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Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
- bowsamic 3y agoI don’t have a problem with google
- avereveard 3y agoI would really love to see an API, possibly with a pay per request pricing.
- baggachipz 3y agoThey do have exactly such a thing: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/overview.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/overview.html
- avereveard 3y agoAh wonderful! Looks fairly inexpensive as well, and they have a summarisation option that seems great, I'll need to play a bit with it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoAny of the DDG search libraries on GiHub + ChatGPT-turbo-3.5 is cheaper than this, especially if you need to do a lot of searches and then apply a heuristic to narrow them down. Doesn’t seem very competitive.
- avereveard 3y agoDo ddg has a public api or are these search wrapper in violation of ddg tos? Also gpt gets expensive real fast if any of the linked result is long enough, and no search augmented result over the search engine snippet is often not enough to answer the question. And you are not accounting for the cost of where langchain or similar tooling runs. That said I haven't tested yet fastgpt searches, so quality is still unknown. It is useful however to have a real api with a real tos, a clear pricing model and good enough is great to have in the toolbox, compared to a library that may or may not work for unknown stretches of times.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 3y agoBueno!
- jmholla 3y agoGlad they found a way to to walk back the limited search count (especially when so many things you wouldn't think counted did). Might have to re-enable my account now. Previous discussion about the prior change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078392 (226 Comments)
- esafak 3y agoNow you're priced to sell. Have you done a formal price optimization? There are no priced competitors to pressure you to stick to a price point so you have leeway to experiment.
- crisp 3y agoHappy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is. When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then. Now? Never. 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time. There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.
- mongol 3y agoCan the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!" Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
- prennert 3y agoyou can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.
- seventytwo 3y agoIt’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools. I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
- pierat 3y ago> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools. Yet. Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less. When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers. I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago[flagged]
- gchamonlive 3y agoIt is the first time I hear a out kagi. What for me, as a developer, would be the selling point for using kagi instead of say phind.com?
- hardcopy 3y agoI just signed up for ultimate two days ago. Oh well, I suppose the extra $15 is going to a good cause. edit: You can switch pro-rated, nice.
- SushiHippie 3y agoUltimate will be worth it in the next couple of weeks, cool features are coming ;) i'm in the beta and it's really great bank for buck
- m00dy 3y agoanyone paying for kagi here ? how's it comparing to duckduckgo results ?
- neoromantique 3y agoBeen a paying customer for a year now, it's very much worth it.
- neysofu 3y agoI've been a paying customer for more than a year, in my experience DDG is not even in the same league as Kagi. DDG provides a noticeably worse search experience than Google for most queries, whereas Kagi is either just as good or often better than Google.
- DanHulton 3y agoBeen paying for a long while now, I expect I'll keep paying a lot longer. It's very, very good. Occasionally, I'm on someone else's computer where I'm not signed in to Kagi, and I try DDG first, but I frequently resort to pulling out my phone and just searching there.
- CoryAlexMartin 3y agoEchoing what others have said. When I used DuckDuckGo, I would have to resort to using Google all the time because Google's results were often better. Since switching to Kagi, I never feel the need to use Google anymore.
- seventytwo 3y agoBeen paying for Kagi for about a year now. It’s great and worth it. As good as google for search, but with much better tools and basically zero ad spam.
- r2_pilot 3y agoI've heard about it, signed up the other day, didn't use it. I tried it today on a medical condition that's been hard to get good info on, and while it wasn't the first hit, there was a great reference fairly high up that I didn't find on Google. I'm working on budgeting for yet another subscription as I figure kagi will be my next go-to if AI doesn't outstrip it first. And probably even then(sometimes you have to use the Dead Internet).
- boringg 3y agoI think Kagi sounds interesting but the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types. E.g. I am interested but can't be bothered to pursue it as it seems like an unnecessary additional SAS model cost to my monthly budget. How does search quality really change my life? Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.
- andrewaylett 3y agoSearch needs to be paid for one way or another, the bill might as well go to someone with my best interests in mind.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vorpalhex 3y agoHow much time do you waste wading through bad search results? Would you pay $10/mo to fix that problem? For me, the answer has been yes. I don't think that is true of everyone (but maybe some people can live in the free plan limits!) I started with the free plan, made it my default search engine and then tried to measure how often I felt like I had "lost something" once my free tier was up. And yeah, having to go back to Google or DuckDuckGo felt like I lost a really good tool and was using a mediocre replacement.
- sshine 3y ago> maybe some people can live in the free plan limits When the free plan was 50 searches, that lasted me less than a day. Now that the free plan is 300 searches, it'd last me a few days. It was enough for me to get hooked.
- UltimateEdge 3y agoNote that the free plan is still 100 searches per month. The $5/mo "Basic" plan now gives you 300 searches per month. https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
- wkat4242 3y agoHmm most of the things I used search for are now covered by ChatGPT (for which I use the api which costs cents). I don't think web search is still important enough for me to pay for. A year ago it would have been. I originally signed up with kagi but I wasn't too impressed and then they came with the limited plans and that was it. Not sure if I'll go back now. And yeah like the article says it was priced for "silicon valley bros". Even $10 is a lot on a Spanish salary still. But it's doable and 300 for $5 is a decent deal IMO. I wouldn't do that many.
- ghostpepper 3y agowhat do you use to hit the api? is there a good CLI tool for linux?
- Zetobal 3y agoNot the op but I use chatblade[0] on the cli, chatgpt-next-web[1] as webgui and quivr[2] for multimodal stuff files/images/audio/video. atm everything goes over a azure openai endpoint but would love to infere an llm locally. [0] https://github.com/npiv/chatblade https://github.com/npiv/chatblade [1] https://github.com/Yidadaa/ChatGPT-Next-Web/ https://github.com/Yidadaa/ChatGPT-Next-Web/ [2] https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr
- hifikuno 3y agoIs there much difference between the Azure endpoint and the direct OpenAI endpoint?
- wkat4242 3y agoI really wonder this too. At work we're always told to use the Azure one because our CIO is elbow deep in Microsoft's ass. But I wonder.. one funny thing is that everyone at Microsoft is referring to OpenAI as an 'acquisition' whereas as far as I know they only have a <50% interest?
- 3y ago
- zamadatix 3y agoHow many is unlimited? Presumably they don't get unlimited searches for $10 and, inevitably, someone will use more than they planned for. How much more than they expected is considered "fair use" or however they want to term it and why can't I know that before I sign up instead of guess I'm within what they are thinking?
- zakary 3y agoWhatever the cap is, I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you or making you do a captcha for every search. Pretty much all search services have some cap, after which they will put up roadblocks to slow you down
- gretch 3y ago> I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you Do you have any basis for this assumption?
- gkbrk 3y agoGoogle throws me around 4-5 CAPTCHAs a month with regular usage. So far, Kagi hasn't made me do any "find the firehoses".
- Lammy 3y agoI've been getting captchaed by Google just for using `intitle:` or `inurl:` modifiers.
- Scubabear68 3y agoIt drives me bonkers when I am searching a very deep topic (like looking for specific legal decisions), and Google throws up a Captcha at me. I am fast and good at searching, but I ain’t that good. I’m going to give Kagi a try for this reason, plus ability to prefer or ban specific sites.
- zamadatix 3y agoWhen trying out Kagi (prior to unlimited searches) my monthly Google searches were significantly higher than the cap. While some definitely do get CAPTCHAs, I wasn't. Adjusting this to the new unlimited price and it would still seem to be negative profit for them, hence the question.
- dcminter 3y agoYou can block domains you don't want to see results from. With that feature I'm not sure it even needs to deliver better results than Google to be compelling.
- snihalani 3y ago+1
- joshstrange 3y agoThis is great news. I've been paying for a couple months now and I've been happy with the results and the previous limits weren't something I even needed to worry about in the end (I did worry at the start but only because I had no idea how many searches I do to gauge which plan I needed).
- ghostpepper 3y agoThis is great - I have been a happy subscriber for almost a year I think. My biggest complaint with Kagi is not their fault - it's the inability to set custom search engines on Safari (and no, I'm not interested in installing a custom browser extension).
- daft_pink 3y agoI was skeptical about this as well but I caved and did it. It’s amazing how hard different browsers have made it to add a search engine
- slikrick 3y agoif you don't want to install a browser extension then safari having customizable search engines wouldn't help you anyways. you would need to login to the account which is additionally functionality that wouldn't be provided without the extensioj
- g_p 3y agoIf you're on Mac or iOS (which you will be if you use Safari), the team from Kagi also develop Orion. It's a browser, heavily focused on keeping to WebKit principles, and obviously supports custom Search engines by default. It's not a 100% clone of Safari, but it's now matured far beyond a "scratching their own itch" project to enable custom search engines - it gives you the performance and power efficiency of safari, with the option to run most Firefox or Chrome extensions (by implementing the extension APIs in WebKit). The iOS version isn't quite as mature as the Mac version (which is definitely usable as your main browser), but it's getting there.
- bob_theslob646 3y agoI don't understand what's wrong with charging money for a service that to the best of my knowledge doesn't serve you ads?
- imiric 3y agoIt's far less profitable than the advertising model. Unfortunately, most tech companies are VC-backed and optimize for profits. It also introduces adoption friction for users who are used to things being "free" on the internet, which hurts the hypergrowth shareholders want to see.
- pbarnes_1 3y agoIs there a dark mode? The example (https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs) doesn't seem to respect my system theme on macOS.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Is there a dark mode? Here is Kagi's quick answer [0], where its AI "extracts and summarizes the important content from the search results including links to the source material": "Kagi supports dark mode functionality to reduce eye strain.[1][2] Users can select between the Royal Blue or Moon Dark default themes in their appearance settings. Additionally, the Orion browser powered by Kagi includes dark mode that can be toggled on websites.[3]" [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/#summarize-results https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/#summarize-result... [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/appearance.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/appearance.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/open-source.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/open-source... [3] https://blog.kagi.com/orion-new-features https://blog.kagi.com/orion-new-features
- pbarnes_1 3y agoAh, when not logged in, it defaults to light mode. When I logged in with my Google account, it detected the system setting.
