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Happy 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

by crisp 3y ago

Happy 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 ago
Can 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 ago
  you can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.
- seventytwo 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. 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.
    - askvictor 3y ago
      Not just that, but it's not really on the radar of SEO. If they get big, SEO will probably lead to the same enshitification as happened to Google.
      - freediver 3y ago
        I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
        carlosjobim 3y ago
        SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
        whs 3y ago
        I think if they want to sell to me and ads&trackers harm their SEO, it'd at least make the internet a little bit more private. That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.
        Gustomaximus 3y ago
        True for you, but there are billions of people out there and your attitude is a tiny minority for what they would lose elsewhere.
        dazc 3y ago
        Boss of wonderful search site seems to be unaware?
        eitland 3y ago
        Unlike Google who has incentives to promote the spam Kagi has incentives to fight the spam. Also Kagi lets me blacklist domains myself if I want stricter rules than Kagi already provide.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Isn't that the same thing said about Lotto/scratch-offs/etc?
    - oaktowner 3y ago
      A good friend once described the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math skills" and I don't think I've played since.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct. Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success). So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
        yunwal 3y ago
        I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
        Falkon1313 3y ago
- crisp 3y ago
  I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification. The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
    That's how Google was when I was a kid
  - mypetocean 3y ago
    I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website). Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features. I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue. There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
    - root_axis 3y ago
      The results are worse because the Internet is worse.
      - dazc 3y ago
        Exactly, the incentive to produce good quality content is no longer there.
    - Falkon1313 3y ago
      One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried. Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all. The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information. I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
- esafak 3y ago
  Yes, in many ways, such as the proportion of items on the first page of a query response that are relevant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(information_retrieval) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...
- svaha1728 3y ago
  If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
  - robocat 3y ago
    #4 pinned is hacker news!!! So clearly big crossover between HN fans and kagi. 8,629 Members. Top Blocked (from most blocked): pinterest.com/.co.uk/.ca/.de/.fr/.com.au/.es facebook.com foxnews.com tiktok.com quora.com w3schools.com breitbart.com dailymail.co.uk appsloveworld.com instagram.com githubplus.com geeksforgeeks.org libhunt.com twitter.com msn.com healthline.com solveforum.com 9to5answer.com alternativeto.net giters.com wikihow.com nypost.com codegrepper.com issuehint.com cnn.com educba.com coder.social linkedin.com geekrepos.com kknews.cc bleepcoder.com amazon.com programcreek.com forbes.com newbedev.com drivereasy.com medium.com lightrun.com you.com reddit.com webmd.com blog.csdn.net nytimes.com washingtonpost.com
    - shermozle 3y ago
      Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
      - HanClinto 3y ago
        I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam). Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
- rg111 3y ago
  I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google. I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching. I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc. I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
  - mypetocean 3y ago
    Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
  - dcow 3y ago
    Kagi has replaced DDG for me entirely. Now that you get unlimited searches, do you think it would for you, too?
  - pierat 3y ago
    Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit. And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
    - hedora 3y ago
      They used to have a US office, which got me wondering if they're obligated to sell private user information to the US gov't. Here's their current list of offices: https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)
    - int_19h 3y ago
      The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
  hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
  - dylan604 3y ago
    you could always Ask Jeeves if you were looking for things too.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      I used to prefer Dogpile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile
      - Croftengea 3y ago
        Lycos anyone? :)
        anotheraccount9 3y ago
        Askjeeves...
        dylan604 3y ago
        psst, look 3 replies up </hangsHeadInShame>
        warpspin 3y ago
        You guys with your newfangled stuff. Archie FTW! :D
        claytongulick 3y ago
        Search in Spitfire BBS or Galacticom anyone? :-)
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- viraptor 3y ago
  In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam. For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh=M69XtTvQiEqY0N-zAmYw_A https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
  - JoshuaEN 3y ago
    This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again. Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Feels like I'm paying to do someone elses job.
      - stavros 3y ago
        Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free.
        hk__2 3y ago
        > Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free. You can do it with uBlacklist [1]. See also [2]. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... [2]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
- louthy 3y ago
  When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched) Very happy customer here.
- distract8901 3y ago
  Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is. It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now. I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
  - dcow 3y ago
    I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
- adamsb6 3y ago
  I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow. I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
  - olig15 3y ago
    You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc
    - 14 3y ago
      It appears you can as one commenter who uses the search engine states in one of the comments.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
  - palata 3y ago
    > But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    Can I encourage you to try it? It took me a while to get good results with it, as I was so used to skipping the first 4-5 hits as those are always adverts. They aren’t with Kagi.
- eitland 3y ago
  Yes. In four ways for me: - it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me. - there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird. - as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages. - built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Does it warn you about typos in your "prhase that exists with a phrase " or just blanks out?
    - benhurmarcel 3y ago
      It does fix typos unless you put them in quotes. And tells you about it.
      - eviks 3y ago
        I was specifically asking about typos in quotes
        sergiosgc 3y ago
        No, it won't fix quotes. A quote is an exact match. And please, let it continue to be so.
        eviks 3y ago
        Please read the question again. What part of "Does it warn you about typos" is about "fixing quotes"???
