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Just chiming in here. My experience is: * Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant.
by Lazare 3y ago
Just chiming in here. My experience is:
* Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant.
* DDG solves a lot of privacy issues, but the search quality is strictly worse than Google. I know people who use it preferentially, and I respect that, but personally Google search is already so bad than opting for something even worse is hard for me to accept. And I think almost every DDG user is familiar with having to fall back to Google to get a result.
* Kagi solves the privacy issues and the search quality is excellent - certainly better than Google is today, and subjectively, feels as good at least as good as Google was at its heyday. And notably I have never needed to fall back to Google; it's just a strict upgrade. I absolutely feel it's worth the cost.
I can't really predict if it will stay good; some of the decline in Google is no doubt just because they're the most popular SEO target, so it's possible if Kagi becomes wildly popular it'll be a victim of it's own success. And of course, Kagi's goals and principles may change with time, etc.
But as of today, if you think you might get some value from really good search, and Kagi isn't wildly out of your price range, give it a shot.
- juunpp 3y agoAren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
- juunpp 3y agoHmm, and apparently you can also ask it to block shit like pinterest from your search results?
- hifikuno 3y agoThis is one of my biggest loves of Kagi. I have all pintrest domain's blocked and it's great. And it's really easy to add a block too so when I get a result for a website that is useless or I don't like on to the blocklist it goes!
- causality0 3y agoBeing able to set up custom search weights would be cool. Like up-weighting results from sites you like and down-rating sites you don't.
- bbatha 3y agoYes it’s a pretty handy feature
- pachouli-please 3y agoIt can do exactly this, as well as outright blacklisting. Very good stuff
- Lazare 3y agoYes. Quite useful. Also groups listacle spam ("top 10 X" type articles).
- flir 3y agoIf they could group ecommerce sites in the same way they group listicles, that would be damn handy. (Just identifying sites with payment forms would go along way). It's not that I don't want ecommerce sites, it's just that sometimes I'm in research mode and sometimes I'm in shopping mode.
- manonthewall 3y agothere are browser plugins that do this as well :) . uBlackList for one
- vunderba 3y agoThey also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account”. So you essentially have to make the same leap of faith as you would with a commercial VPN.
- beej71 3y agoOr with DDG.
- juunpp 3y agoThe VPN doesn't know what I search for, it "only" knows what host I connect to and all the associated metadata.
- wutwutwat 3y agoUnless they MITM you and whatever app you’re using doesn’t do cert pinning, or they don’t have a legit root cert that they can sign completely valid certs with
- hnben 3y ago> Unless they MITM you how high would you estimate the odds of this actually happening for lets say mullvad?
- wutwutwat 3y agoHow would I know? There’s always a VPN new kid on the block everyone shills for. Used to be that ProtonVPN was our savior now it’s nobody even knows it exists. Point is unless you control every hop in the chain you can’t know it’s safe
- juunpp 3y agoTo MITM me they'd need the intermediate or root certs of whatever I am connecting to? I don't see how even pinning the cert would help if the chain is invalid to begin with.
- manonthewall 3y agoDo they provide "personalized results" like google claims? That would seem to imply they -must- attach searches to your account, wouldn't it?
- Xerox9213 3y agohttps://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalized-results.html#personalized-results https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize... AFAIK the personalized results are not based on your search history, rather a personalized list of blocked, lowered, raised, or pinned domains. I think some people share their lists, not unlike PiHole.
- TisButMe 3y agoHeya, I work at Kagi. This is correct, we do not personalize searches other than by respecting the user's customizations (eg. domain preferences, lenses, etc...) which are all entirely user-controlled.
- keybits 3y agoLooks like this could change in the future, quoting from my Kagi settings screen: > Save My Search History > Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThere were studies where it took as little as 10 searches to find out your exact identity. If you pay per month, month's worth of searches is more than enough to de-anonymize you. Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoThat's surprising given how I assume the pareto principle applies to search terms. >Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search. I guess if you're really hardcore and are willing to trigger a transaction per search. But in reality it doesn't work becsuse there's a small transaction fee for every charge. So it's really hard to charge below a dollar without major penalties. You can get around that with a token system, but we go right back to square one. I guess that's one problem crypto mitigates.
- buzer 3y agoThey at least claim that they don't save the search history. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html
- Lazare 3y agoA fair call, but to quote their privacy policy: > Unlike "free" search engines, we do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account. So if you trust them to do what they say, then yes, that pretty much solves the issue. If not, well...
- juunpp 3y agoYeah, I don't trust startups in Palo Alto to do what they say.
- i_play_stax 3y agoUse a single use burner privacy.com card?
- daft_pink 3y agoIt's not really about privacy. It's just a better experience on Kagi.
- sillyfluke 3y agoSeriously, on its face it's worse than google privacy wise because of the payment thing. Accept cash payment as some email providers and VPNs or stop telling people to trust you. And claiming Bitcoin changes anything privacy wise for the layman just blares red flags all over the place.
- cgriswald 3y agoI'm not sure when you tried DDG, but until relatively recently I found it had equal to or better results than Google for most things. I did have to sometimes fall back to Google, but it was only for certain classes of search. There was a time when there were fewer and fewer times I had to fall back to Google and fewer and fewer successes when I did. That said, I agree, Kagi is an upgrade over both.
- pkulak 3y agoIf Kagi keeps charging, it will never be popular. They could lower their price to $0.99 a year with the same result. And that's a good thing.
- manonthewall 3y agoIt's unlikely they can make a profit doing that. Servers, devs, etc cost money. This way they keep the audience smaller and can make money as well. It's a business, so you do what you gotta do.
- ditsuke 3y agoI think you're missing the point: a price barrier regardless how big is good.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI think the main point was that any price barrier over 0 dollars limits your audience, regardless of profitability. That literal pay wall simply makes people start to question. Especially if a "free" alternative exists and they don't care about the pitch (in this case, privacy or less low quality results in search). That's arguably a good thing since a premium model mitigates the temptation of ad or data selling based approaches. But the fact is many don't care nor mind those as long as they aren't extremely intrusive. Even if they are (full page banner ad with small x), they may tolerate it anyway.
- temp2022account 3y agoBy that logic, life itself can never be popular. Everyone in the world makes/has access to a non-zero amount of money, and where it goes is our collective human decision for how the world should operate. You're spending money right now, because of your opportunity cost! Kagi v Google, in terms of "How do you operate as an organization wrt the world?"? Kagi wins hands-down. I couldn't care less about the privacy angle, the QUALITY is amazing. It's like traveling back to 2008, and for $10/mo that's a sweet deal.
- bluetidepro 3y agoI love Kagi, too. I’ve mostly switched over. The one main thing I still find myself using Google for though is sports scores. That’s one thing I wish Kagi had. I love just searching “bears” or “colts” on Google on a NFL game day and immediately getting the live score at the top of the results. Kagi doesn’t have that feature yet, and I hope they add it.
- MagerValp 3y agoI honestly hope that they don’t. You’ll never cover all sports and you’ll never have global coverage, all while sucking up a ton of developer resources. Focus on search.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pleb_nz 3y agoI use Kagi now and love it. But I used DDG for a few years prior and rarely ever used Google. I think DDGs results are subjective in that for some people they are better or as good than Google's. Let's hope Kagi keep up the good work.