16 ms·

Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

421 points by mroche 3y ago

mroche 3y ago
If viewing this link in the future, either search for "Dec 7, 2023" or view this snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/changelog https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/...
- freediver 3y ago
  Or direct link https://kagifeedback.org/d/2654-dec-7-2023-paywalled-articles-indicator-and-improved-weather-widget https://kagifeedback.org/d/2654-dec-7-2023-paywalled-article...
  - mroche 3y ago
    I had no idea this existed, thanks for the tip! https://kagifeedback.org/t/release-notes https://kagifeedback.org/t/release-notes
- goplayoutside 3y ago
  They really should add anchors on that page, this is not the first time this problem has come up.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
First seen timestamp instead.
madkat 3y ago
I love kagi. It's the first search product I'm willing to spend money on
yunohn 3y ago
I find it kind of hilarious that a paid search engine is highlighting paid articles to help their users avoid them.
- Grimburger 3y ago
  Many top 10 searches are paywalled and a waste of time clicking on, this seems like exactly the sort of thing people want from a search engine?
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Why? There's nothing wrong with paying for something (including some news sites), and when I search for a topic I'm looking for something I can actually read. Knowing that a link will get me nowhere without the credit card is useful.
- janosett 3y ago
  You’re paying them to rank and collect information from things on the web for you. People can’t subscribe to everything and it’s nice as a user of a search engine to know if it’s a requirement.
- omnicognate 3y ago
  It doesn't say anything about avoiding them. It's just indicating that they are (potentially) paywalled. To a user willing to pay Kagi for a better search experience that may well be seen as a mark that those articles are more likely to be worth reading.
- shinryuu 3y ago
  Down the road I see a potential bundle / partnership :).
- q0uaur 3y ago
  we really need a better way of paying for content. There's some attempts going around of browsers or extensions paying sites, but the ones i've seen felt kinda scammy. i'd love some service where i can put in $20 a month, and it gets split up among the sites i've visited, with options to give bigger shares or exclude sites completely. probably not gonna happen for a while though, having to set up something to receive payments with is just too much trouble for the small personal blogs etc. that have the most interesting content.
  - 3y ago
tastyminerals2 3y ago
Subscribed for a year after a free trial. Returns more relevant results than Bing, snappy interface and just overall gives you a good impression. They have a fast GPT powered article summarizer, which I find extremely useful when exploring library documentation. Not something that a plain ChatGPT cannot do, of course, but Kagi is just faster. You should as well check out their lightweight webkit based browser, Orion (MacOS only).
throwaway81523 3y ago
Kagi is ok but I don't understand the level of gushing over it that I see here. I got the 100 query free trial a few months ago and haven't used it up yet. So I'm not willing to buy a monthly subscription for something I'd rarely (won't say never) use. A flat $20 for 500 queries would be fine and might last me a year or so.
- hackideiomat 3y ago
  Do you still use other search engines? You should start to do your everyday searches on both and compare the results. For me, this showed that kagi can save me time, I'm rarely scrolling to find good results where on DDG or Google I'd rephrase and search again often. I don't like Kagi for other things, but that's not the topic here.
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    I mostly use DDG. Kagi results are comparable. When DDG fails I sometimes resort to Google. I can't use Kagi routinely with just 100 queries but I try it sometimes. It is subject to the same spurious results as the others afaict. And I haven't yet seen it find anything that the others missed.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      The thing with Kagi is, you can demote or remove the domains which you don't want to see, making it more yours than Google. Also, not having ads and results manipulated for money is a real, underrated gem. I tried Kagi for a day, and signed up right away, and I don't care that I pay for it. It works wonderfully.
    - akvadrako 3y ago
      If you think Kagi is comparable to DDG maybe it doesn't make sense. For me DDG is terrible, while Kagi is comparable to Google.
- tastyminerals2 3y ago
  Just a couple of weeks ago, and this is a perfect moment to share, a colleague told me how he wanted to reschedule a flight and in a hurry clicked on one of the first Google provided links (ads) and got redirected to a scam site which was identical to the one his airline uses. In the end, he had to suspend his credit card and lost money. He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him. But you are right, ppl tend to justify their choices more, especially when they paid for them ;) Still, no harm knowing there is a good alternative out there I guess.
28304283409234 3y ago
For me it just brings a lot of peace of mind to be able to click on any link and not have it blocked by ublock or pihole. All links are what Kagi believes to be valid results.
- reddalo 3y ago
  Semi-off topic, but do you recommend using both uBlock and Pihole? I'm currently a uBlock user (on Firefox), and I was thinking of setting up a Pihole. Thanks!
  - jve 3y ago
    pihole works by filtering whatever device is on your network, even if it doesn't support ublock... and coming changes in Google Chrome manifest v3 doesn't impact pihole. Cannot judge on the quality filtering tho.
  - andrewaylett 3y ago
    They might have similar results in many cases, but they're very different things. For a start, if uBlock blocks a domain then it's a click away from accessing it just this once. On the other hand, it only helps in browsers it supports. On the gripping hand, uBlock Origin can block individual resources, not only entire domains. I'm a happy user of NextDNS rather than a PiHole, but the rationale is the same: use DNS blocking to block stuff that you never want anything on your network to see, and use uBlock Origin for fine-grained blocking of the rest. I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on DNS blocking, because it won't block at the right level of granularity. I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on uBlock Origin either, because it doesn't work everywhere I want to block stuff.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      Agreed, I also use both. NextDNS/PiHole are great because you can configure them as the root DNS providers at the router level and give everyone in your household and guests on WiFi a painless ad-free experience while layering uBlock on top for the sneakier ads like Youtube. The only downside is email unsubscribe links. Those annoyingly tend to be on domains blocked by the various block lists NextDNS uses.
aryonoco 3y ago
Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you get the idea. Who would pay for search, right!? I signed up for the free trial, fully expecting to walk away. But have you noticed how the quality of Google has steadily deteriorated over the last decade or so? How it now just surfaces ad filled garbage, listicles, and regurgitated content, ad nauseam? I'm sure it's not just me who prefers what Google used to show around 2011. Kagi is like the Google of 2011. Except, better. You can combine a bunch of domains you think are related and create a "lens" to just search them. It comes with a bunch of pre-built lenses, so you can search for academic results, or forum posts or pdfs. You can tell Kagi if a website is good or not, and it will then tailor your results according to your preferences. It kind of feels like what Google could have been, if the brilliant minds employed there weren't just tasked with chasing billions more in ad revenue every quarter. Honestly, its results are better than Google's. Forget the lack of ads and them not tracking you and not selling your data (from which Google Search apparently makes on average $300 USD every year from every user). Just purely based on the search results, Kagi is better. I've recently converted my plan to a "Duo" plan, and the SO, who doesn't over care about privacy and ads and stuff, also likes it. #win
- M4v3R 3y ago
  I was exactly the same. I tried various search engines but always reverted back to Google after a while. I think I stuck with DDG for the longest time but it wasn't enough to win me. And somehow Kagi managed to do it and now I'm a very happy paying customer of theirs.
- jcul 3y ago
  Yes, also the same experience. Who would pay for search right? I signed up for the $10 plan, before they introduced unlimited searches. One month I went over and thought ok, I'm not really ok with making more than 10. A few weeks later they switched to unlimited. The lens feature is great. I have one for searching my company's public documentation etc. The redirect thing is great too, it can rewrite URLs on the fly, e.g. Reddit -> old.reddit. I have used other search engines in the past, like ddg for a long period, and others. I always ended up just doing !g on every search. Kagi is the first where I don't notice I'm using another search engine and actually if I'm on Google I notice my experience is worse! Great to see updates like this, in the months I've been using it it has improved so much already.
spiffotron 3y ago
As a UK user I find Kagi returns results from Australia far too often which is a super weird issue DDG used to have as well
- robga 3y ago
  I'm a UK Kagi user and do not have this issue. Perhaps it is your IP range? Do you have the same problem on mobile and broadband?
  - spiffotron 3y ago
    It happened at both work and home - my region was always set to United Kingdom and it would still decide I want localised Australian results sometimes. It may have been fixed since I last used it of course - I just didn't find the results provided by Kagi any better than DDG to keep paying.
- aryonoco 3y ago
  We're coming to take over mate. It's the start of the reverse colony
RockRobotRock 3y ago
Is DuckDuckGo more neutral on doing things like this that help the user but might piss off publishers?
timvdalen 3y ago