- ramenbytes 3y ago
  When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
- niemal_dev 3y ago
  From the ~5 search queries I have done so far, it's not like "wow" but more like "yes".
- _kidlike 3y ago
  another happy user here. yes it does!
- mrinterweb 3y ago
  I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective. I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.
h4x0rr 3y ago
So would you say it's on-par with google results or even better?
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  In my experience it's far, far better than google search. The ability to boost some domains and block others is invaluable. But also, because you're the customer not the product, you don't have to contend with Google's ad-driven search results and their privacy violating bs. Totally worth the money. (Kagi user since the beta, paying user since they started offering subscriptions.)
- rg111 3y ago
  Not GP, but from my end- a big yes! Also better than DDG, which is better than Google nowadays. I also use phind and code.you.com.
- wellthisisgreat 3y ago
  google search is only good if you want to know "what the corporate hive mind thinks what their idea of an average consumer should think about it"
- daft_pink 3y ago
  I think it is better most of the time because: - it combines the top 10 this or that list into listicles that are aggregated into their own section and I find to often be full of spam - it lets you block or deprioritize any site you want like quora, medium, Forbes, that often give me useless or incorrect info or are just their to boost so - it lets you prioritize sites you like in the search ranking - it doesn’t have blocked or censored keywords - it lets you specify by date or time quickly and easily which I find to be beneficial and google seems to hide it constantly move around in news It’s weaker for like looking up a phone number or hours for a local eatery, but in general I like it better.
- NobodyNada 3y ago
  Yes, its results are far better than Google’s. Google results are full of SEO spam, marketing pages, etc. Kagi tends to surface official documentation, blog posts, online discussion/Q&A. Overall, it does a very good job highlighting “real” content rather than “artificial” content. Plus, you can personalize it by boosting/downranking/blocking sites, creating regex rewrite rules on URLs, etc.
cobertos 3y ago
I've been using Kagi for about a year now as well and have been very happy. I find that I still go back to Google when I am ready to purchase a product or find a local service. In this case, I find that I'm generally happy with the people who are paying money for search placement (either directly to Google or for hardcore SEO) and find I can get less "fly-by-night" type companies that way.
- dylan604 3y ago
  that's funny as the fly-by-night companies in my experience are the ones spending all of their efforts to win the SEO to get those clicks where the established companies can be found by less sleazy methods
kulahan 3y ago
That's awesome that it's so flexible. Can you search using symbols? Like if I'm trying to search "what is %" will it bring back results regarding the percentage sign, or results that start with the words "what is"? That's my major problem with google. Sometimes I need to search info on a symbol, and I don't know what it's called yet, so I have to perform another search, just to perform the one I actually care about.
- desperate 3y ago
  ^^^^ this is so frustrating to me.
- jorams 3y ago
  I've generally found searching for symbols to work quite well. It's a mixture of the two. You can check the results for "what is %" here: 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...
  - kulahan 3y ago
    Thank you so much!
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Why do your search links work, but the ones from Kagi's own "Features" page just take me to a login page?
    - jorams 3y ago
      It looks like the like the blog post linked to by Features links to plain search page URLs, which only work for logged-in users. I used the Share feature to get a sharable link. I guess that page needs to be updated.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - freediver 3y ago
carlossouza 3y ago
I also stopped using Google, but I have replaced it with Perplexity.ai... Have you ever used Perplexity? How does Kagi compare with it?
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Interesting, thanks for tip.
- melvinmelih 3y ago
  I’m still on the free Perplexity plan but it has already replaced my Google search by a lot. I’m a huge fan. Haven’t tried Kagi yet though.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Perplexity seems to be an AI chatbot tool, how is that a replacement for a search engine?
turnsout 3y ago
Weird question, but: what do you search for? I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back but I’m not a heavy searcher. I would be curious to know your typical use cases!
- ghayes 3y ago
  I search a lot for programming topics and when I get frustrated I switch to Google and get literally the same results. I’d say it’s pretty good for web search and keeps up to date. The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
- crisp 3y ago
  Mainly tech/programming stuff for which Kagi is outstanding. Lately I've searched a lot about a city (restaurants, places to visit, events, ...) I moved in and it works for that too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sva_ 3y ago
> 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.
- jchw 3y ago
  Some platforms actually do account for this by having special "developing countries" discounts, or some other euphemism like that. IIRC Gumroad is one that supports this.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    Pretty funny that when textbook publishers try to do this, people really hate it.
    - jchw 3y ago
      I think most people have a negative kneejerk reaction to asymmetrical pricing when they're the ones paying more. Generally for most things, the cost of delivering a product or service doesn't vary too much based on factors like local living wages, so at the end of the day, you're paying more margin than some other people are. In some cases, maybe your group is flat-out subsidizing other groups. It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary. Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
      - paradox460 3y ago
        Some people will even go out of their way to abuse a pricing scheme to get things for far cheaper. See cdkeys selling Xbox live cards from Argentina, for example
ukd1 3y ago
Ditto; also happy customer, been paying for a long time now, never looked back money wise, or to google. My experience trying switching with duckduckgo (repeatedly) always failed; checking google, unhappy with ddg results. Kagi, not so.
TradingPlaces 3y ago
$9 now. Just signed up for the annual; 10% off
w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago
How does it compare to Brave ?
dustingetz 3y ago
yup
kelnos 3y ago
> When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then. Same. I still do attempt a Google fallback if I don't easily find what I want on Kagi, but every single time, the Google results aren't what I'm looking for either.
antihero 3y ago
I am giving it another shot. First thing I've noticed is the lack of localisation with results. If I search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon" it comes up with a .com link. I have to search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon uk" for it to go to .co.uk. This was an option with Google that I liked. *Weirdly now if I search for "elac debut 6.2 amazon" it comes up with a UK link :S
- jjar 3y ago
  There's a dropdown at the top for the locale - you can select UK and you should get UK results.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    One of Kagi's core principles seems to be that they don't try to guess what you want. Their "Personalized Results" settings just ask you to tell them which domains you like and which you're tired of seeing. It makes sense that they'd ask you for your locale rather than guessing it from your IP or asking for location access. As someone who's sick and tired of the way Google tries and fails to guess what I want—to the point of now ignoring me when I try to tell it what I want with search operators—I appreciate this philosophy!
Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]