- bionade24 3y agoYes, even multiple themes. You can choose between detection of the system preference, light and dark mode. The setting is bound to your account, which I like, but I don't search much on my phone outdoors.
- cobertos 3y agoTIL that there was a light mode. I've been in dark mode since I started using it
- somsak2 3y agoInteresting example for a search. I found a few things that seem like bit like basic misses: * the regular wikipedia as the first result, and the mobile version of the same page as fourth one * Links to https://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur/ https://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneu..., which never mentions Steve Jobs * the above link also has the wrong date attached (Kagi thinks it was published Jul 17, 2023)
- ezekiel68 3y agoAlso happy Kagi customer. It is my default search and I get much less fluff in the results than I did with big G. So happy it respects search modifiers!
- okasaki 3y agoI definitely wouldn't want to associate my entire search history with my real identity
- CobaltFire 3y agoThey offer crypto payments, and you can cycle accounts through throwaway emails. Vlad has addressed this several times; it’s a planned use case. They offer it because though they don’t keep logs they don’t expect everyone to trust that. I can’t find the comment but he just addressed it a couple days ago here on HN.
- sph 3y agoNeither do I, which is why I don't use Google.
- jamiek88 3y agoThey don’t keep logs and if you don’t trust that, they accept crypto. Also, do you really think google doesn’t know who you are? One would have to go to extraordinary lengths to hide your real name nowadays from even a talented curious searcher never mind google itself. Even Ross Ulnricht couldn’t do it. And that boy had a LOT to lose.
- _8j50 3y ago[flagged]
- wellthisisgreat 3y ago> Who wants to start a company selling fresh bottled air? Lol. i wish i could downvote this 100x. Peak bad NH stuff. Kagi is actually one of the few good new products out there that tackle fundamental user needs.
- _8j50 3y agoI respect your desire to downvote me but I respectfullu disagree after signing up and using them. "Bad HN stuff" is lazy argument. They sell google searches and their value is "we promise". Bad HN stuff is how the HN crowd loves to hate on commercial VPN providers who have the same business model but the Kagi dude speaks and talks like your crowd so you rally around this product. As if DDG didn't do the same thing for free. ADs were never the problem, the way ads work in search was the problem. One of the first lessons I learned on the internet is never to trust online services on their word alone and that what you post online (search in this case) is there to stay forever. You know what made me swtich from indifferent to opposing Kagi? After my trial ended, i kept searching for stuff in my nav bar, historical hits come up and when I select them, boom, Kagi paywall! That's why my challenge to Kagi is if they ask money for what DDG and like a dozen other competitors offer for free with privacy promises similar to Kagi, then at least offer insurance and put their money where their mouth is if they're going to ask for people's money. Also, search results after you stop paying shouldn't go back on paywall, you paid already for it! I commented fully expecting to get downvoted as I do now, but you haven't countered my fairly reasonable assertions.
- dot5xdev 3y agoI'm currently paying for Kagi. It's nice. But, so far I feel like it may only be like 2% better than Google, probably not enough to keep me long term. A lot of times the results are better on Kagi than Google, but not by much. It makes sense they're similar since Kagi uses Google's index (among others).
- sph 3y ago> 2% better Not in my experience, and what about user tracking and pervasive advertising? You don't seem to include that in your comparison.
- hovering_nox 3y ago>user tracking You can use Google anonymously but you have to log in and leave your payment data with Kagi. EDIT: apparently they accept crypto
- sph 3y agoNot very anonymous when 99% of websites on the internet use Google Analytics, so it's pretty easy to follow you around the web.
- dot5xdev 3y agoYeah, I'm strictly talking about search results. That's the main thing I care about. No ads is nice, but if I can't find information I need then that's not very useful to me.
- daft_pink 3y agoLove Kagi. First search engine I’ve been willing to ditch google for.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nipperkinfeet 3y agoIs it truly worth it? Nothing appears when I search for adult content. The safe search function has been disabled.
- kup0 3y agoAdult searches work for me, I disabled safe search on https://kagi.com/settings?p=privacy https://kagi.com/settings?p=privacy and it seems to be working fine?
- runeofdoom 3y agoThis is going to get me to try Kagi. I've thought about it several times, enough that I did track my searches for a week. Between work, hobbies, and just life I searched (overwhelmingly DDG and Bing) over a thousand times in a week. (A evening of prep for my tabletop RPG racked up over a hundred all by itself.) I've bailed on Google - wading though the flood of SEO'd garbage just stopped being worth it. Bing and DDG have been mostly working, but I definitely feel like they're missing something. $10 a month is definitely worth it to try it out, and if it works for me, worth it to keep paying. I'd been hesitating because worrying about my search count seemed like a substantial negative for me.
- freeAgent 3y agoBe sure to look into the results customization options. You may not need them, but they can also make the engine feel so much more tuned to your needs.
- sshine 3y ago> over a thousand times in a week That's a lot! I perform 500-900 searches a month. I really enjoy Kagi's caching image search; it often lets me avoid visiting websites when I'm just looking for graphics. Going on Kagi and reading summaries and viewing cached material gives me the "I don't feel like going out" vibe, but on the Internet. One step closer to offline.
- kup0 3y agoExcited to see this. Thinking about using this on mobile and all PCs I use now that there is no worry about hitting a quota.
- apricot 3y agoI mostly use Duckduckgo these days but fall back on Google for non-English searches because DDG is lacking in that area. Kagi users, how good is Kagi for non-English searches?
- warpspin 3y agoCan only speak for German searches, but the results are good there.
- uasi 3y agoFor me, Japanese search quality is on par with Google most of the time.
- sshine 3y agoFor Danish searches, simple queries get confused with Norwegian/Swedish results. Admittedly, I haven't said anywhere that I prefer Danish results when the query is the same in two languages. My operating system and browser are not configured to reveal my nationality. The only way Kagi would know is if they factored in my IP address. Which I can deduce that they don't. I prefer it that way.
- iruoy 3y agoKagi in Dutch has been very good. The last thing I've still been using Google for was looking up which Dutch retailers sold the product I was looking for. But now I see that was unnecessary.
- kuon 3y agoResults are good, but the problem is working in multiple languages or in region with multiple languages. There is a discussion[1] on this topic on the forum. [1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/89-language-vs-region https://kagifeedback.org/d/89-language-vs-region
- Etheryte 3y agoI'm currently running the free trial for Kagi and the few non-English searches I've tried have been fine. That being said, I would say they've mostly been pretty simple things to look up since I'm trying to get a feel for how well the engine suits me. If you're interested you could also try the free trial, you don't need a credit card or anything for the trial.
- pdx6 3y agoI think $5-$10 is a good price point for just the privacy aspect. As far as search, it's about 90% kagi and 10% Google if I don't like the kagi results. Maps could use some work and I'm always jumping back into Google maps. I don't use any of the other features.
- james2doyle 3y agoI like the statement they made on their jobs page: Core Front-end Team Passion for creating delightful and swift user interfaces. Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and _an understanding that JavaScript can be used sparingly to enhance, not create, product experiences._ Ability to prototype rapidly. Fun fact: At Kagi, we prioritize speed, to the point where *all functionalities of Kagi Search (except Stripe checkout and Maps) work perfectly without JavaScript*. We see JavaScript as a tool to enhance the UX, not create it.
- threatofrain 3y agoAh, their backend is in Crystal!
- zelphirkalt 3y agoThat frontend team statement alone makes it almost worth switching and thereby supporting their work. It is rare these days to hear such wise words.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- autoexec 3y agoI like the sound of it, but I do notice that the link https://kagi.com/search?q=what+is+%25&r=no_region&sh=Qd1RlT2uU4VjwQbUD3JMGg https://kagi.com/search?q=what+is+%25&r=no_region&sh=Qd1RlT2... which someone posted elsewhere in this discussion as an example doesn't work with JS disabled.
- jorams 3y agoIt should work without JS. It even works in eww (in Emacs). Looking at the source of the page, there's a redirect (meta http-equiv="refresh") wrapped in a <noscript>-tag to the same URL but with "/html" before the path.[1]. It seems the browser you tried doesn't handle that. [1]: https://kagi.com/html/search?q=what+is+%25&r=no_region&sh=Qd1RlT2uU4VjwQbUD3JMGg https://kagi.com/html/search?q=what+is+%25&r=no_region&sh=Qd...
- late25 3y agoInteresting the HN crowd is into this for the simple fact that you must be logged in (and presumably tracked?) to use it.
- jkubicek 3y agoI have other ways to search anonymously. For 95% of my searches I'm happy to have my search history tracked, used to drive better results for me in the future and available for me to browse if I want to. As long as Kagi isn't selling my search history to another company, I actually prefer that they track my search history. Note: currently Kagi doesn't track search history; I hope they find a way to enable it in the future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- freeAgent 3y agoKagi doesn’t currently retain search history. It’s set for future opt-in, but can’t be enabled as yet.
- prh8 3y agoIt's not tracked, that's (part of) the whole point
- sph 3y agoI'm already a paying customer but all I can say is wow. It is rare to see companies offer more for less price, especially in this economy. Good job Kagi, seriously!
- user3939382 3y agoDone. The price was my only problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hellowoods 3y ago[dead]
- kilmanio 3y agoyou forgot to mention the ads and crypto
- prepend 3y agoI wish there was a way to just buy 10,000 searches as a block and charge down against it. I don’t search that much. I don’t want another monthly service fee. But I love the idea of paying for search. Id happily pay $5 for 300 searches, but don’t want to do that every month. This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much.