I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and search results definitely feel much more useful than Google. Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though (think stuff like "sunrise", timezone conversion, currency conversion, etc).
- Sebb767 3y ago
  > Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though That's true. The seem to especially be confused with `,` and `.` in fractional numbers; sometimes it recognizes `,` , sometimes it doesn't, but it does use `,` in the results. This leads to the fun result that you can't use the output it gave you as input in a new calculation. But that's a minor issue and otherwise I'm also a happy paying user.
NewsGotHacked 3y ago
I bought a year of kagi and overly very satisfied. 2 things that annoy me about it: -I randomly get irrelevant international results as a US person (Amazon Canada and Amazon India for instance) -There are inconsistently labeled timestamps on things. I use reddit a lot when reviewing search results. Sometimes the reddit links are timestamped and sometimes they aren't. Leads to end up clicking on a reddit link that is 6 or 8 years old and no longer revelant. Other than that is works really well!
- russelg 3y ago
  You could try work around the Amazon issue by lowering the non US ones and raising the US one
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  Reddit time stamps has always been a problem for me in all the other search engines, not for you? I’ve also noticed Bing is now surfacing tons of Reddit results on just about every search but without me typing Reddit. I’m guessing my use of bing chat or something similarly creepy.
- msowers77 3y ago
  Pretty sure reddit results not being timestamped is reddit itself not giving the timestamp. I have noticed it for a while on multiple search pages.
Beijinger 3y ago
[flagged]
- Sebb767 3y ago
  I think you might have responded to the wrong thread :-)
  - joshuaissac 3y ago
    The intended thread might have been https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562939
mertbio 3y ago
Would be nice to open those paywalled articles with archive.ph.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Kagi supports regex-based redirects, so you could redirect paywalled domains to a paywall bypass website.
  - teroshan 3y ago
    That's exactly what I configured right after reading this news, here's a rule I came up with: (https?://www\.nytimes\.com\/\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}.*)|https://archive.is/newest/$1 https://archive.is/newest/$1 Unfortunately, I quickly encountered the "Too Many Requests" error while testing. Maybe I should configure an nginx rule to distribute requests along my multiple VPSes to mitigate this...
gregdoesit 3y ago
I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for about 2 months now. I love it, and feel so far that it's well worth the $108 per year: just by not having to spend mental energy to scroll through the first several sponsored results; and try and decide if a result is paid or not. I set Kagi to be my default search in my browser (Chrome). For specific searches like stocks, maps or restaurant reviews, I still use the "!g" bang to go to Google. Never thought I'd pay for search: but very happy with my choice so far. Great to see others agree on this page - as I hope they can maintain this as a viable business, and stick to the principles of users being their customers: and not advertisers. Feels like a breath of fresh air tbh.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- llamaInSouth 3y ago
  I'm surprised how many people here don't use an ad blocker...
  - xigoi 3y ago
    An ad blocker can only block sponsored results if they’re marked as sponsored.
    - llamaInSouth 3y ago
      are those impossible to block?
nixass 3y ago
Are search results on Kagi regionalized? For example do I MUST have region set or they give me best of the best results based on my query? Google is annoying with region specific results in any of their services
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
  By default I get international results, and I can switch with a dropdown list where my country is at the top.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  The have an "international" region setting, which is from my experience the best option. Unless you want regionalized results.
sph 3y ago
Thanks Kagi, love these status updates. Vlad, I know you often read these comments, so here's a suggestion: I would love a way for Kagi to respect my search query and not try to interpret or assume anything is a typo. "Verbatim" feels just too strict (I think the order of the words is important as well, doesn't return more than 2 or 3 links), where the default is too loose. Sadly, I don't have any examples to share, but it feels that as Kagi improves, it becomes more and more Google-like, as in trying to be smart instead of following my orders. I grew up when search engines searched for keywords, and were not trying to be smart. If I search for—foo bar baz—I want to be shown all pages that contain the three words as I have spelled them. Not presenting any combination of the three as valid. Search engines trying to be smart make the web feel so small, because all the niche variations and topics are just so hard to search for, and it is the reason I stopped using Google in the first place. Anyway, I am a happy paying user, and love the product :)
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  If you quote each word, you get closer to what you're looking for but without quite the degree of specificity that you'd get from quoting the entire query?
dwilding 3y ago
Does anyone use Kagi for Kids? The Starter level at $5/mo is enough for me so far, so $20/mo for Family is quite a jump. Would love to know whether Kagi for Kids is worth paying for
strogonoff 3y ago
I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting more investment which never comes without strings attached, or just selling the business. The best possible, most honest and sustainable option would be usage-based billing, but it appears that Kagi have decided against that route. I’m a moderately happy customer and would hands down recommend Kagi, but personally wouldn’t use it by default as the inevitable cost of changing my habit again in future puts me off.
- gostsamo 3y ago
  Just drop them when they fail/become bad. No reason to miss now for some future eventuality which does not affect the present.
  - sph 3y ago
    Yeah it's a philosophy I've started to adopt. Better to get in when the product is new and there is hype, to enjoy fast-paced improvements from a new competitor that just wants to create a cool product, than to come in later when the hype has died down, the original founders have exited and the enshittification starts. We all know the hype cycle of programming languages. Hype, disillusion then plateau of productivity. It's not the same with startups: there is only hype, peak, followed a long descent to the mean and death. The hipsters were right.
  - strogonoff 3y ago
    Not sure if that letdown will trump whatever minor time savings I have accrued while it was good, though. To make it worse, first make it better, then make it back as before. It’s the same reason I choose not to make use of insane promotions that ride app space newcomers tend to provide. I could use Bolt DeLuxe (or whatever is the new hotness in town) for a couple months, but the anticipation of how I will soon suffer as it becomes more and more of a ripoff with incompetent drivers and absent customer support, and how I’ll waste willpower on changing my habit again, makes me wonder if it’s really worth it. Instead I could in meantime exercise my taxi hailing skills (in this analogy, practice crafting queries and otherwise working around the limitations of worse search engines).
alien_cat 3y ago
Perhaps this is not meant for me. I use gpt-4-turbo frequently, which costs only $5 per month. For the same price, if I were to purchase from Kagi, I would need to limit my quota, like using a different search engine for unit conversion or obtaining a simple Raspi pinout. Why design a product that encourages users to use it less? In my opinion, a $5 with limited searches doesn't justify the cost.
- krageon 3y ago
  openai doesn't respect your privacy at all
- xigoi 3y ago
  GPT is not a search engine, so why would you even compare it to Kagi?
puttycat 3y ago
Kagi is currently great. Can someone explain what makes it more resilient to AI-generated garbage than Google? (If at all)
- tyingq 3y ago
  Of course, I can't prove it, but the search results on Google look like they tried to win the spam wars with some variation of page rank that's skewed by "big brand power". Like they have some seed list of trusted brands, and graph proximity to that boosts your site over the pure spam. That, of course, penalizes genuinely good content that has no such proximity. Kagi's various posts about their algorithm consistently talk about the value of "non-commercial content" and indexes to make sure they don't get lost. Like this post: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.htm... Which sort of sounds like the same idea, but with more time and attention to curating a better list.
- q0uaur 3y ago
  I imagine the reason we get all the AI garbage is ads. kagi downranks sites that contain a lot of ads, while google, who obviously gets their income from ads, pushes them. that alone is bound to make a massive difference. there's more, of course. but it's plenty for me to decide that i have no problem paying my $10 a month to not get 8/10 results that are ads.
- hobofan 3y ago
  I think at some point in the past Google shifted it's stance of SEO from "if you do SEO you are cleary trying to game the system and will be punished" to "we are generally okay with SEO as that easens the burden of trying to guess content, and will only rarely punish it". One instance that seemed like a turning point there was their reversal on the search penalty of genius.com after they were found gaming the system, something that I think was enforced much harder in the past. So I think with embracing SEO spam to some degree (in combination with generally tailoring the behaviour of the search results more towards "consumption"), they must have lost parts of the resiliency. In contrast Kagi seems to be very alergic to SEO spam (AI generated or not), sometimes even too much.
- 3y ago
SSLy 3y ago
How is it for searches not in English?
- oriettaxx 3y ago
  Do you mean writing non English search text, or for results not written in English?
  - SSLy 3y ago