by crisp 3y ago

mongol 3y ago

Can 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 ago
you can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.
seventytwo 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. 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.
  - askvictor 3y ago
    Not just that, but it's not really on the radar of SEO. If they get big, SEO will probably lead to the same enshitification as happened to Google.
    - freediver 3y ago
      I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
        whs 3y ago
        I think if they want to sell to me and ads&trackers harm their SEO, it'd at least make the internet a little bit more private. That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.
        Gustomaximus 3y ago
        True for you, but there are billions of people out there and your attitude is a tiny minority for what they would lose elsewhere.
        dazc 3y ago
        Boss of wonderful search site seems to be unaware?
        eitland 3y ago
        Unlike Google who has incentives to promote the spam Kagi has incentives to fight the spam. Also Kagi lets me blacklist domains myself if I want stricter rules than Kagi already provide.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Isn't that the same thing said about Lotto/scratch-offs/etc?
  - oaktowner 3y ago
    A good friend once described the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math skills" and I don't think I've played since.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct. Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success). So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
      - yunwal 3y ago
        I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
        Falkon1313 3y ago
crisp 3y ago
I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification. The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  That's how Google was when I was a kid
- mypetocean 3y ago
  I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website). Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features. I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue. There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
  - root_axis 3y ago
    The results are worse because the Internet is worse.
    - dazc 3y ago
      Exactly, the incentive to produce good quality content is no longer there.
  - Falkon1313 3y ago
    One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried. Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all. The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information. I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
esafak 3y ago
Yes, in many ways, such as the proportion of items on the first page of a query response that are relevant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(information_retrieval) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...
svaha1728 3y ago
If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
- robocat 3y ago
  #4 pinned is hacker news!!! So clearly big crossover between HN fans and kagi. 8,629 Members. Top Blocked (from most blocked): pinterest.com/.co.uk/.ca/.de/.fr/.com.au/.es facebook.com foxnews.com tiktok.com quora.com w3schools.com breitbart.com dailymail.co.uk appsloveworld.com instagram.com githubplus.com geeksforgeeks.org libhunt.com twitter.com msn.com healthline.com solveforum.com 9to5answer.com alternativeto.net giters.com wikihow.com nypost.com codegrepper.com issuehint.com cnn.com educba.com coder.social linkedin.com geekrepos.com kknews.cc bleepcoder.com amazon.com programcreek.com forbes.com newbedev.com drivereasy.com medium.com lightrun.com you.com reddit.com webmd.com blog.csdn.net nytimes.com washingtonpost.com
  - shermozle 3y ago
    Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
    - HanClinto 3y ago
      I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam). Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
rg111 3y ago
I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google. I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching. I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc. I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
- mypetocean 3y ago
  Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
- dcow 3y ago
  Kagi has replaced DDG for me entirely. Now that you get unlimited searches, do you think it would for you, too?
- pierat 3y ago
  Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit. And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
  - hedora 3y ago
    They used to have a US office, which got me wondering if they're obligated to sell private user information to the US gov't. Here's their current list of offices: https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/ So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)
  - int_19h 3y ago
    The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
konfusinomicon 3y ago
hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
- dylan604 3y ago
  you could always Ask Jeeves if you were looking for things too.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    I used to prefer Dogpile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile
    - Croftengea 3y ago