- dylan604 3y ago>This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much. I see this as the point to any subscription model. Of course they want you paying for more than you use/consume.
- prepend 3y agoRight and this is the reason I don’t like subscriptions. Id rather buy things. I don’t want a car subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t want a book subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t a compute subscription. I want to buy compute hours. Etc etc
- dylan604 3y agoBack when Netflix/Prime were the king of paid premium (ad free) streaming essentially being the only players, there were definite months where I barely watched any content and I was a pure source of subsidy for all the other viewers. There are other times, where I swear they (Netflix) start throttling my use to sub-VHS quality. Macroblocking the size of your fist that looks like a 320x240 image scaled to the size of my TV.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoCars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates. I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier. Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the aliens final attack. How do I get out of town?
- RantyDave 3y agoAside, possibly, but didn't Kagi used to be a company that collected money for shareware authors or am I hallucinating?
- jorams 3y agoYes. Quoting Wikipedia[1]: > Kagi.com was an e-commerce micropayment platform often used for shareware and e-book purchases, operating from Sept 1994 to July 2016. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi
- dooglius 3y agoFrom [0] > Are you affiliated with the legendary Kagi shareware platform? > No. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance. [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/faqs.html#are-you-affiliated-with-the-legendary-kagi-shareware-platform https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/faqs.html#are-you-affilia...
- RantyDave 3y agoOh. That’s… awful.
- xlii 3y agoI dropped of Kagi after price change, mostly because I don’t think search hit should be something I need to keep in mind when using search engine. This is a change in good direction, and I’ll happily check it once again.
- lordfrito 3y agoThis is great I just signed up! Been wanting to bail on free search for a while now, hoping paid search will prioritize users needs above all else. Crossing fingers they can go the distance, scale, and stick around a while.
- pjmq 3y agoI've been a paying subscriber to Kagi for over a year and I'm sad to say it just gets in my way and I often find myself just wishing I was using Google. I've kept it thus far because I believe in the mission but man... I get why other promising search engines have fallen to Google.
- hosteur 3y ago> I'm sad to say it just gets in my way Care to elaborate on how it gets in your way? And what, in your opinion, Google does better? I use Kagi myself and I am very happy with it.
- p3rls 3y agoA good deal worse than google for results in my niche (Korean entertainment). Oh well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- t0astbread 3y agoBrowsing the site on Tor Browser gave me a Google 403 page until I cycled circuits a few times. Makes perfect sense given the blog is hosted on GCP but it did make me pause initially and consider if that was some sort of joke I'm not getting.
- raybb 3y ago> Universal Summarizer, which can summarize unlimited-length documents, audio, and video! Any plans to let you paste in text or a PDF yet? It's quite annoying to have to upload the audio files somewhere to get a summary.
- raybb 3y agoEdit: also would be nice is kagi transcribed videos when there are no transcripts available. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlmr9NzxjUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlmr9NzxjUA just says "Sorry, a problem occurred while processing your request. Please try again later."
- paholg 3y agoLooks like the API supports submitting text, maybe that would work for you? https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/summarizer.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/summarizer.html
- Lammy 3y agoI like the "Blast from the Past" unit in search results. Real sick of Google's neurotic obsession with recency as a stand-in for relevance to the point that you can tell a lot of spammy sites just fake ${CURRENT_YEAR}.
- t0bia_s 3y agoI don't like the idea of tightening search queries to credit card, however they add option to pay by crypto... That is good approach. But still I refuse to pay subscription model for product that I wouldn't use regularly.
- richardw 3y agoKeen to try it. I would worry that over time, poor people wouldn’t get access as they do with ad-supported services. Maybe search credit donations could be pooled somehow, so I could do $5 for me, $2.50 for students/emerging economies.
- wackget 3y agoCall me tight-fisted or naive or whatever but I don't see $10/month as a remotely attractive price point and I don't see how they can justify it, especially when their results are still powered at least in part by external indexers. $10/month can get you terabytes of media on streaming platforms. $1-2/month is what I would pay.
- europeanNyan 3y agoAt the end of the day, it comes down to what your time is worth to you. I do about 1500 searches per month and paying 10€ per month for those searches to actually be relevant makes it a no brainer.
- carlosjobim 3y agoAssuming you've already paid $10 for your terabytes of streaming and that wasn't the last dollar you owned, how does paying for a completely different thing relate to your media streaming? I can buy potatoes that last me for a week for the same price as for what I'd pay to just get a coffee, but if I've already bought my potatoes and have money to spare, why couldn't I buy also the coffee?
- wackget 3y agoMy point was that their supply cost should be minimal especially if they don't fully host and run their own crawlers/indexers.
- user3939382 3y agoIt’s a very fair price. If anything we have to hope it’s enough that they can survive.
- MrVandemar 3y agoYou're not paying for terabytes of media. You are paying for time and a reduced cognitive load. I think it's a fair price if you live in the US. I'd pay it, except I don't live in the US and our currency isn't great at the moment, and I don't exactly get overpaid at my job, and the cost of everything is rising, so I personally can't afford it ATM. But it seems reasonable to me.
- BoppreH 3y agoThree years ago, I migrated from Gmail to FastMail because I was afraid of losing access to my digital life on Google's whim. Two years ago, I found out that my favorite Youtube creators were all on Nebula. One year ago, I switched my phone to LineageOS to get security updates a little longer. A month ago, I installed OpenStreetMaps because Google Maps got really bad at showing points-of-interest. And today, Kagi removed the only obstacle that kept me on Google Search. I'm looking forward to building my filter list. After accidentally de-googlifying myself, I might ditch Windows next. It feels really nice using products that respect me, as opposed to services that are actively hostile because of advertisers.
- rjh29 3y agoYeah you sound like someone who should not be using Windows in any way shape or form. The telemetry and lack of control? Try Linux out.
- BoppreH 3y agoI'm wary of telemetry, but willing to accept it. It's the lack of respect that gets to me. "Yes/Maybe Later"? Showing me a fake Windows update screen once a month to try to get me to use an online account and switch to Edge? Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name? Pre-installing games with advertisement and microtransactions? It's a commercial operating system, for Christ's sake, stop pushing sleazy features. They are quickly burning through all the trust acquired over decades.
- aidenn0 3y agoYeah, Windows 8 was kind of ineffably bad. I know exactly effing why Windows 10 is bad; nothing ineffable about it.
- smrq 3y agoThe only thing I will credit Win8 for is that it felt really good on a Surface--Win10 was actually a step back on that platform. Which is natural, because 8 was clearly designed for the Surface to the exclusion of everything else, and they rightfully had to walk it back because the choices they made were ridiculous on the majority of Windows machines.
- distract8901 3y agoI'm kind of shocked to see a company in this day and age making their service more affordable as it becomes more popular. I'm very happy with this service. Worth every cent and then some.
- rkagerer 3y agoCan someone offer some history on Kagi? It's founder / roots? I'm curious. Also what specific features are in the mysterious Ultimate plan? And what was the domain before it was a search engine? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 Thanks!
- sshine 3y ago> what specific features are in the mysterious Ultimate plan? Ultimate used to be unlimited searches. Now that the Professional plan is unlimited, this seems like a quick attempt to provide some value to those with Ultimate. My bet is that many will move to Professional, those who stay will mainly do it for the support, and the mystery is just a cherry on top. I'm guessing extended API and AI features are among the coming features.
- u2077 3y agohttps://help.kagi.com/orion/company/history.html https://help.kagi.com/orion/company/history.html
- lmm 3y agoWhat's the language support like? I can find what I need in English, but I really struggle to find good search results in Japanese - but if that isn't something they've been paying attention to then they're unlikely to be good at it.
- slipperlobster 3y agoInstant upgrade from the $5/mo plan to this. My biggest complaint about Kagi was that (artificial) ceiling looming over my head at 500 searches per month. Now, I can finally switch my work computer over to using Kagi and have zero worry. Nothing to complain about here, just overall very pleased.
- clnq 3y agoIs there killer feature that Kagi has or is it just a marginal improvement over Google? I’ve tried a few of my last technical Google searches and got practically identical results. So I’m wondering if there’s more. Is there $120/yr worth of more here? Also, if anyone finds it substantially better, could you give some example queries on which it does better?
- petepete 3y agoBeing able to blacklist sites from results is worth the entrance fee alone.
- karaterobot 3y agoI've been a Kagi customer since the beta, I'm still happy to pay for the privacy and for certain UX improvements they have, for instance being able to give higher or lower weight to different websites in search results. I do not think the quality of their search is any better than DDG or Google. If I am being honest, it's actually worse for a lot of things, if you don't factor in that you can block bad websites without a plugin. Even paying for Kagi, I still go back to Google for any really open-ended searches where the search engine's ML can actually be helpful. For known-item searches ("fandango showtimes Seattle"), or simple searches ("pumpkin bread recipe") which are fully 90%+ of what I search for, Kagi is just fine, and they aren't after my identity (just my money).
- coconut08 3y agocan you give a few examples where you would think that kagi wouldn't be able to match google?