    Both? When I want to look up something in my native language.
    - Toutouxc 3y ago
      10M people European country here, no issues. I get good results in the native language for "restaurants in [random 15K people town]", "[random local food] recipes", info about taxes from gov websites, recent local events, my own name (high school's website), my mom's name (her business website), random hobby forums.
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        I think the question is about the paywall indicator, not about Kagi search in general. I tried some searches in three different languages, and mostly Kagi didn't identify non-english paid webpages. It could only identify one (which wasn't paywalled at all).
        Toutouxc 3y ago
        Oh, that makes sense. I assumed there was a hardcoded list of possible paywalls and how to recognize them, but I guess there could also be some kind of heuristic that might not work for different languages.
tjpnz 3y ago
Unrelated: tried logging in with my Google account (yes, I know it's considered bad practice) and got an error on Google's side that Kagi is blocked.
- _aaed 3y ago
  Worked fine for me
- freediver 3y ago
  Would you be able to post this as a bug report on kagifeedback.org with more details/screenshot as we are not able to reproduce it?
Uninen 3y ago
I've been using Kagi for a while now and I love it. My only gripe is the usability on iOS as it keeps logging me off every now and then (it feels like more often than many other sites) which then results in a login screen when you're trying to search something and after the re-login the query you already wrote once is now lost.
- q0uaur 3y ago
  not sure if it's possible to set up on iOS, but in settings -> account they offer a "Session Link" that contains a token that will log you in automatically. if you can set that link as your default search you shouldn't have that issue any more. I use it in private browsing mode so i can still use the nice search without having to log in every time.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    IIIUC custom search engines on iOS are a hack and they just have an extension which captures your google queries and redirects them to Kagi. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... They recommend their own Orion browser which is the only browser on iOS that uses a webkit fork, which can install browser extensions intended for chrome and firefox
salad-tycoon 3y ago
I like Kagi , I do. I like the ranking, I like how I can search for controversial people and not have my intended search target censored by obfuscation. Kagi just gives me the data. That’s great! I pay the 5 a month but I run out mid month which makes me not use it and breaks the habit and worry. I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month. I guess I’m a heavy user, one day supposedly I had >30 searches (that I don’t recall). I want to pay but not that much. So I just learn to live with an inferior product. So now I’m stuck between wanting to pay more and wanting to outright cancel. Although sometimes reading HN news updates feels a bit weird/ad like (watch how negative downvotes get greyed out) I enjoy seeing them work on it and wish them the most success. Ps I do appreciate their ios and mac apps that help with safari. Sadly I think all the spotlight, look up, and Siri searches still get processed out of kagis world. Obviously, not in their control. Good luck Kagi.
- q0uaur 3y ago
  I really hope they keep lowering the unlimited searches price. I'm pretty sure I use way less resources than my $10 pays for, but I just wanted it for the peace of mind - if enough people like me subscribe, they'll probably be able to lower it even more. alternatively, I don't know how deeply embedded the LLM stuff is in kagi, but I really do not need that, so maybe a plan without that, since that is the stuff that requires a lot of expensive compute.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    As mentioned in another comment, a plan without the LLM stuff wouldn't really lower the price, as search is the most costly thing they have, the LLM features are dirt cheap compared to searching. (>2ct per query)
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month. Just because Proton is a great deal doesn't make Kagi a worse deal. This kind of logic never made sense to me. The products have nothing in common, so why the comparison? Then, also think about why you're worrying about spending $10 per month on a product that you think is great? Is that an amount of money that has any impact on your current life situation? I think a lot of people can't break the habit that everything on a computer has to be free.
theusus 3y ago
Kagi still uses Claude 2.0 any ETA on 2.1? Also, the expert command returns mostly wrong answers and loses all of the previous context.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  They already use claude 2.1 in the assistant, source: vlad (kagi founder) wrote this on the 22th November on discord.
xenator 3y ago
We need this paywall indicator badly here on HN.
throwbmw 3y ago
Kagi is mind blowingly good. It's almost unbelievable first time you use it. Like you forgot that there could be good, interesting and relevant stuff on first page of results.. I am mad at myself for not trying it earlier.
thiht 3y ago
I tried Kagi for a few months this year, and while the overall flavor experience was pretty good, it was not quite there yet for me in terms of result quality. I strongly believe in them and will absolutely try it again in 2024 though, the improvements they make are impressive and I actually miss some features (domain ranking and blacklisting is so great!). Can’t wait to see how the quality of results has evolved.
nvarsj 3y ago
I really like Kagi. The only thing bugging me is there is occasional delays when searching, at least from the UK. Google's instant search definitely has spoiled me there.
- freediver 3y ago
  Reporting these when they happen to kagifeedback.org will go a long way (screenshot of page with inspector in browser open). We do not run any client side telemetry so we can not be proactive about this - need reports from users!
- cianmm 3y ago
  I remember trialing it a while back and gave up pretty fast due to the consistent very long delays when searching from Ireland.
  - nvarsj 3y ago
    Yeah, I wonder if it's optimized for US only right now. If the Kagi team is listening, please fix for world wide :). It's not always bad, but P95 needs work.
    - SushiHippie 3y ago
      Here is a map where they've deployed: https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-11-16/1700178524-889329-image.png https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-11-16/1700178524-... Source: https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog
nalekberov 3y ago
I am still not convinced that I should trust Kagi. Why should I use my email address to log into the system? They say that it's for them to know how much credit you have left. Mullvad does generate a unique number for you, which you can use indefinitely.
- freeAgent 3y ago
  You can create an account with an aliased/unique email address.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  If you don't trust something, you should follow your gut instinct. Do you think something or somebody becomes more trustable if the repeat "Trust me, bro" to you? You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?", especially on a message board full of strangers. An dishonest person will repeat a thousand times that you can trust them, while an honest person probably will take offense.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    >You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?" They didn't ask that. They said "Why should I use an email address to log into the system?" (rhetorical) and then gave an example of a service that also needs to verify the user has paid for the service (VPN), but does so without requiring accounts/in a more privacy-preserving way (Mullvad).
  - unaindz 3y ago
    But he didn't asked just for a "Trust me, bro". He is asking about why they don't use mullvad which can replace email id. It only seams beneficial to allow that if you promote your service as privacy focused.
privacyking 3y ago
Do they accept monero yet?
maxehmookau 3y ago
Kagi is great but even though it knows my location is the UK, by default is skews to US-located results. I can fix it by suffixing every query with "UK", but its a pain. That said, I'm a paying customer and will continue to be.
- freediver 3y ago
  We'd appreciate if you posted an example or two to kagifeedback.org so we can take a deper look. These things are mostly fixable.
pelagicAustral 3y ago
I paid for a sub a few months back. It was good, but the volume of my searches is offensive, it was unrealistic to think that I was ever going to stick to the product. Just like someone else posted, I'm trying to cut down on subs at the moment, and this product, as amazing as it is, it's just not beating free google with dorks + ChatGPT.
rplnt 3y ago
How's your experience with non-english searches? Google has become unusable to search in a foreign language if you do not happen to be in a given country. It's trying to be too smart. It's ignoring double quotes, tld restriction still searches for the sites in a language of the country I'm in, etc... it's really frustrating at times. Not to mention Google can't search anything old anymore. It's either news or spam. Or irrelevant "autocorrect". And it used to be so great with a little bit of effort. 10+ years ago that is.
- maelito 3y ago
  Kagi is quite good for French.
- sirn 3y ago
  Kagi has been pretty good for me for Thai and Japanese results. I've had countless occasion Google's result is much worse than Kagi, as far as returning actual useful results is concerned. For example, searching for a product in Japanese, Kagi may find fewer results, but Google shows a page full of affiliate spam, which is not really useful. The only occasion where I found Google remotely useful is for image search and map search.
colesantiago 3y ago
"Sign Up to use Kagi" Why does one need to signup to use a "privacy" based search engine like Kagi if it needs my email and password? Can't it just accept a username like HN and be done with it? I'm trying to use a fake email, tor and a VPN and I'm running into errors, eventually I gave up.
- daveoc64 3y ago
  It's a paid service, so you need to authenticate to use it. You're a paying customer, not the product.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    100% anonymous is possible. I would love my [very, very anonymous] Mullvad account to be matched by kagi. As it is, my options are worse - but free.
