ability to completely remove domains from results if I think I need to tweak it further. For most of my searches I previously used Google for- Kagi makes Google's results look laughably bad. I've also been using it at work for tech searches (linux, redhat, etc) and it has saved me time there too. I use a "family" account- and have one work account and one home account that way I can have different settings for different environments (would be neat if this could be built into non-family accounts though... like "personas" or "profiles" or something...) because I'm overpaying a bit to have the two account setup and don't reach the search cap. I think I'm okay with that though, because having the cap so high means I've removed the "running out of searches" anxiety from my usage of the service.

notemaker 3y ago

How does it fare for bilingual users?

replwoacause 3y ago

This is the answer. I’ll never use Google search again.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Kagi copied the same lame-ass google search experience. Search engines should be able to support even those who are not SEO experts and not the first ones to arrive and sit on specific keywords. What I mean under that, if you have multiple good, exhaustive answers for a query, why not offer varying/random good results, so every link would have a chance? Let people break out of their bubbles. Same power pyramid scheme. Yukk.