- karaterobot 3y agoSure. Sadly, my google search history is turned off, so I don't have a list of my recent searches there. One that I remember from a couple months ago was that I was trying to recall the name of an exercise they used to do (and may still) in design schools. In the exercise, students are given a problem and a short period of time to work on it, everybody working at the same time. At the end, they get together and critique each other's solutions. My search terms in both Google and Kagi would have been something like "design exercise with simultaneous work and followup review". If I run that search now, Kagi gives me articles about psychological studies that combine exercise with learning to test whether you retain more information. It interprets "exercise" as being physical exercise, which is the wrong sense of the word in this case. I think it interprets "design" as being the design of the study, which is also the wrong domain. It does give some articles about graphic design a little way down the page. With the same terms, Google at least gives me articles about design related activities involving teams. At a glance (and in my memory of the original experiment) none of the articles give me the word I was looking for, but at least it knows the domain I'm searching in. I remember this example because this was the first time I successfully used ChatGPT to ask about something, and it actually gave me the perfect response, with no fuss, and completely blew all the other systems out of the water. I gave it a natural language version of the same search as above, and it instantly told me the answer ("charrette") along with an accurate description. So, maybe a bad example, because neither search engine was correct. But, Google definitely got me closer, and I suppose that if I did not have a very specific word in mind, it might have helped me by giving me examples of similar things. Kagi, frustratingly, seemed to have zero idea what I was asking about, and I could not even get it in the ballpark. I wish I could remember (or conjure up) a better example, but that's all I've got at the moment!
- TheRealPomax 3y agoMuch like youtube, I'm fine paying $10/yr, but $10/mo is pretty steep.
- freediver 3y agoI pay for YouTube premium too, and it is $14/mo. Is that some different payment plan you have?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoI don't, because almost $200 a year (with tax) is quite a bit more than my ad impressions otherwise pay for, none of which transparently goes to the creators.
- arealaccount 3y agoThis is great, I did the trial and the reason I chose to not continue is I hated having to think “is this search worth it” for everything.
- xigoi 3y agoIs there any tool you can run on your browser history to determine whether 300 searches/month would be enough for you?
- egonschiele 3y agoA lot of comments mention privacy. Could someone explain who can see my searches at Kagi? My experience working at startups is that companies are very lax with customer PII. With a product like this, I have to assume every engineer at Kagi can see every search I make.
- yazzku 3y agoAs far as I can tell, the "privacy" here is based entirely on trust and on the promise that they don't log searches and other PII on the account that their business model doesn't need that information. Creating an account linked to payment details and your searches is otherwise a red flag. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
- iruoy 3y agoDoesn't that go for almost all paid web services? At least the incentive is low, and the potential backlash is high.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoTechnically they are a for profit company, just like their competitors. They are based in the US, which is a bit hand wavy on privacy and user rights compared to e.g. the EU. And regardless of their intentions, they might transition to being a public company where the share holders run the show. In that case, all bets are off. Google started out with an intention of doing no evil. That didn't survive their IPO for very long and got replaced with sell the hell out of our user data any way we legally can and seek out the darkest areas of what is legally a bit grey. That's why they keep having to pay fines in the EU. So, I would take these promises with a few grains of salt. For the purpose of improving their product they actually need to know how people are using it. So, they have to balance quality of their product with privacy. More privacy means their engineers are not getting all the information they need to do the best that they can. And they are competing with companies that are not holding back on that front. So, there's a bit of tension there. Of course the fact that it's a paid product, allows them to make some stronger guarantees and build in business friendly wording into their terms of use beyond just promising that it's all fine. The flip side is that you have to sign in to use the product and prove that you paid for it. So, you can't use it anonymously. IMHO, they should target the SAAS market and offer to make stronger guarantees to companies that are legitimately worried about their intellectual property leaking via search queries. Having people happily dump whatever in a Google query actually potentially gives Google a lot of insight into what these companies are doing. Including their direct competitors. And I'm sure they solemnly swear that they'd be doing no such thing but the temptation to tap into that is probably enormous for them. I can imagine a few companies that would pay a premium to cut off that particular flow of information. Those per seat deals that get sold by the dozens/hundreds are potentially worth a lot. B2C sales is a lot harder than B2B. And of course access to services like this is also a nice perk for employees.
- goda90 3y agoI don't see myself paying $10/month for search but I could see myself paying even more for a bundle of services that included search. Maybe a bunch of these companies that treat you like a customer instead of a product for advertisers can partner up and do a single login and subscription plan together.
- baliex 3y agoWould love some stats in the near future of whether Google et al. are using these lists (blocked, lowered, raised, pinned) to their advantage somehow. Having said that, they have the data themselves, they just choose not to use it because it’s not in their best interests.. https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1 https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1
- g_p 3y agoI think you answered it yourself - other search engines know which clicks result in the longest dwell on page (as they run analytics and redirect search result clicks through their own referral page). They could optimize their results for best results, but they don't want to, as that would reduce ad revenue. While it sounds very conspiratorial, I don't think many teams in big ad/search companies are being measured by the lack of use of the product. For search, customer satisfaction is likely a first page answer resulting in no more searches on the topic (i.e. less use). For a company hosting ads in search results pages, that's a negative outcome. But it's what users want! I believe if minds were put to it, and commercial drivers put aside, Google or bing or anyone else could very quickly deal with the scourge of poor results and SEO spam. But when you get revenue from search results page impressions, ad clicks, and impressions on the junk sites in listings, the incentives just don't align with the user.
- HNArg024 3y agoI almost never comment here on HN (or anywhere actually), but I feel the need to express how happy I am that I found (lost in a comment a few days ago) this service. For the past three or so years I have tried half a dozen times to leave Google Search. Tried DDG, Brave Search and some others I can't remember now. But the "poor" quality of results had me going to Google for half of my searches, and after a while, just Google again, for convenience. Now, I'm at 44/100 trial searches and I already know I'm going to pay for this. It's like using Google on 2008 plus without ads. It just work wonders, and I haven't even started to play with the filter to raise/lower certain domains, which I think it's a fantastic tool to have. Great work Kagi Team!
- jkestner 3y agoMaybe "Like __ when it was great but paying for it" should be the new "Like Uber but for __".
- ReptileMan 3y agoI think that the problem is that a lot of vendors grossly overestimate their value - like NYTimes with their subscription. I am totally willing to pay for what they earn from me from ads and 10c on top of that monthly. But they want order of magnitude more.
- heyoni 3y agoBecause essentially you’re paying for the free users as well.
- justinclift 3y agoAnyone know if the "Universal Summarizer" is reliable, or does it make stuff up?
- jmakov 3y agoEveryone ok with your searces tied to your credit card?
- freediver 3y agoKagi does not associate searches with an account [1] You can also pay for it with Bitcoin/Lightning to achieve full anonymity if this is desired. [1] https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
- amelius 3y agoI'll pay for a search engine when they are transparent about their algorithm.
- u2077 3y agohttps://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- dustingetz 3y agohas anyone figured out how to configure this on iphone successfully
- hedora 3y agoAnyone using the Family Plan with grade schoolers? How is it?
- freediver 3y agoI have my third grader and sixth grader using it. They are actively fighting teachers trying to revert Google search on their school Chromebooks :)
- joshxyz 3y ago[flagged]
- bachmeier 3y agoTheir previous pricing really puzzled me. If you're charging that much, the only people that benefit enough to pay have big search needs, but Kagi said "we don't want your business". Who wants to monitor how many searches they've made so they don't run out before the end of the month. Or what if your kid sits down at your computer and does 25 searches for their homework.
- g_p 3y agoI think their previous pricing was very much a short term reaction to Bing massively changing their pricing model for search crawl index access. When the prices hiked with very short notice, they were potentially going to lose money on every search, until they figured out their next move. I believe at the time they said they wanted to bring unlimited back when they could make it work financially. And it's nice to see a company do what they say on that front, for a change :) As another commenter said, it's unusual to see a company reduce prices as it becomes successful, but I think that will help to deliver even more user growth by reducing the friction to adoption, and also showing that they're true to their word even when it comes to reducing pricing.
- tambourine_man 3y agoI have FOMO-like feeling whenever I use a different search engine. Specially in programming, when the right article or stack overflow can save you an afternoon, the “I wonder if I would get better results if I was using Google” feeling is hard to shake. Too many decades, I guess. I’m rooting for something like Kagi, though. I’m glad to pay $10 for such an essencial tool. And I’ll eventually be over that hump if it proves to be as good or better consistently.
- g_p 3y agoFor this use-case I think you'll be pleasantly surprised - Kagi seems to be pretty good at prioritizing stack overflow and similar (but not the endless content clones), official documentation pages, and small, niche, focused tech blogs by someone who had the same error and wrote a post on their personal blog about it.
- koreth1 3y agoKagi is my default search engine and I'm happy with it except for one category of search: location-sensitive. I live in San Francisco, and if I type "sf weather" into Google, I get a weather forecast for San Francisco. If I type "sf weather" into Kagi, I get a weather forecast for Santa Fe, which, while technically a valid result for those search terms, is useless to me. Similarly, it's easy to search for restaurants and get search results for other restaurants of the same name in different cities. But most of my searches aren't location-sensitive, and Kagi does a great job the rest of the time.
- sandgiant 3y agoDoes anyone outside the US have a great time with Kagi? I tried it for a few months but found it to be very US focused. Perhaps I just didn't spend enough time shaping my queries.
- codezero 3y agoAnother Kagi blog post (the small web one) convinced me to sign up and the limited number of searches for $10 was my main hesitation. I signed up anyways and haven't regretted it at all. It's a bummer Safari doesn't support custom search engines very well, but the Kagi extension works well enough. This change will make a lot of other people like myself a lot more comfortable with signing up I bet.
- justusthane 3y agoYou can use Kagi’s Orion browser on iOS which (of course) supports Kagi natively.
- codezero 3y agoCool! Didn't know about this. Thanks.
- b8 3y agoI tried Kagi when it was in beta, and I couldn't tell the different between other search indexers like You (you.com) or Searx. I emailed Dimitri telling them about my concerns with a subscription base search index model and they replied, "You are either used by your search engines or you pay to be free" (paraphrasing). However, there's non privacy comprising ways to do ads. I doubt a large number of people will be willing to pay for a search indexer in $current_year. Especially when there's FLOSS alternatives.