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    Mullvad is able to do this without passwords and emails AND it is a paid product that is privacy based. I don't see why Kagi can't do the same.
    - drewbitt 3y ago
      And it has huge problems with reselling accounts, attacks to randomly guess the username which gives full access to the account, they had to disable port forwarding due to abuse via anonymity, and they enforce a device limit per account due to the above. It does work for them, but at a cost. Kagi is "a company created with the mission to humanize the web. Our goal is to amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity, and self-expression." Their goal is a search engine above all. Mullvad's tagline right now is "A free and open society is a society where people have the right to privacy." Their goal is privacy exclusively in a VPN.
      - colesantiago 3y ago
        > And it has huge problems with reselling accounts, attacks to randomly guess the username which gives full access to the account, they had to disable port forwarding due to abuse via anonymity, and they enforce a device limit per account due to the above. It does work for them, but at a cost. Paying for a random generated ephemeral account would be even better for Kagi but as far as I see it now, it's a privacy nightmare. I recommend Kagi to follow the model what Mullvad has done for making a product privacy preserving while still being able to make money.
nlnn 3y ago
I'm also a very happy Kagi customer, the price is worth being able to ditch yet another Google product for me (being able to completely block Pinterest/Medium and other annoying domains is great). The only thing I still occasionally use Google search for is the Shopping tab, which I find handy for filtering results to product listings (though if anyone's got any tips for this in Kagi, happy to hear!).
daveoc64 3y ago
I have been using Kagi for a few months now and generally enjoy it, but I do think it's biased towards returning results from sites in the US, despite having "United Kingdom" selected in the search criteria. I think Google UK handled this better.
civilitty 3y ago
Kagi search is great and totally worth the $10/mo (I pay for Ultimate to get access to the assistant features but I'm not yet sure if they're worth it, though I'm happy to support the company). Custom bangs alone are worth the price: I have them set up for LibGen, all my torrent sites, archive.ph, and their summarizer (which I recently discovered is !sum by default, no need for a custom bang). But my favorite is a custom bang that points back at localhost (via Tailscale hostname so its available on mobile too) running a custom terminal emulator web app. Just using the bang alone opens a new terminal tab in the browser but when using it in combination with a URL allows writing commands like "curl [...url...] | ~/scripts/crawl.sh"
- michaelmcdonald 3y ago
  Would you share a bit more about how you have your custom bangs setup? I'm always curious to see the life hacks people implement that speed up workflow processes.
jimmyblanco 3y ago
Kagi is really nice but the limit of searches for the $5 is far too low
goplayoutside 3y ago
Another happy "Early Adopter"-flag Kagi customer here. The search results are, ime, superior to Google, and it's great to be able to remove one more Google product from my life. The quality of the reviews sites that come up for product searches is night vs day. The bang support is awesome (I use "I'm feeling lucky" daily) and I've been using the Universal Summarizer[0] more often lately. Customized promotion & demotion/blocking of domains is seamless and surfaces the content I'm trying to find. Looking at using FastGPT[1] and Kagi Small Web[2] more. I wish they'd get their forum off of Discord and onto something open and indexable! 0. https://kagi.com/summarizer https://kagi.com/summarizer 1. https://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt 2. https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb
hprotagonist 3y ago
Kagi’s ability to acquire name recognition among tech-centric people is not only what convinced me to pay for it - it was one of two or three fairly simultaneous things that made me reconsider the magnitude of the financial stake i have had in $GOOG since 2005. It’s less than it was a month ago.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seanthemon 3y ago
I had huge issues with Kagi because I don't just use google for research, but to find local things like finding a coffee shop in a location or using reviews to see what's going on, or some product I need to buy in my country - 70% of my searches fall in that category and I generally use AI or some light research for programming topics. Although the google results are poorer, the facility offering is far superior and I found I was switching between Kagi and Google too often. I think it's great for research, but not so great for researching day-to-day things you use in real life outside of the computer.
acedTrex 3y ago
Did google oauth block kagi? It wont allow me to sign up with google because "kagi has not completed the signup process"
karmakaze 3y ago
I don't want to pay for a search service and have 'range anxiety' and self-regulate my usage like I'm driving a 50km EV. Search is ubiquitous, make a flat rate subscription for normal people and a TOS that excludes non-human abuses. I don't pay for a per call mobile phone plan and I make way more searches.
- oktoberpaard 3y ago
  The Pro plan is unlimited, though. It used to be capped until earlier this year.
- yoru-sulfur 3y ago
  The limit has been removed from most paid plans since September https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10 https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10 > We’re thrilled to announce that unlimited search is now included in our $10/month Professional plan and our Ultimate, Family, and Duo plans.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    That's reasonable, and good timing as it could start breaking into the mainstream. A discount pairing with Firefox might be good for sales/marketing.
maelito 3y ago
Funny to see the revival of the dog search engine, after Lycos.
maelito 3y ago
According to SimilarWeb, Kagi.com has ~1 million visits per month. Very niche, for now.
- freediver 3y ago
  That is off by at least an order of magnitude since we have 350k searches/day [1] But anyway, we like niche, niche is good, allows focus. [1] https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
dzonga 3y ago
I think i'm tired --- initially read that as particle accelerator and improved widget. then started to wonder what particle accelerators have to do with browsers.
kkoyung 3y ago
I have been using Kagi as my default search engine for a month now. It really provides better search experience than google. Nowadays, Google Search is flooded by SEO. When you search things on Google, you will likely get tons of listicles titled "Top <keyword> 2023", "<keyword1> vs <keyword2> comparison", which barely contains some useful contents. Sometimes, you will even see some AI-generated gibberish articles repeating some basic information about your keywords. It becomes much harder to find useful contents from google than the old days. Kagi search results have fewer nonsense articles. They groups those listicles together so that you can easily skip them. The feature I like the most is Personalized Results, which allows you to pin/raise/lower/block results from certain domains. For example, I pin wikipedia.org, and block quora.com.
beej71 3y ago
I've been a paying Kagi customer for maybe 6 months now. It's such a breath of fresh air to be the customer again. Haven't used !g a single time.
ndom91 3y ago
Man I really like this, but I'm having trouble convincing myself that $10/month for unlimited searches is worth it.. I guess thats what ~20 years of using Google and other free search engines will do to you haha I would jump on a $5/month unlimited queries plan though. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that bucket
- freediver 3y ago
  Maybe this helps (a bit) to convince you: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
drewbitt 3y ago
I have been using Kagi for the past 9 months. I can't wait until they can fully replace Google for me, but I have a few problems with it. 1. Some niche domains are entirely not crawled by Kagi. Obviously, Google crawls a ton more and while Kagi can get 90% of what I need, I must fall back to Google occasionally. 2. Searching for restaurants or maps is poor. I didn't realize how much I relied on Google reviews for businesses until I switched to Kagi. Plus, the built in "order" buttons, photos, menu tab etc. are all missing. At least Kagi has a button to launch Google Maps, but I'd like more in Kagi itself. 3. I get results from other countries for Amazon and other web shopping sites even though my region is United States. I can't make them lower priority unless it's in the subdomain. I use Kagi for search but have to fall back to Google 3-4 times a day at least.
- flexagoon 3y ago
  > Obviously, Google crawls a ton more I'm not sure how this is possible, Kagi uses Google's results https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... Perhaps those sites are just getting downranked by Kagi's algorithms
  - drewbitt 3y ago
    Interesting. I'll go deeper next time. Often I give up if it's not on the first page like I expect.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  >2 No other search engine will be able to compete with Google in the short or medium term on business reviews and opening hours, because the business owners send their information and opening hours themselves to Google, and they have billions of Google Maps users to write reviews. There's nothing Kagi can do to compete, at best they should start purchasing this stuff from Google and integrate it. Or we as users have to learn to open Kagi for web searches and Google Maps for local business searches. That's the easiest way.
martin82 3y ago
I think during the last three months or so, I only used the !g flag four or five times. It seems as if Kagi has indeed become a truly viable alternative to Google. Whenever I do use the !g flag, the results over at Google are just awful, sometimes I have to scroll 1.5 screens just to get past the ads. Imagine running a search engine and not delivering meaningful results above the fold. Google is a zombie company now.