      Lycos anyone? :)
      - anotheraccount9 3y ago
        Askjeeves...
        dylan604 3y ago
        psst, look 3 replies up </hangsHeadInShame>
        warpspin 3y ago
        You guys with your newfangled stuff. Archie FTW! :D
      - claytongulick 3y ago
        Search in Spitfire BBS or Galacticom anyone? :-)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
viraptor 3y ago
In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam. For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh=M69XtTvQiEqY0N-zAmYw_A https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
- JoshuaEN 3y ago
  This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again. Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Feels like I'm paying to do someone elses job.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free.
      - hk__2 3y ago
        > Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free. You can do it with uBlacklist [1]. See also [2]. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... [2]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
louthy 3y ago
When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched) Very happy customer here.
distract8901 3y ago
Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is. It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now. I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
- dcow 3y ago
  I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
adamsb6 3y ago
I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow. I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
- olig15 3y ago
  You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc
  - 14 3y ago
    It appears you can as one commenter who uses the search engine states in one of the comments.
jacobsenscott 3y ago
Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
- palata 3y ago
  > But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Can I encourage you to try it? It took me a while to get good results with it, as I was so used to skipping the first 4-5 hits as those are always adverts. They aren’t with Kagi.
eitland 3y ago
Yes. In four ways for me: - it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me. - there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird. - as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages. - built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
- eviks 3y ago
  Does it warn you about typos in your "prhase that exists with a phrase " or just blanks out?
  - benhurmarcel 3y ago
    It does fix typos unless you put them in quotes. And tells you about it.
    - eviks 3y ago
      I was specifically asking about typos in quotes
      - sergiosgc 3y ago
        No, it won't fix quotes. A quote is an exact match. And please, let it continue to be so.
        eviks 3y ago
        Please read the question again. What part of "Does it warn you about typos" is about "fixing quotes"???
ramenbytes 3y ago
When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
niemal_dev 3y ago
From the ~5 search queries I have done so far, it's not like "wow" but more like "yes".
_kidlike 3y ago
another happy user here. yes it does!
mrinterweb 3y ago
I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective. I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.

h4x0rr 3y ago

So would you say it's on-par with google results or even better?

andyjohnson0 3y ago
In my experience it's far, far better than google search. The ability to boost some domains and block others is invaluable. But also, because you're the customer not the product, you don't have to contend with Google's ad-driven search results and their privacy violating bs. Totally worth the money. (Kagi user since the beta, paying user since they started offering subscriptions.)
rg111 3y ago
Not GP, but from my end- a big yes! Also better than DDG, which is better than Google nowadays. I also use phind and code.you.com.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
google search is only good if you want to know "what the corporate hive mind thinks what their idea of an average consumer should think about it"
daft_pink 3y ago
I think it is better most of the time because: - it combines the top 10 this or that list into listicles that are aggregated into their own section and I find to often be full of spam - it lets you block or deprioritize any site you want like quora, medium, Forbes, that often give me useless or incorrect info or are just their to boost so - it lets you prioritize sites you like in the search ranking - it doesn’t have blocked or censored keywords - it lets you specify by date or time quickly and easily which I find to be beneficial and google seems to hide it constantly move around in news It’s weaker for like looking up a phone number or hours for a local eatery, but in general I like it better.
NobodyNada 3y ago
Yes, its results are far better than Google’s. Google results are full of SEO spam, marketing pages, etc. Kagi tends to surface official documentation, blog posts, online discussion/Q&A. Overall, it does a very good job highlighting “real” content rather than “artificial” content. Plus, you can personalize it by boosting/downranking/blocking sites, creating regex rewrite rules on URLs, etc.