- kstrauser 3y ago> Especially when there's FLOSS alternatives. I'd guess there are more people willing to pay a little than maintain the FOSS alternatives themselves. I ran my own mailserver for a couple decades, then found myself at a place where I have more pocket change than free time and started paying someone else to manage the hassle for me. That's where I am here, too. It's worth it for me to pay $10 per month to get Kagi's benefits without having to do it myself. Apparently they believe there are enough people in that boat to make it a worthwhile business plan.
- rafram 3y agoAt launch, if I remember correctly, Kagi relied on the Google Search API. The poor economics of that decision were a big part of why it was so expensive. Has that changed?
- mrweasel 3y agoAccording to their documentation they still relied on Google for search, mixed in with results for other source, like Wikipedia, Marginalia and others (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...). It seems a little weird that there would be searches where users fallback on a Google search, when Kagi fails... Shouldn't Kagi get those same results? There's also some double standards at play. On every article on DuckDuckGo you'll have people comment: "It's just Bing". Well, if that's the case, then Kagi is just Google. Basically the two search engines do the same thing, but with different business models, and with different levels of success. Personally I feel like Google and Bing are on par. Bing has improved a lot, and Google simply hasn't.
- 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 3y agoIf I could pay with Monero I’d get an account. I like what I see but don’t like the possibility of my ID being tied to my searches.
- qudat 3y agoBeen subbed to Kagi for a few months and think it is mostly equivalent to google — which is big praise. I’d say local searches are a little rough still but otherwise have rarely needed the g! bang
- CGamesPlay 3y agoUnlimited searches are great to see included by default. A big part of my search engine usage is as a glorified bookmark manager, where I know I want to go to a specific MDN page, but I don't want to open MDN and search for that page specifically. It always felt awkward going all-in on Kagi when I knew that most of my searches were served just as well by an ad-supported search engine.
- mmahemoff 3y agoGood to see DuckDuckGo's Bang syntax [1] has become commonplace with alt search engines. Following convention, Kagi lets you append !g to divert the search on Google. A simple escape hatch like that is worthwhile as Google is often superior for local-area searches, in my experience. I've dabbled with a multitude of search engines recently and that is one thing badly missing from Bing. 1. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- falsenapkin 3y agoNot disagreeing with your main point but some anecdata on local searches: for me, Google likes to show me the other, larger city by the same name several hundred miles away. If I use Google Maps it likes to teleport as well. Sometimes even serving results for unrelated businesses, like one time I was searching for a photo developer and it recommended a B rate fast food chain. Kagi has done a much better job of respecting where I live, though it has had a few minor misses that Google produced (maybe after wading through some crap).
- mmahemoff 3y agoBy “local”, I’m mainly concerned with the country rather than city level. I’m not US based and most search engines have that bias. For example, searches about news, public holidays, or certain statistics should default to the user’s home country (however that is determined, which is admittedly a whole other can of worms that even Google doesn’t always handle well).
- falsenapkin 3y agoAh! Miss on local, apologies
- eviks 3y agoIt's rather unfortunate that this unergonomic convention of requiring shifted far away 1 key spread , this should be customizeable to some better ,comma prefix or something
- Melatonic 3y agoWas an early adopter and also love it. Very high quality results. No bullshit Google ads. Extremely easy to use out of the box with no customisation and lots of advanced features. Any chance of some bonuses for the early adopter people ? Totally get that you want to keep "Ultimate" it's own higher tier thing but maybe there's an in between ?
- lucgagan 3y ago"Unlimited" positioning rubs me the wrong way. It really means "until we deem to be no longer reasonable for personal use".
- mberning 3y agoLike what they did earlier this year.
- daveoc64 3y agoReally bad timing for me. I just locked in a year of the Ultimate plan - three days ago! I only did that for the unlimited searches! I don't feel like I'm a heavy user, but after nearly 4 days of usage, seems like I typically do ~30 searches per day, but hit 60 searches on one of the days. It's still early days, but I'm enjoying Kagi so far. I think the biggest problem I'm having is a sort of psychological block that when I run a search I expect to see Google.
- TisButMe 3y agoHey daveoc64. I work at Kagi. Really cool stuff is coming for Ultimate, and being a early Ultimate user you'll get it before the newer users. If that doesn't work for you (fair enough) and you switch to pro, we'll prorate all your credits. If that also doesn't work, contact support@kagi.com and we'll help.
- blakespot 3y agoDidn't I use some online payment system in 2001 or so, called Kagi?
- esafak 3y ago"We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance." https://help.kagi.com/orion/company/history.html https://help.kagi.com/orion/company/history.html
- l72 3y agoHow often do you use a general search engine and what are you searching for? For me, if it is related to my job, I am usually going straight to the docs, language forums, and sometimes stack overflow. It's only if I am looking up a specific error that I do a general search (although that is getting harder and harder as more words are ignored). Personally, I rarely search. Music related? Straight to Metal Archives. Tv/Movie related? straight to tmdb.org. General Reference? Wikipedia. Stats/Facts? WolframAlpha. I'd say I use a general search engine only a few times a week total.
- jackvalentine 3y agoHaving been trialing Kagi for the last couple of months I do about 600-900 searches a month.
- l72 3y agoWhat are some examples of searches that you do? I guess I am just surprised at how often people search using a general search engine.
- slipperlobster 3y agoNot OC, but I burn through searches trying to chase down stacktrace errors. We're going through a big upgrade off of JDK8, so there's a lot of random queries.
- jackvalentine 3y agoReading back the last few: - dutch baby pancake - dave hughes - albert park sailing lessons - <nameredacted> paediatrician - LNC patient cables pinout - 23FBQ connector masimo - state’s powers australian constitution - digital ID ACCC - Woman dies due to bushfire smoke canberra - <local council area> babytime library - bellroy - what does ammonia smell like - herschel infrared heater home assistant
- p1necone 3y agoThis is timely, I signed up last month for the $10 plan and burned through the limit like halfway through the month without even turning it on at work. When I'm writing code I tend to search a lot, and I'd resigned myself to not using kagi because I didn't really want to bump up to the $25 plan.
- 5- 3y agothis is welcome news, and i will likely reinstate my subscription. however, i'd like to point out that in my understanding, most of my $10 will go to google, in kagi's payment for their search service, rather than support kagi or their mission. please correct me if that's not the case.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- libraryatnight 3y agoI love Kagi! Happy customer since they started asking for money! I tried so hard to use ddg but I always found myself just banging to Google. I actually use Kagi results!
- rvz 3y agoThis is hilarious with all these celebrations from Firefox fans on HN using Kagi paying for search. Firefox fans need to know that by using Kagi you're hurting Firefox (and Mozilla) as they are completely dependent and need to beg for Google's millions for being the default search engine. Unlimited Kagi searches at $10 is still unsustainable vs free Google searches. By default, Kagi will either (eventually) raise prices or reduce them to compete in the race to zero on search with Google already at the finish line. So please continue the 'celebrations'.
- ColonelBlimp 3y agoWhat should 'Firefox fans on HN' do?
- typon 3y agoJust searched for something technical and didn't get GeeksForGeeks as the first search result unlike Google. I'm already sold.
- stxne 3y ago[dead]
- resonious 3y agoThis is pretty cool. I tried Kagi once and liked it, but ran out of my monthly search allowance within a few days. Apparently I make 20x more searches than the average user... So even if I paid, I wouldn't have enough. And I don't like the idea that I'm paying for every web search. It'd add a weird friction that I think would inhibit my flow. Admittedly $10 still seems kinda steep for something I get for free already. But maybe I should just try it out for a month and my mind might change.
- kelnos 3y ago> Admittedly $10 still seems kinda steep for something I get for free already. And this is why surveillance capitalism is so effective. If it helps, think about it in yearly terms. They offer a small discount for annual payments. Is $108 per year an amount you are really going to miss, for something that gives you daily (even hourly) value? (I get that for many many many people in the world, $108 is a significant sum, even yearly, but I expect that most of us here are luck enough to not be in that boat.)
- stelonix 3y agoI read somewhere Google makes $350 per year off each user. Divided by 12 months that's a bit less than $30. In a way, you're paying $20 less than you would by using Google, while keeping your privacy etc. Seems great when you take into account the fact with Google you're the product.
- solardev 3y agoI like the domain rankings, seeing which domains get raised or lowered by people (https://kagi.com/settings?p=rule_leaderboard https://kagi.com/settings?p=rule_leaderboard) I'd love to see a upvote/downvote system per query/result, as another ranking metric. Especially if it can cluster recommendations by "users like me", similar to how Netflix recommendations used to work. Maybe don't apply it to political searches, lol, but for everyday queries I'd find that really useful.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThe last time this came up this was my only complaint. Limits create anxiety for me because I’m weird that way. Either I worry it won’t be enough or I feel like I’m leaving money on the table. Unlimited completely changes the feeling of it for me and now I’m on board. Sold.
- farhanhubble 3y agoMore interested in the Summarization API. There is no way to control the summary generation though, like, specifying that I am only interested in certain kinds of information.
- radicalriddler 3y agoResubscribed. I liked Kagi when it came out, happy to give it another shot. The search UI seems broken on my Firefox due to some absolute styling. I had to set this in my Stylus config to fix .auto_suggestions { padding: 0; top: unset; } The auto suggestions were appearing over the top of the search bar due to unruly top css.
- radicalriddler 3y agoAnother more UX issue. When I hit Advanced search, and then click Podcasts (or any) without a search query, it gives a "tab switch" like behaviour. Given that behaviour, When I enter a search term and hit enter Then as a user, I expect the search term to search based on the category I'd selected. What I get Given I've selected podcasts without a search term entered When I enter a search term and press "Search" button Then I get sent to the generic search page for that search term, not the expected category I'd selected on the prior page.