421 points by mroche 3y ago

If viewing this link in the future, either search for "Dec 7, 2023" or view this snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/changelog https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/...

freediver 3y ago
Or direct link https://kagifeedback.org/d/2654-dec-7-2023-paywalled-articles-indicator-and-improved-weather-widget https://kagifeedback.org/d/2654-dec-7-2023-paywalled-article...
- mroche 3y ago
  I had no idea this existed, thanks for the tip! https://kagifeedback.org/t/release-notes https://kagifeedback.org/t/release-notes
goplayoutside 3y ago
They really should add anchors on that page, this is not the first time this problem has come up.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

First seen timestamp instead.

madkat 3y ago

I love kagi. It's the first search product I'm willing to spend money on

yunohn 3y ago

I find it kind of hilarious that a paid search engine is highlighting paid articles to help their users avoid them.

Grimburger 3y ago
Many top 10 searches are paywalled and a waste of time clicking on, this seems like exactly the sort of thing people want from a search engine?
arghwhat 3y ago
Why? There's nothing wrong with paying for something (including some news sites), and when I search for a topic I'm looking for something I can actually read. Knowing that a link will get me nowhere without the credit card is useful.
janosett 3y ago
You’re paying them to rank and collect information from things on the web for you. People can’t subscribe to everything and it’s nice as a user of a search engine to know if it’s a requirement.
omnicognate 3y ago
It doesn't say anything about avoiding them. It's just indicating that they are (potentially) paywalled. To a user willing to pay Kagi for a better search experience that may well be seen as a mark that those articles are more likely to be worth reading.
shinryuu 3y ago
Down the road I see a potential bundle / partnership :).
q0uaur 3y ago
we really need a better way of paying for content. There's some attempts going around of browsers or extensions paying sites, but the ones i've seen felt kinda scammy. i'd love some service where i can put in $20 a month, and it gets split up among the sites i've visited, with options to give bigger shares or exclude sites completely. probably not gonna happen for a while though, having to set up something to receive payments with is just too much trouble for the small personal blogs etc. that have the most interesting content.
- 3y ago

tastyminerals2 3y ago

Subscribed for a year after a free trial. Returns more relevant results than Bing, snappy interface and just overall gives you a good impression. They have a fast GPT powered article summarizer, which I find extremely useful when exploring library documentation. Not something that a plain ChatGPT cannot do, of course, but Kagi is just faster. You should as well check out their lightweight webkit based browser, Orion (MacOS only).

throwaway81523 3y ago

Kagi is ok but I don't understand the level of gushing over it that I see here. I got the 100 query free trial a few months ago and haven't used it up yet. So I'm not willing to buy a monthly subscription for something I'd rarely (won't say never) use. A flat $20 for 500 queries would be fine and might last me a year or so.

hackideiomat 3y ago
Do you still use other search engines? You should start to do your everyday searches on both and compare the results. For me, this showed that kagi can save me time, I'm rarely scrolling to find good results where on DDG or Google I'd rephrase and search again often. I don't like Kagi for other things, but that's not the topic here.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  I mostly use DDG. Kagi results are comparable. When DDG fails I sometimes resort to Google. I can't use Kagi routinely with just 100 queries but I try it sometimes. It is subject to the same spurious results as the others afaict. And I haven't yet seen it find anything that the others missed.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    The thing with Kagi is, you can demote or remove the domains which you don't want to see, making it more yours than Google. Also, not having ads and results manipulated for money is a real, underrated gem. I tried Kagi for a day, and signed up right away, and I don't care that I pay for it. It works wonderfully.
  - akvadrako 3y ago
    If you think Kagi is comparable to DDG maybe it doesn't make sense. For me DDG is terrible, while Kagi is comparable to Google.
tastyminerals2 3y ago
Just a couple of weeks ago, and this is a perfect moment to share, a colleague told me how he wanted to reschedule a flight and in a hurry clicked on one of the first Google provided links (ads) and got redirected to a scam site which was identical to the one his airline uses. In the end, he had to suspend his credit card and lost money. He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him. But you are right, ppl tend to justify their choices more, especially when they paid for them ;) Still, no harm knowing there is a good alternative out there I guess.

28304283409234 3y ago

For me it just brings a lot of peace of mind to be able to click on any link and not have it blocked by ublock or pihole. All links are what Kagi believes to be valid results.

reddalo 3y ago
Semi-off topic, but do you recommend using both uBlock and Pihole? I'm currently a uBlock user (on Firefox), and I was thinking of setting up a Pihole. Thanks!
- jve 3y ago
  pihole works by filtering whatever device is on your network, even if it doesn't support ublock... and coming changes in Google Chrome manifest v3 doesn't impact pihole. Cannot judge on the quality filtering tho.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  They might have similar results in many cases, but they're very different things. For a start, if uBlock blocks a domain then it's a click away from accessing it just this once. On the other hand, it only helps in browsers it supports. On the gripping hand, uBlock Origin can block individual resources, not only entire domains. I'm a happy user of NextDNS rather than a PiHole, but the rationale is the same: use DNS blocking to block stuff that you never want anything on your network to see, and use uBlock Origin for fine-grained blocking of the rest. I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on DNS blocking, because it won't block at the right level of granularity. I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on uBlock Origin either, because it doesn't work everywhere I want to block stuff.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Agreed, I also use both. NextDNS/PiHole are great because you can configure them as the root DNS providers at the router level and give everyone in your household and guests on WiFi a painless ad-free experience while layering uBlock on top for the sneakier ads like Youtube. The only downside is email unsubscribe links. Those annoyingly tend to be on domains blocked by the various block lists NextDNS uses.

aryonoco 3y ago

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you get the idea. Who would pay for search, right!? I signed up for the free trial, fully expecting to walk away. But have you noticed how the quality of Google has steadily deteriorated over the last decade or so? How it now just surfaces ad filled garbage, listicles, and regurgitated content, ad nauseam? I'm sure it's not just me who prefers what Google used to show around 2011. Kagi is like the Google of 2011. Except, better. You can combine a bunch of domains you think are related and create a "lens" to just search them. It comes with a bunch of pre-built lenses, so you can search for academic results, or forum posts or pdfs. You can tell Kagi if a website is good or not, and it will then tailor your results according to your preferences. It kind of feels like what Google could have been, if the brilliant minds employed there weren't just tasked with chasing billions more in ad revenue every quarter. Honestly, its results are better than Google's. Forget the lack of ads and them not tracking you and not selling your data (from which Google Search apparently makes on average $300 USD every year from every user). Just purely based on the search results, Kagi is better. I've recently converted my plan to a "Duo" plan, and the SO, who doesn't over care about privacy and ads and stuff, also likes it. #win

M4v3R 3y ago
I was exactly the same. I tried various search engines but always reverted back to Google after a while. I think I stuck with DDG for the longest time but it wasn't enough to win me. And somehow Kagi managed to do it and now I'm a very happy paying customer of theirs.
jcul 3y ago
Yes, also the same experience. Who would pay for search right? I signed up for the $10 plan, before they introduced unlimited searches. One month I went over and thought ok, I'm not really ok with making more than 10. A few weeks later they switched to unlimited. The lens feature is great. I have one for searching my company's public documentation etc. The redirect thing is great too, it can rewrite URLs on the fly, e.g. Reddit -> old.reddit. I have used other search engines in the past, like ddg for a long period, and others. I always ended up just doing !g on every search. Kagi is the first where I don't notice I'm using another search engine and actually if I'm on Google I notice my experience is worse! Great to see updates like this, in the months I've been using it it has improved so much already.

spiffotron 3y ago

As a UK user I find Kagi returns results from Australia far too often which is a super weird issue DDG used to have as well

robga 3y ago
I'm a UK Kagi user and do not have this issue. Perhaps it is your IP range? Do you have the same problem on mobile and broadband?
- spiffotron 3y ago
  It happened at both work and home - my region was always set to United Kingdom and it would still decide I want localised Australian results sometimes. It may have been fixed since I last used it of course - I just didn't find the results provided by Kagi any better than DDG to keep paying.
aryonoco 3y ago
We're coming to take over mate. It's the start of the reverse colony

RockRobotRock 3y ago

Is DuckDuckGo more neutral on doing things like this that help the user but might piss off publishers?

timvdalen 3y ago

I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and search results definitely feel much more useful than Google. Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though (think stuff like "sunrise", timezone conversion, currency conversion, etc).