cobertos 3y ago

I've been using Kagi for about a year now as well and have been very happy. I find that I still go back to Google when I am ready to purchase a product or find a local service. In this case, I find that I'm generally happy with the people who are paying money for search placement (either directly to Google or for hardcore SEO) and find I can get less "fly-by-night" type companies that way.

dylan604 3y ago
that's funny as the fly-by-night companies in my experience are the ones spending all of their efforts to win the SEO to get those clicks where the established companies can be found by less sleazy methods

kulahan 3y ago

That's awesome that it's so flexible. Can you search using symbols? Like if I'm trying to search "what is %" will it bring back results regarding the percentage sign, or results that start with the words "what is"? That's my major problem with google. Sometimes I need to search info on a symbol, and I don't know what it's called yet, so I have to perform another search, just to perform the one I actually care about.

desperate 3y ago
^^^^ this is so frustrating to me.
jorams 3y ago
I've generally found searching for symbols to work quite well. It's a mixture of the two. You can check the results for "what is %" here: 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...
- kulahan 3y ago
  Thank you so much!
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Why do your search links work, but the ones from Kagi's own "Features" page just take me to a login page?
  - jorams 3y ago
    It looks like the like the blog post linked to by Features links to plain search page URLs, which only work for logged-in users. I used the Share feature to get a sharable link. I guess that page needs to be updated.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - freediver 3y ago

carlossouza 3y ago

I also stopped using Google, but I have replaced it with Perplexity.ai... Have you ever used Perplexity? How does Kagi compare with it?

t0bia_s 3y ago
Interesting, thanks for tip.
melvinmelih 3y ago
I’m still on the free Perplexity plan but it has already replaced my Google search by a lot. I’m a huge fan. Haven’t tried Kagi yet though.
xigoi 3y ago
Perplexity seems to be an AI chatbot tool, how is that a replacement for a search engine?

turnsout 3y ago

Weird question, but: what do you search for? I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back but I’m not a heavy searcher. I would be curious to know your typical use cases!

ghayes 3y ago
I search a lot for programming topics and when I get frustrated I switch to Google and get literally the same results. I’d say it’s pretty good for web search and keeps up to date. The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
crisp 3y ago
Mainly tech/programming stuff for which Kagi is outstanding. Lately I've searched a lot about a city (restaurants, places to visit, events, ...) I moved in and it works for that too.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sva_ 3y ago

> 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.

jchw 3y ago
Some platforms actually do account for this by having special "developing countries" discounts, or some other euphemism like that. IIRC Gumroad is one that supports this.
- somsak2 3y ago
  Pretty funny that when textbook publishers try to do this, people really hate it.
  - jchw 3y ago
    I think most people have a negative kneejerk reaction to asymmetrical pricing when they're the ones paying more. Generally for most things, the cost of delivering a product or service doesn't vary too much based on factors like local living wages, so at the end of the day, you're paying more margin than some other people are. In some cases, maybe your group is flat-out subsidizing other groups. It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary. Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
    - paradox460 3y ago
      Some people will even go out of their way to abuse a pricing scheme to get things for far cheaper. See cdkeys selling Xbox live cards from Argentina, for example

ukd1 3y ago

Ditto; also happy customer, been paying for a long time now, never looked back money wise, or to google. My experience trying switching with duckduckgo (repeatedly) always failed; checking google, unhappy with ddg results. Kagi, not so.

TradingPlaces 3y ago

$9 now. Just signed up for the annual; 10% off

w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago

How does it compare to Brave ?

dustingetz 3y ago

yup

kelnos 3y ago

> When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then. Same. I still do attempt a Google fallback if I don't easily find what I want on Kagi, but every single time, the Google results aren't what I'm looking for either.

antihero 3y ago

I am giving it another shot. First thing I've noticed is the lack of localisation with results. If I search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon" it comes up with a .com link. I have to search for "Elac 6.2 speakers amazon uk" for it to go to .co.uk. This was an option with Google that I liked. *Weirdly now if I search for "elac debut 6.2 amazon" it comes up with a UK link :S

jjar 3y ago
There's a dropdown at the top for the locale - you can select UK and you should get UK results.
- lolinder 3y ago
  One of Kagi's core principles seems to be that they don't try to guess what you want. Their "Personalized Results" settings just ask you to tell them which domains you like and which you're tired of seeing. It makes sense that they'd ask you for your locale rather than guessing it from your IP or asking for location access. As someone who's sick and tired of the way Google tries and fails to guess what I want—to the point of now ignoring me when I try to tell it what I want with search operators—I appreciate this philosophy!

Vicinity9635 3y ago

[dead]