- renewiltord 3y agoOkay, I am seriously considering this now for two reasons: 1. Family Plans: I prefer managing things for the family 2. Unlimited: Usage-based risk was too high even if I wouldn't have used it to the high end.
- ibejoeb 3y agoKagi really is good. I blew through the 300-search plan in like 2 weeks, then upgraded to the $10/1000-search plan. I've been following them on discord. They've been pretty upfront about everything, and they meet their projects. So today I upgraded to the $25/mo Ultimate plan because I want them to succeed. DDG never did it, bing never did it, but I really think Kagi is a runner.
- gloriaguthrie 3y ago[flagged]
- jameskerr 3y agoI love anything that gets me off Google products. I’m using plausible analytics now too. This looks cool!
- poutinepapi 3y agoSign me the fuck up! Kagi is basically now my daily use search engine apart from Startpage. The bangs feature, where you can use a quick command to search popular sites like Wikipedia, reddit, Youtube, etc is great, and doesn't count towards your search limit. And I'm really looking forward to using the Universal Summarizer feature which is included with these new $10 rate. Keep up the great work lads & lasses!
- inktype 3y agoKagi says that it does not link private information and searches. I'm really struggling to see how that's possible when you need to log in to search. Magic? The anonymous payment options are cumbersome. Why not do something like Mullvad with scratch-off vouchers sold on Amazon?
- justusthane 3y agoJust because you’re logged in doesn’t mean they have to remember your searches. All they have to do is just…not track them. If you’re asking how you know whether you can trust them when they say that, I don’t think there’s any way they can conclusively prove it.
- riddley 3y agoI looked into Kagi a week or so ago from a different HN link and was turned off by the Apple-focus. I've had bad experiences in the past with early adopting and regretting it because I don't use Apple products. I understand they plan to support non Apple stuff but it's never clear if that support will be first-class and it often isn't. Considering that it's a Chromium wrapper, it seems odd that they took this route. It's also not clear if there are device/location limits for an account. I use a lot of devices and travel quite a bit.
- justusthane 3y agoThat’s just the browser though (Orion) — the main product, the search engine, has no Apple focus. I believe a significant part of why they built the browser is because Safari on iOS doesn’t have good support for third-party search engines. You shouldn’t have any such issue on Android. The search limits are per account. As long as you’re signed in, you’ll be fine. Edit: Also, the browser is WebKit, not Chromium. That’s why it’s Apple-only.
- NobodyNada 3y agoIt sounds like you’re talking about Orion (the browser developed by Kagi) rather than the Kagi search engine, which is what this pricing update is about. The search engine is a normal website that’s not limited to any particular device or browser, and as far as I know has no location or device limits.
- leejoramo 3y agoOrion is based on Apple’s WebKit, not Google’s Chromium. Granted Chromium was a fork of WebKit, but that was a long time ago.
- IvanMilatForPM 3y ago[dead]
- j7ake 3y agoHow does Kagi perform for non-English websites? Eg german, Japanese, Chinese?
- Version467 3y agoI can only comment on german. For general stuff, like articles, blog posts, etc. it performans really well. For local stuff, like finding restaurants, opening hours, etc. it's okay-ish, but switching to google with the bang commands is easy enough to not annoy me. It is the weakest part of the product though.
- sergiotapia 3y agoDoes Kagi work for piracy related searches? Yandex is right on the money for those kinds of queries, how does Kagi do?
- w1nst0nsm1th 3y agoJust subscribed. Quality search is priceless.
- Gustomaximus 3y agoFor mass market I feel 'free' will always win. With that in mind I wonder if Kagi would be worth having ads for a free version but be super clear what the ads are based on. E.g purely based on 1) search KW and 2) IP location of the search. Nothing more and nothing additional stored. I wonder if privacy minded people would be happy with that as it's very limited data in today's ad world, a massive improvement on anything else, plus you can turn if off if you want to pay. I also suspect it would be ~80% as good for advertisers as so much of the rich segmenting advertisers like to pitch has limited to zero effect and KW/location are the big 2 variables.
- BytesAndGears 3y agoIt goes against their core principle though, of ensuring that their users are their customers, not the product. If advertisers become their customers, then the incentives might start to break just a little at a time. As long as you’re the (only) one paying them, you’re the customer. It’s a big part of why I trust them so much.
- freediver 3y agoExactly this.
- yunwal 3y agoI don't understand why Kagi needs to be mass market. Why not just be the search engine for people willing to pay for better search? Does Ferrari feel the need to enter the economical midsize sedan market? Advertising is a lot of work, and introduces a lot of tension into the business model. Spotify premium showed me "promoted content" last week (but they promise it's not an ad). They also accept payola for placement in discover weekly playlists, which means their features are useless to me. There's no reason to encourage Kagi to go down that route. They have a good business model that they and their customers are happy with.
- Gustomaximus 3y agoMy thinking with mass market is: 1) To make the business viable and profitable. I searched a bit more and saw a post where the founder said they do expect to be profitable with 50,000 users. That still seems a tight budget if people are paying $10/20 amounts. Also I believe Kagi use google results currently so there has to be a big risk google limit what they can do if they ever become a threat of a business or generally remain beholdent to their main competitors via access and pricing rather than have independent infrastructure. 2) I would love to see a real challenger to Google. A paid model will not likely be that. I completely understand the responses and there is also value in staying ad free, but there is also value in doing ads a better way rather than all or nothing and hopefully not going down the supply slope type arguments by setting clear and transparent rules at the beginning so that tension doesn't exist or is limited.
- Shorn 3y agoKagi seems ideal for pre-paid usage-based billing - particularly given they've already implemented the usage-based billing part. A recurring subscription plan for something like this makes no sense to me personally.
- lepetitchef 3y agoI am so proud to be one of Kagi customer. Please check out my 3 favorite features of Kagi: - Small web: a collection of human blogs that you can submit your own. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web - Lens: customized search result https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html - Bang: very similar to DuckDuckGo bang.
- replwoacause 3y agoAnother happy customer chiming in. This is awesome
- mroche 3y agoAt $10 to essentially have a month-long evaluation of an unhindered product... that is a steal. Time to see how Kagi performs for me! I didn't give it a try in the past because I end up doing a lot of searching during the day and Google/DDG are starting to get repetitive and annoying with their results.
- m3kw9 3y agoWhy would I pay this when I have every search engine for free?
- croes 3y agoObviously not every search engine
- dilDDoS 3y agoVery exciting news. I’ve been trialing Kagi for a while now, and just signed up for this new unlimited plan without hesitation. Google’s results have been getting so awful and full of content farms lately, and it’s nice to be back in control of what sort of sites show up for different searches. I’m eager to see where Kagi goes from here. I’m skeptical that it’ll expand beyond people in the tech industry and their close relatives, but maybe that’s not a bad thing if it’s sustainable for them long term.
- fho 3y agoWoohoo! I always commented that I'll switch to kagi when they get to $10 for unlimited searches. That time has come!
- fho 3y agoWoohoo! I always commented that I'll switch to kagi when they get to $10 for unlimited searches. That time has come!
- climb_stealth 3y agoBeen using Kagi for 2 months now and am pretty happy. Have been using the $10 plan even though I didn't cross the threshold as I think it's a good cause. My two main complaints: - It's not very good with conversions. Say searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work. Or the little widget with conversions that do work like '120cm in m' doesn't allow to change the input and change values on the fly. - The image search is super slow for whatever reason. It takes about 5 seconds before images show when doing a search.
- hosteur 3y ago> searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work 120 mph in km/h does work, though. I don't think "kmh" is a normal abbreviation. This is the first time I see it.
- Moldoteck 3y agoIt should be perceived as eeror correction maybe?
- climb_stealth 3y agoInteresting, '120mph in km/h' doesn't work on my end either. Though you are right. kmh is not a proper abbreviation but it doesn't bother any of the other search engines either.
- Phenomenit 3y agoI guess we are legacy early adopters now!
- nurettin 3y ago> Integrate Kagi.ai into your production system. Priced at $50 per thousand queries, with a minimum of $1,000 annual commitment. Is this going to change as well?
- nurettin 3y agoFor comparison, this was the previous pricing plan https://staticmedia.kagi.com/pricing/new_plans.png https://staticmedia.kagi.com/pricing/new_plans.png
- CynicusRex 3y agoAdvocate of the devil, could this be a last ditch effort to remain competitive against LLMs?
- CynicusRex 3y agoWhat annoys me is that no search engine places quitfacebook.org among the first results despite searching for “quit facebook”.
- SanderNL 3y agoKagi seems great and I’m more than willing to pay, but then my searches get literally attached to my credit card. At least Google can pretend it doesn’t know me directly.. It’s not that I am involved in shady business, but I do look up strange things from time to time. How do others feel about this? (I feel like there is a need for a private, maybe even local, search?)
- brandon272 3y agoKagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
- SanderNL 3y agoUnless you work at Kagi I am not taking that too seriously.
- cowthulhu 3y agoIt looks like their privacy policy backs this up. It’s also written in plain English, which I adore. “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.” https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
- exitb 3y agoNot so plain. We do not (log AND associate), or we do not log AND we don’t associate? Am I supposed to believe that if their backend crashes after a user query, that can’t tell what has been queried?
- bthrn 3y ago" Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account." > Am I supposed to believe that if their backend crashes after a user query, that can’t tell what has been queried? I'm sure they'll know the query. They just won't know which user made the query.
- wastewastewaste 3y agothey did it god damn. Literally best service I pay for. I do around 100 searches a day, but that's no longer relevant!