Sebb767 3y ago
> Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though That's true. The seem to especially be confused with `,` and `.` in fractional numbers; sometimes it recognizes `,` , sometimes it doesn't, but it does use `,` in the results. This leads to the fun result that you can't use the output it gave you as input in a new calculation. But that's a minor issue and otherwise I'm also a happy paying user.

NewsGotHacked 3y ago

I bought a year of kagi and overly very satisfied. 2 things that annoy me about it: -I randomly get irrelevant international results as a US person (Amazon Canada and Amazon India for instance) -There are inconsistently labeled timestamps on things. I use reddit a lot when reviewing search results. Sometimes the reddit links are timestamped and sometimes they aren't. Leads to end up clicking on a reddit link that is 6 or 8 years old and no longer revelant. Other than that is works really well!

russelg 3y ago
You could try work around the Amazon issue by lowering the non US ones and raising the US one
salad-tycoon 3y ago
Reddit time stamps has always been a problem for me in all the other search engines, not for you? I’ve also noticed Bing is now surfacing tons of Reddit results on just about every search but without me typing Reddit. I’m guessing my use of bing chat or something similarly creepy.
msowers77 3y ago
Pretty sure reddit results not being timestamped is reddit itself not giving the timestamp. I have noticed it for a while on multiple search pages.

Beijinger 3y ago

[flagged]

Sebb767 3y ago
I think you might have responded to the wrong thread :-)
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  The intended thread might have been https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562939

mertbio 3y ago

Would be nice to open those paywalled articles with archive.ph.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Kagi supports regex-based redirects, so you could redirect paywalled domains to a paywall bypass website.
- teroshan 3y ago
  That's exactly what I configured right after reading this news, here's a rule I came up with: (https?://www\.nytimes\.com\/\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}.*)|https://archive.is/newest/$1 https://archive.is/newest/$1 Unfortunately, I quickly encountered the "Too Many Requests" error while testing. Maybe I should configure an nginx rule to distribute requests along my multiple VPSes to mitigate this...

gregdoesit 3y ago

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for about 2 months now. I love it, and feel so far that it's well worth the $108 per year: just by not having to spend mental energy to scroll through the first several sponsored results; and try and decide if a result is paid or not. I set Kagi to be my default search in my browser (Chrome). For specific searches like stocks, maps or restaurant reviews, I still use the "!g" bang to go to Google. Never thought I'd pay for search: but very happy with my choice so far. Great to see others agree on this page - as I hope they can maintain this as a viable business, and stick to the principles of users being their customers: and not advertisers. Feels like a breath of fresh air tbh.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
llamaInSouth 3y ago
I'm surprised how many people here don't use an ad blocker...
- xigoi 3y ago
  An ad blocker can only block sponsored results if they’re marked as sponsored.
  - llamaInSouth 3y ago
    are those impossible to block?

nixass 3y ago

Are search results on Kagi regionalized? For example do I MUST have region set or they give me best of the best results based on my query? Google is annoying with region specific results in any of their services

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
By default I get international results, and I can switch with a dropdown list where my country is at the top.
SushiHippie 3y ago
The have an "international" region setting, which is from my experience the best option. Unless you want regionalized results.

sph 3y ago

Thanks Kagi, love these status updates. Vlad, I know you often read these comments, so here's a suggestion: I would love a way for Kagi to respect my search query and not try to interpret or assume anything is a typo. "Verbatim" feels just too strict (I think the order of the words is important as well, doesn't return more than 2 or 3 links), where the default is too loose. Sadly, I don't have any examples to share, but it feels that as Kagi improves, it becomes more and more Google-like, as in trying to be smart instead of following my orders. I grew up when search engines searched for keywords, and were not trying to be smart. If I search for—foo bar baz—I want to be shown all pages that contain the three words as I have spelled them. Not presenting any combination of the three as valid. Search engines trying to be smart make the web feel so small, because all the niche variations and topics are just so hard to search for, and it is the reason I stopped using Google in the first place. Anyway, I am a happy paying user, and love the product :)

andrewaylett 3y ago
If you quote each word, you get closer to what you're looking for but without quite the degree of specificity that you'd get from quoting the entire query?

dwilding 3y ago

Does anyone use Kagi for Kids? The Starter level at $5/mo is enough for me so far, so $20/mo for Family is quite a jump. Would love to know whether Kagi for Kids is worth paying for

strogonoff 3y ago

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting more investment which never comes without strings attached, or just selling the business. The best possible, most honest and sustainable option would be usage-based billing, but it appears that Kagi have decided against that route. I’m a moderately happy customer and would hands down recommend Kagi, but personally wouldn’t use it by default as the inevitable cost of changing my habit again in future puts me off.

gostsamo 3y ago
Just drop them when they fail/become bad. No reason to miss now for some future eventuality which does not affect the present.
- sph 3y ago
  Yeah it's a philosophy I've started to adopt. Better to get in when the product is new and there is hype, to enjoy fast-paced improvements from a new competitor that just wants to create a cool product, than to come in later when the hype has died down, the original founders have exited and the enshittification starts. We all know the hype cycle of programming languages. Hype, disillusion then plateau of productivity. It's not the same with startups: there is only hype, peak, followed a long descent to the mean and death. The hipsters were right.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  Not sure if that letdown will trump whatever minor time savings I have accrued while it was good, though. To make it worse, first make it better, then make it back as before. It’s the same reason I choose not to make use of insane promotions that ride app space newcomers tend to provide. I could use Bolt DeLuxe (or whatever is the new hotness in town) for a couple months, but the anticipation of how I will soon suffer as it becomes more and more of a ripoff with incompetent drivers and absent customer support, and how I’ll waste willpower on changing my habit again, makes me wonder if it’s really worth it. Instead I could in meantime exercise my taxi hailing skills (in this analogy, practice crafting queries and otherwise working around the limitations of worse search engines).

alien_cat 3y ago

Perhaps this is not meant for me. I use gpt-4-turbo frequently, which costs only $5 per month. For the same price, if I were to purchase from Kagi, I would need to limit my quota, like using a different search engine for unit conversion or obtaining a simple Raspi pinout. Why design a product that encourages users to use it less? In my opinion, a $5 with limited searches doesn't justify the cost.

krageon 3y ago
openai doesn't respect your privacy at all
xigoi 3y ago
GPT is not a search engine, so why would you even compare it to Kagi?

puttycat 3y ago

Kagi is currently great. Can someone explain what makes it more resilient to AI-generated garbage than Google? (If at all)

tyingq 3y ago
Of course, I can't prove it, but the search results on Google look like they tried to win the spam wars with some variation of page rank that's skewed by "big brand power". Like they have some seed list of trusted brands, and graph proximity to that boosts your site over the pure spam. That, of course, penalizes genuinely good content that has no such proximity. Kagi's various posts about their algorithm consistently talk about the value of "non-commercial content" and indexes to make sure they don't get lost. Like this post: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.htm... Which sort of sounds like the same idea, but with more time and attention to curating a better list.
q0uaur 3y ago
I imagine the reason we get all the AI garbage is ads. kagi downranks sites that contain a lot of ads, while google, who obviously gets their income from ads, pushes them. that alone is bound to make a massive difference. there's more, of course. but it's plenty for me to decide that i have no problem paying my $10 a month to not get 8/10 results that are ads.
hobofan 3y ago
I think at some point in the past Google shifted it's stance of SEO from "if you do SEO you are cleary trying to game the system and will be punished" to "we are generally okay with SEO as that easens the burden of trying to guess content, and will only rarely punish it". One instance that seemed like a turning point there was their reversal on the search penalty of genius.com after they were found gaming the system, something that I think was enforced much harder in the past. So I think with embracing SEO spam to some degree (in combination with generally tailoring the behaviour of the search results more towards "consumption"), they must have lost parts of the resiliency. In contrast Kagi seems to be very alergic to SEO spam (AI generated or not), sometimes even too much.
3y ago