- seaman1921 3y agosure :eye-roll:
- szundi 3y agoInteresting, how seeing the “g” logo created a feeling of it is Google for a moment
- __rito__ 3y agoHi, if someone from Kagi is reading this, can we please get a lower tier than $5/month- even specially for India? We are kinda priced out when keeping the PPP in mind. Say $1-$2 for 100-200 queries?
- flexagoon 3y agoThey can't really do that. Their prices are based on what it costs them to use all of the required APIs (Google, Bing, etc.) If they make a cheaper plan, they will quickly lose money on it.
- __rito__ 3y agoThat's why I proposed reduced searches per month. To put things into perspective: - YouTube premium is $1.30/month - Amazon Prime is $1.50/month ($0.75 if you are <25) - Spotify premium is $1.44/month - Netflix (1080p, no-ads, 2 devices) is $6/month $5 is decent home-cooked lunch for eight days in India. Maybe Kagi's target customer base isn't India, and that's okay. But to do business in India, a company has to do, what I call- "India pricing". Maybe there are better terms for it.
- coconut08 3y agoyou just listed a bunch of corporations that subsidise the lower subscription cost by monetizing people's data which kagi promises not to do. not only that you listed a bunch of billion and trillion dollar corporations that have money to burn and operate at much higher economy of scale. surely you don't expect a boutique small company of a few people to be able to match that
- __rito__ 3y agoI just listed those as an end user. I am plainly talking from a consumer's perspective. Just sharing my thoughts. That's all. I didn't list boutique companies in India. Their pricing is much lower. You ignore the part about the lunch expense. The pricing is just too high. The comment is not made with an argumentative spirit. It's just that I am priced out and shared my concerns.
- dharmab 3y agoKagi is the single best productivity tool I've added to my kit in the past year. It is easily worth the price.
- jesterson 3y agoCould you please share what you have found or discovered, or perhaps how it helps productivity? Genuinely curious. Have tried Kagi and found results to be mediocre at best compared to DDG.
- dharmab 3y agoNumber one is pinning sites that have canonical information (like official documentation), raising sources which are consistently good and blocking sources that are consistently bad. With a day or two of tuning these you get better results than any other search engine.
- jesterson 3y agoInteresting, thank you for your response.
- grahamjpark 3y agoI was just evaluating Kagi earlier this week. Personally I'm still content with DuckDuckGo, but I'll have to keep this in mind. Especially if DDG keeps building silly things like yet another private browser.
- dewey 3y agohttps://browser.kagi.com/ https://browser.kagi.com/ ;)
- Lio 3y agoI don't directly use Google or Bing much any more but I know that Duckduckgo is terrible now. If you get results that don't match your search term and try to filter them you actually get more of the bad results. That's a product that flat out doesn't work in my opinion.
- anonzzzies 3y agoReading more about this lately; does it have an API and/or can it be automated? I would like a search engine in my workflow, not via their interface.
- _frkl 3y agoYes, they have, but it's billed separately and more expensive than a subscription, depending on how much you use it: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html Edit: also, looks like you have to be in the 'Team' plan for access. But who knows, if there is demand I'm sure they'd open this up, so maybe just ping them.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI seems I am a bit daft for not finding that; thank you. Anyone knows why the API would be so much more expensive? With Google I can understand because with the API you miss a lot of the tracking, targeting and advertising, but if you don't have any of that, why would it cost so much more than normal searching? I understand unlimited is off the table for an API, but 1000 for $25 is quite a bit.
- stanislavb 3y agoThis post has brought Kagi "a few" new users https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
- antoniojtorres 3y agoHard to explain how much cleaner search gets with Kagi after just a couple of tweaks. This is a no brainer upgrade for me. Kudos to the team.
- dewey 3y agoI‘m using Kagi for a month now and switched over all my devices to Kagi as a default search engine. I tried doing the same with DDG a while ago but it never really stuck, with Kagi I’m happy and was actually sad when I ran out of credits and had to use Google until I increased my quota. For the first time since I started using Google the search interface looked clunky and unfamiliar after getting used to Kagi for a month. This couldn’t have come at a better time as I was a bit hesitant to add another subscription while still keeping in mind the additional searches I might have to pay on top. Signed up for a year!
- 5tefan 3y agoAnyone experience how Kagi performs with non-english searches?
- afterburner 3y agoMight buy access for the universal summarizer alone.
- leokennis 3y agoI’m very glad there’s a market for paid premium search engines and based on the comments here Kagi is doing fantastic. However I experimented last week by running all my searches (work and personal) in DDG (my default) and then also in Kagi. And basically they either both had the best result first, or sometimes second or third. Definitely not a $10/month difference for me.
- j7ake 3y agoKagi looks great. But does it search academic papers like google scholar?
- TisButMe 3y agoWe do - we have lenses which basically search subsets of the web (and you can make your own). Academic is a default lens :)
- j7ake 3y agoThanks. I created a lens that searches PubMed for scientific papers. It’s not bad, but not sure if it’s better than just searching on pubmed or scholar.google.com
- paisal 3y ago[flagged]
- Aeolun 3y agoGood. Now I can finally subscribe!
- wazdra 3y agoHas someone tried using Kagi extensively in non-english languages ? I wonder how well my family would adopt it, and it depends heavily on this
- dexwell 3y agoYes, Dutchman here. It seems to intuitively understand when you want local results vs. international. When it doesn't, you can easily toggle above the search results. I'm never looking back.
- thebytefairy 3y agoKagi seems cool, but I haven't felt that google search is so bad that I'd pay ~120/year for search. I think Google's also heard the discontent around search results lately and has been trying to improve - eg. I get relevant Reddit results now without needing to specify that into my query. I personally haven't found cases where the results are so bad I would rather start paying, but would be interested to hear specific examples to open my eyes if people have them.
- loehnsberg 3y agoThe thing is you ARE paying for search but do not know how much, because you will never know where a targeted ad nudged you to pay a little markup for something that you bought. I prefer to pay for the services that I use with money rather than with my personal data, which may be used against mine or my fellow citizen‘s interest.
- xigoi 3y ago> you will never know where a targeted ad nudged you to pay a little markup for something that you bought. I don't search very often for stuff to buy, so… definitely not 10$.
- loehnsberg 3y agoBased on your searches, the sites that you visit, the videos that you watch Google or the likes create a profile that they then offers to companies to target you with ads. The effect may be subtle, but ads work, and companies hand millions to show them.
- enbugger 3y ago[flagged]
- DavideNL 3y agoAnyone in Europe have experience with how well it performs when searching for local things like stores, local organizations, and the like ?
- argulane 3y agoIt seems to find local Estonian sites and locations quite well.
- poulpy123 3y agoI would advise them to include 5/10 search per year in the free account for people to check if Kagi reach the point it is useful for them
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gcau 3y agoDoes kagi remove the need to add "reddit" after every query to get some real human results?
- gbrindisi 3y agoyes, you can “boost” websites you trust more to give them more priority in search results
- styren 3y agoHow well does it work for non-English languages? I just tried it out for Swedish and had issues finding relevant results, especially searching for things like restaurants or hospitals.
- hosteur 3y agoIn my experience from Denmark it is not great at the local results. However I don’t experience many problems with the Danish language. It is mostly stuff like if you search for some generic term that exists in both English and Danish. Then you might want the local one. This does not work very well. But adding stuff like site:dk helps.
- brettermeier 3y agoI just tried it in german and searched for "vegan restaurant [my town]", and the results are good, comparable to Googles results. It would be interesting where the "language barrier" drops in.
- milgrim 3y agoKagi is awesome, can’t recommend it enough. I have been waiting for years for a viable paid Google alternative and couldn’t be happier now.
- Closi 3y agoIt was pretty obvious that this was what the price needed to be from the start, so it’s great they have been able to finally make it work.
- Polarity 3y agojust use kagi, best search engine
- postexitus 3y agoI cannot comment on how good Kagi is - based on enthusiastic reviews here, I can only assume that its results are of phenomenal quality. Again, based on those view, one could easily imagine Kagi taking over the world. I glimpsed at their transparent stats and they are only at 8.8k paying users. This is not a bash or a critisism, but just sharing how things are different when observed from a HN lens. https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
- freediver 3y agoThere was a time when Apple too had only 8.8k paying users. Also worth noting is that Google search has 0 paying users :)
- kilroy123 3y agoI tried out Kagi the other month. I went back to brave search. The killer brave search for feature for me is the goggles. You can even create your own goggle and narrow down searches to whatever you want. I wish Kagi supported that as well.
- Rewrap3643 3y agoAre you familiar with Kagi Lenses? https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
- kilroy123 3y ago> Up to 10 includes websites With goggles, you can build and maintain custom lists of _thousands_ on github.
- eole666 3y agoI'm trying Kagi now : - search results are greats ! - the speed isn't that great (results can take more than 1s to show) : does it become faster once you pay for it ? Or maybe it has to do with the access from europe.
- freediver 3y agoThat should not be the case - Can you post more details on https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org
- _benj 3y agoYES!! I love seeing the success of kagi! I’m an early adopter and the search results quality plus the hidden gems plus the ability to customize them is just fantastic! A example of customization that I’ve been experimenting is lowering a bit the results from stackoverflow to see official documentation first, it’s been working like a charm! Thanks again for making kagi in spite of all the naysayers!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tokai 3y agoAbout time. The old prices and search limits were naughty.
- hyyypr 3y agoThis is great, I had a limited number of queries with my previous plan and I would end end using duckduckgo most of the time out of fear of "wasting" my limited kagi searches. The mental gymnastic of having to decide if a search is worth using Kagi for, ended up in my not really using Kagi.. This unlimited (and reasonably priced) solves this, thanks!
- compilator1 3y agoProbably in a few years this will be bought by google, ms or amazon.
- alex_toms 3y agoNever heard of this before. But if the results are actually better than Google as people say, than it’s worth trying. I’ve literally stopped using Google for a while now (and instead use chatGPT and Youtube) because all those articles were just some SEO-optimized bullshit
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoIt still seems expensive for just a search engine. You can get a streaming subscription for that and that has actual content on it. You’re just listing other people’s content. What are you offering me that is worth $10 more than just using DDG?
- freediver 3y agoHave you tried Universal Summarizer which comes included? https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
- nottorp 3y agoIt's getting better. Waiting for the price to drop from an US latte to an eastern european latte per month.
- samjohnation111 3y ago[dead]
- airpoint 3y agoOK, but am I the only one finding Kagi "super" slow comparing to other search engines? It takes like a good full second to load the results…
- freediver 3y agoThis is unusual, can you post on https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org with more details?
- imsurajkadam 3y ago1401 points, 747 comments, happy customer comments and yet I am not understanding WHY :)
- khobragade 3y agoPehle istemal karein, fir vishwas karein!
- Havoc 3y agoDo they have a search API? Last I check the documentation site vs main site said conflicting things
- JackMorgan 3y agoAnother happy paying customer here. Very much worth the price for the value.
- oriettaxx 3y agoI'm in, now : thanks for the discount
- satireguff 3y agoDo I get FastGPT with the 10 USD plan?
- freediver 3y agoYes you do, unlimited use.
- beanjuice 3y agoDoes anyone have experience with Kagi in relation to academic searching? Does it perform better in this sense?
- freediver 3y agoThere is a specific Kagi "lens" just for academic searches.
- breton 3y agoI have just tried it and it is a little disappointing. `mjml2json in browser` returns completely irrelevant results in the third link, that have 0 mentions of mjml or mjml2json.
- freediver 3y agoWould you mind reporting what you see at https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org so we can take a deeper look?
- jxy 3y agoIs there an option to use the API and just pay per use? I couldn't find it.
- culopatin 3y agoIt’s still a hard sell. Netflix was running at 8.99 back in the day, I pay $5 for Spotify and Hulu combo as a student. These companies pay royalties, have to secure licenses, have the equipment to feed multimedia to me, apps, Netflix even makes shows now, etc. If they want to get to the average user they’ll need to figure out either a student discount, a combo with another service, light ads like Hulu or optimize their costs.
- malfist 3y agoI agree. I like kagi, I like it better than Google. But it's not _that_ much better. Certainly not $10 a month better. For comparison, I pay $3/month for mightytext. Which is a tool for Android that lets me send/view/search text messages on my phone from any browser. I'd pay $10/month for it, but kagi doesn't give me nearly that much value
- Exuma 3y agoI'm very glad that my value scale doesnt concern itself with the difference between $3 and $10, I can't imagine going through day to day like that with that level of granularity. That is literally less than the price of a single pizza. A single potato at the store is probably $3 EDIT: I just signed up for Kagi. Youre out of your mind if this isnt worth $10, holy crap this is awesome. The amount of configurations and settings is out of this world. Unless you use google 5 times per month this far exceeds its cost.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xigoi 3y agoI'm glad you're making a lot of money so you can afford to spend 10$ without thinking. Good for you.
- Exuma 3y agoIt's less about money and more about the mental energy required to distill such a granular view of money/value. $3 is basically the same as $10, or even $50. Even when I slept on the floor of an office building and made $10/hr I never thought like that. It is madness to me. Spend that energy thinking how to make $10 more, which is incredibly easy, far far easier than the mental energy micromanaging single dollars.
- Kye 3y agoHow are the results outside SV/tech/software development? I worry it'll be like early DuckDuckGo with a hard tilt toward libertarian and conservative content no matter what you search for. I couldn't search DDG back then for anything remotely queer without at least one result telling me I'm going to hell and a menagerie of op-eds from right wing figureheads. I can't do a long demo like I did with DDG because of the free limits, and $5-10 is a lot of money for me right now. So I ask here.
- birracerveza 3y agoPlease charge me per query, not a monthly subscription. Ideally 1c per x queries, where x>=5 or around that ballpark, otherwise it's a no from me. For comparison, I pay $5 a month for my phone carrier with unlimited everything.
- galleywest200 3y agoTheir API has this option.
- birracerveza 3y agoBut I don't want to use the api, I want to use their website.
- bigoljim 3y agoThe summarization feature has been an insane time saver for me. On the cybersecurity front there are so many research articles, conference videos, and news articles just constantly flooding your feeds. There was an article on HN recently about the importance of "Critical Ignoring", to know what to ignore. This has been a key tool in speeding that process up. Especially conference materials and news articles. They have such clickbait titles, it can be hard to determine what is legit and what is obvious. For news you can get a use the source as a fairly decent gauge on what the articles will be (quality wise). But for conference materials it is so hard. Summarization with the "Key Moments" lets you quickly determine if I should dig in more or not. The Discuss option is super helpful on huge framework/audit documents to help you figure out is this the standard that requires xyz vs the other one. Once i know i'm in the right doc then i can zero in on what I was looking for. Presenting Kagi as a tool for use in our larger Principal/Architect team next week. Will be very interested in Enterprise/Corporate plans once they are a thing. Thanks for all the work Vlad (and team)!
- Eumenes 3y agoI've actually found I barely use search engines anymore. I go directly to sites. Seems like people have forgotten this. I've heard good things about Kagi but at the end of the day, we have an address bar for a reason.
- tamimio 3y agoYeah $10 a month is crazy for a search engine, I would expect a lot more for that price! I an happy with searx and similars in the meantime.
- Mockapapella 3y agoI think using Kagi was the first time I've ever encountered an "instant switch" moment for a product I've been using for over a decade. I never realized just how much useless SEO garbage was being flung in my face using Google until I used Kagi. Of course there's the measurable added productivity of finding what I need faster, but it's also a qualitative difference in that I don't kind myself glossing over half the page avoiding ads and useless links.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tylervigen 3y agoThis was a very good decision. It was a poor use experience to pay $10/month and regularly get notified that I had gone over my search count; it discouraged me from consistently using Kagi. Glad the $10/month level is now unlimited.
- smath 3y agoI don’t see an option to “try before I buy” (without setting up an account) but maybe it’s there? That’d be useful to win over users. Account set up is friction
- politelemon 3y agoThere is one on the main page: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ "Example search results:" click one of them and it takes you to https://kagi.com/search?q=python+exceptions https://kagi.com/search?q=python+exceptions Although tbh I'm not liking these results. One of the top results for Python Exceptions is "Python exceptions considered an anti-pattern" which is an opinoin boost rather than documentation.
- wakeupcall 3y agoThis new pricing scheme made me switch. I still think though that in many countries it's still high. At least from my friend group, <5$/mo is the price where most would stop "thinking about it" and just subscribe to try the service after a friend recommendation. You would probably retain most users that would otherwise never have tried it in the first place. I rely on search for work daily, and I want to support non-ad-supported business, so I'm biased. If most users don't really reach the original 1000q/mo, then more regular "non-power" users could offset the cost. Or maybe that's already factored in the current pricing. Either way, I did enjoy kagi quite a bit on the first beta, so I knew exactly what I was in for. But if I would have subscribed as a test with the 100 initial queries I don't think I would have got attached to it. It took me a while to trust the result and compare it with other search engines to get a feeling for the service.
- iaziz786 3y agoHas anyone know about https://0.kagi.com https://0.kagi.com?
- aaroninsf 3y agoWho was it that observed that one of the horrors of the internet as we have built it, is that because we are the product, we live in a world where whatever is free is evermore enshittified, and only those with means can afford to not be sold. And e.g. get high-quality search results. Ugh.
- Zopieux 3y agoI misread the title as "$10 a year" and was hyped, then was thoroughly disappointed when reality set in. I already have too many subscription services. $10 for some occasional weekend web searches won't do.
- lykahb 3y agoThis is a minor detail, but I am impressed that the settings page has custom CSS. Getting this simple option feels special after seeing many companies, which had custom CSS, remove its support for the sake of hypothetical average user who cannot be trusted with anything other than GUI.
- awwx 3y agoBizarrely, many search engines seem to think it would be helpful to truncate the titles of search results. For example, the example search "python exceptions" suggested by Kagi on their homepage results in: > How to Handle Exceptions in Python: A Detailed Visual... A search on DuckDuckGo displays the complete title.
- grappler 3y agoI recall hearing that Google and Bing have a nearly insurmountable lead in terms of raw ability to index the web, and that all other "alternative" search engines are using Google and/or Bing under the hood. Is this the case for Kagi? Or is Kagi actually maintaining and drawing upon their own independent index?
- bpye 3y agoThis finally prompted me to try Kagi - and it seems like I’m going to be paying for it after all. I’ve gotten on okay with DDG until now, but this certainly appears to be a step better again.
- khorpy 3y agoI was about to setup a subscription, but haven't found my language in Interface Language settings. Why there is no translation for widely used languages like Chinese, but avaiable for super rare languages like "Luxembourgish"?
- pleb_nz 3y agoDoes this apply to the legacy pro plan as well?
- oftenwrong 3y agoI cannot see myself subscribing until they make the search API generally available. >NOTE: The Search API is currently only available to customers of the Kagi Teams plan. Please reach out to vlad@kagi.com for invite. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html It sounds like an excellent product, but I don't want to be forced to use their client/interface; I want to be able to make my own.
- YellowSuB 3y agoI was just thinking about purchasing a subscription last month, glad to see the price has dropped, I will definitely be buying it now,, also seems like they allow using PayPal which is a bonus. The results I've gotten on kagi at far superior to Google so I am happy to make the switch