SSLy 3y ago

How is it for searches not in English?

oriettaxx 3y ago
Do you mean writing non English search text, or for results not written in English?
- SSLy 3y ago
  Both? When I want to look up something in my native language.
  - Toutouxc 3y ago
    10M people European country here, no issues. I get good results in the native language for "restaurants in [random 15K people town]", "[random local food] recipes", info about taxes from gov websites, recent local events, my own name (high school's website), my mom's name (her business website), random hobby forums.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      I think the question is about the paywall indicator, not about Kagi search in general. I tried some searches in three different languages, and mostly Kagi didn't identify non-english paid webpages. It could only identify one (which wasn't paywalled at all).
      - Toutouxc 3y ago
        Oh, that makes sense. I assumed there was a hardcoded list of possible paywalls and how to recognize them, but I guess there could also be some kind of heuristic that might not work for different languages.

tjpnz 3y ago

Unrelated: tried logging in with my Google account (yes, I know it's considered bad practice) and got an error on Google's side that Kagi is blocked.

_aaed 3y ago
Worked fine for me
freediver 3y ago
Would you be able to post this as a bug report on kagifeedback.org with more details/screenshot as we are not able to reproduce it?

Uninen 3y ago

I've been using Kagi for a while now and I love it. My only gripe is the usability on iOS as it keeps logging me off every now and then (it feels like more often than many other sites) which then results in a login screen when you're trying to search something and after the re-login the query you already wrote once is now lost.

q0uaur 3y ago
not sure if it's possible to set up on iOS, but in settings -> account they offer a "Session Link" that contains a token that will log you in automatically. if you can set that link as your default search you shouldn't have that issue any more. I use it in private browsing mode so i can still use the nice search without having to log in every time.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  IIIUC custom search engines on iOS are a hack and they just have an extension which captures your google queries and redirects them to Kagi. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... They recommend their own Orion browser which is the only browser on iOS that uses a webkit fork, which can install browser extensions intended for chrome and firefox

salad-tycoon 3y ago

I like Kagi , I do. I like the ranking, I like how I can search for controversial people and not have my intended search target censored by obfuscation. Kagi just gives me the data. That’s great! I pay the 5 a month but I run out mid month which makes me not use it and breaks the habit and worry. I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month. I guess I’m a heavy user, one day supposedly I had >30 searches (that I don’t recall). I want to pay but not that much. So I just learn to live with an inferior product. So now I’m stuck between wanting to pay more and wanting to outright cancel. Although sometimes reading HN news updates feels a bit weird/ad like (watch how negative downvotes get greyed out) I enjoy seeing them work on it and wish them the most success. Ps I do appreciate their ios and mac apps that help with safari. Sadly I think all the spotlight, look up, and Siri searches still get processed out of kagis world. Obviously, not in their control. Good luck Kagi.

q0uaur 3y ago
I really hope they keep lowering the unlimited searches price. I'm pretty sure I use way less resources than my $10 pays for, but I just wanted it for the peace of mind - if enough people like me subscribe, they'll probably be able to lower it even more. alternatively, I don't know how deeply embedded the LLM stuff is in kagi, but I really do not need that, so maybe a plan without that, since that is the stuff that requires a lot of expensive compute.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  As mentioned in another comment, a plan without the LLM stuff wouldn't really lower the price, as search is the most costly thing they have, the LLM features are dirt cheap compared to searching. (>2ct per query)
carlosjobim 3y ago
> I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month. Just because Proton is a great deal doesn't make Kagi a worse deal. This kind of logic never made sense to me. The products have nothing in common, so why the comparison? Then, also think about why you're worrying about spending $10 per month on a product that you think is great? Is that an amount of money that has any impact on your current life situation? I think a lot of people can't break the habit that everything on a computer has to be free.

theusus 3y ago

Kagi still uses Claude 2.0 any ETA on 2.1? Also, the expert command returns mostly wrong answers and loses all of the previous context.

SushiHippie 3y ago
They already use claude 2.1 in the assistant, source: vlad (kagi founder) wrote this on the 22th November on discord.

xenator 3y ago

We need this paywall indicator badly here on HN.

throwbmw 3y ago

Kagi is mind blowingly good. It's almost unbelievable first time you use it. Like you forgot that there could be good, interesting and relevant stuff on first page of results.. I am mad at myself for not trying it earlier.

thiht 3y ago

I tried Kagi for a few months this year, and while the overall flavor experience was pretty good, it was not quite there yet for me in terms of result quality. I strongly believe in them and will absolutely try it again in 2024 though, the improvements they make are impressive and I actually miss some features (domain ranking and blacklisting is so great!). Can’t wait to see how the quality of results has evolved.

nvarsj 3y ago

I really like Kagi. The only thing bugging me is there is occasional delays when searching, at least from the UK. Google's instant search definitely has spoiled me there.

freediver 3y ago
Reporting these when they happen to kagifeedback.org will go a long way (screenshot of page with inspector in browser open). We do not run any client side telemetry so we can not be proactive about this - need reports from users!
cianmm 3y ago
I remember trialing it a while back and gave up pretty fast due to the consistent very long delays when searching from Ireland.
- nvarsj 3y ago
  Yeah, I wonder if it's optimized for US only right now. If the Kagi team is listening, please fix for world wide :). It's not always bad, but P95 needs work.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Here is a map where they've deployed: https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-11-16/1700178524-889329-image.png https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-11-16/1700178524-... Source: https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog

nalekberov 3y ago

I am still not convinced that I should trust Kagi. Why should I use my email address to log into the system? They say that it's for them to know how much credit you have left. Mullvad does generate a unique number for you, which you can use indefinitely.

freeAgent 3y ago
You can create an account with an aliased/unique email address.
carlosjobim 3y ago
If you don't trust something, you should follow your gut instinct. Do you think something or somebody becomes more trustable if the repeat "Trust me, bro" to you? You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?", especially on a message board full of strangers. An dishonest person will repeat a thousand times that you can trust them, while an honest person probably will take offense.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?" They didn't ask that. They said "Why should I use an email address to log into the system?" (rhetorical) and then gave an example of a service that also needs to verify the user has paid for the service (VPN), but does so without requiring accounts/in a more privacy-preserving way (Mullvad).
- unaindz 3y ago
  But he didn't asked just for a "Trust me, bro". He is asking about why they don't use mullvad which can replace email id. It only seams beneficial to allow that if you promote your service as privacy focused.

privacyking 3y ago

Do they accept monero yet?

maxehmookau 3y ago

Kagi is great but even though it knows my location is the UK, by default is skews to US-located results. I can fix it by suffixing every query with "UK", but its a pain. That said, I'm a paying customer and will continue to be.

freediver 3y ago
We'd appreciate if you posted an example or two to kagifeedback.org so we can take a deper look. These things are mostly fixable.

pelagicAustral 3y ago

I paid for a sub a few months back. It was good, but the volume of my searches is offensive, it was unrealistic to think that I was ever going to stick to the product. Just like someone else posted, I'm trying to cut down on subs at the moment, and this product, as amazing as it is, it's just not beating free google with dorks + ChatGPT.

rplnt 3y ago

How's your experience with non-english searches? Google has become unusable to search in a foreign language if you do not happen to be in a given country. It's trying to be too smart. It's ignoring double quotes, tld restriction still searches for the sites in a language of the country I'm in, etc... it's really frustrating at times. Not to mention Google can't search anything old anymore. It's either news or spam. Or irrelevant "autocorrect". And it used to be so great with a little bit of effort. 10+ years ago that is.

maelito 3y ago
Kagi is quite good for French.
sirn 3y ago
Kagi has been pretty good for me for Thai and Japanese results. I've had countless occasion Google's result is much worse than Kagi, as far as returning actual useful results is concerned. For example, searching for a product in Japanese, Kagi may find fewer results, but Google shows a page full of affiliate spam, which is not really useful. The only occasion where I found Google remotely useful is for image search and map search.

colesantiago 3y ago

"Sign Up to use Kagi" Why does one need to signup to use a "privacy" based search engine like Kagi if it needs my email and password? Can't it just accept a username like HN and be done with it? I'm trying to use a fake email, tor and a VPN and I'm running into errors, eventually I gave up.

daveoc64 3y ago
It's a paid service, so you need to authenticate to use it. You're a paying customer, not the product.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  100% anonymous is possible. I would love my [very, very anonymous] Mullvad account to be matched by kagi. As it is, my options are worse - but free.
- colesantiago 3y ago
  Mullvad is able to do this without passwords and emails AND it is a paid product that is privacy based. I don't see why Kagi can't do the same.
  - drewbitt 3y ago
    And it has huge problems with reselling accounts, attacks to randomly guess the username which gives full access to the account, they had to disable port forwarding due to abuse via anonymity, and they enforce a device limit per account due to the above. It does work for them, but at a cost. Kagi is "a company created with the mission to humanize the web. Our goal is to amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity, and self-expression." Their goal is a search engine above all. Mullvad's tagline right now is "A free and open society is a society where people have the right to privacy." Their goal is privacy exclusively in a VPN.
    - colesantiago 3y ago
      > And it has huge problems with reselling accounts, attacks to randomly guess the username which gives full access to the account, they had to disable port forwarding due to abuse via anonymity, and they enforce a device limit per account due to the above. It does work for them, but at a cost. Paying for a random generated ephemeral account would be even better for Kagi but as far as I see it now, it's a privacy nightmare. I recommend Kagi to follow the model what Mullvad has done for making a product privacy preserving while still being able to make money.

nlnn 3y ago

I'm also a very happy Kagi customer, the price is worth being able to ditch yet another Google product for me (being able to completely block Pinterest/Medium and other annoying domains is great). The only thing I still occasionally use Google search for is the Shopping tab, which I find handy for filtering results to product listings (though if anyone's got any tips for this in Kagi, happy to hear!).

daveoc64 3y ago

I have been using Kagi for a few months now and generally enjoy it, but I do think it's biased towards returning results from sites in the US, despite having "United Kingdom" selected in the search criteria. I think Google UK handled this better.

civilitty 3y ago

Kagi search is great and totally worth the $10/mo (I pay for Ultimate to get access to the assistant features but I'm not yet sure if they're worth it, though I'm happy to support the company). Custom bangs alone are worth the price: I have them set up for LibGen, all my torrent sites, archive.ph, and their summarizer (which I recently discovered is !sum by default, no need for a custom bang). But my favorite is a custom bang that points back at localhost (via Tailscale hostname so its available on mobile too) running a custom terminal emulator web app. Just using the bang alone opens a new terminal tab in the browser but when using it in combination with a URL allows writing commands like "curl [...url...] | ~/scripts/crawl.sh"

michaelmcdonald 3y ago
Would you share a bit more about how you have your custom bangs setup? I'm always curious to see the life hacks people implement that speed up workflow processes.

jimmyblanco 3y ago

Kagi is really nice but the limit of searches for the $5 is far too low

goplayoutside 3y ago

Another happy "Early Adopter"-flag Kagi customer here. The search results are, ime, superior to Google, and it's great to be able to remove one more Google product from my life. The quality of the reviews sites that come up for product searches is night vs day. The bang support is awesome (I use "I'm feeling lucky" daily) and I've been using the Universal Summarizer[0] more often lately. Customized promotion & demotion/blocking of domains is seamless and surfaces the content I'm trying to find. Looking at using FastGPT[1] and Kagi Small Web[2] more. I wish they'd get their forum off of Discord and onto something open and indexable! 0. https://kagi.com/summarizer https://kagi.com/summarizer 1. https://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt 2. https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb

hprotagonist 3y ago

Kagi’s ability to acquire name recognition among tech-centric people is not only what convinced me to pay for it - it was one of two or three fairly simultaneous things that made me reconsider the magnitude of the financial stake i have had in $GOOG since 2005. It’s less than it was a month ago.

deleted 3y ago

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seanthemon 3y ago

I had huge issues with Kagi because I don't just use google for research, but to find local things like finding a coffee shop in a location or using reviews to see what's going on, or some product I need to buy in my country - 70% of my searches fall in that category and I generally use AI or some light research for programming topics. Although the google results are poorer, the facility offering is far superior and I found I was switching between Kagi and Google too often. I think it's great for research, but not so great for researching day-to-day things you use in real life outside of the computer.

acedTrex 3y ago

Did google oauth block kagi? It wont allow me to sign up with google because "kagi has not completed the signup process"

karmakaze 3y ago

I don't want to pay for a search service and have 'range anxiety' and self-regulate my usage like I'm driving a 50km EV. Search is ubiquitous, make a flat rate subscription for normal people and a TOS that excludes non-human abuses. I don't pay for a per call mobile phone plan and I make way more searches.

oktoberpaard 3y ago
The Pro plan is unlimited, though. It used to be capped until earlier this year.
yoru-sulfur 3y ago
The limit has been removed from most paid plans since September https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10 https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10 > We’re thrilled to announce that unlimited search is now included in our $10/month Professional plan and our Ultimate, Family, and Duo plans.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  That's reasonable, and good timing as it could start breaking into the mainstream. A discount pairing with Firefox might be good for sales/marketing.

maelito 3y ago

Funny to see the revival of the dog search engine, after Lycos.

maelito 3y ago

According to SimilarWeb, Kagi.com has ~1 million visits per month. Very niche, for now.

freediver 3y ago
That is off by at least an order of magnitude since we have 350k searches/day [1] But anyway, we like niche, niche is good, allows focus. [1] https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats

dzonga 3y ago

I think i'm tired --- initially read that as particle accelerator and improved widget. then started to wonder what particle accelerators have to do with browsers.

kkoyung 3y ago

I have been using Kagi as my default search engine for a month now. It really provides better search experience than google. Nowadays, Google Search is flooded by SEO. When you search things on Google, you will likely get tons of listicles titled "Top <keyword> 2023", "<keyword1> vs <keyword2> comparison", which barely contains some useful contents. Sometimes, you will even see some AI-generated gibberish articles repeating some basic information about your keywords. It becomes much harder to find useful contents from google than the old days. Kagi search results have fewer nonsense articles. They groups those listicles together so that you can easily skip them. The feature I like the most is Personalized Results, which allows you to pin/raise/lower/block results from certain domains. For example, I pin wikipedia.org, and block quora.com.

beej71 3y ago

I've been a paying Kagi customer for maybe 6 months now. It's such a breath of fresh air to be the customer again. Haven't used !g a single time.

ndom91 3y ago

Man I really like this, but I'm having trouble convincing myself that $10/month for unlimited searches is worth it.. I guess thats what ~20 years of using Google and other free search engines will do to you haha I would jump on a $5/month unlimited queries plan though. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that bucket

freediver 3y ago
Maybe this helps (a bit) to convince you: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html

drewbitt 3y ago

I have been using Kagi for the past 9 months. I can't wait until they can fully replace Google for me, but I have a few problems with it. 1. Some niche domains are entirely not crawled by Kagi. Obviously, Google crawls a ton more and while Kagi can get 90% of what I need, I must fall back to Google occasionally. 2. Searching for restaurants or maps is poor. I didn't realize how much I relied on Google reviews for businesses until I switched to Kagi. Plus, the built in "order" buttons, photos, menu tab etc. are all missing. At least Kagi has a button to launch Google Maps, but I'd like more in Kagi itself. 3. I get results from other countries for Amazon and other web shopping sites even though my region is United States. I can't make them lower priority unless it's in the subdomain. I use Kagi for search but have to fall back to Google 3-4 times a day at least.

flexagoon 3y ago
> Obviously, Google crawls a ton more I'm not sure how this is possible, Kagi uses Google's results https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... Perhaps those sites are just getting downranked by Kagi's algorithms
- drewbitt 3y ago
  Interesting. I'll go deeper next time. Often I give up if it's not on the first page like I expect.
carlosjobim 3y ago
>2 No other search engine will be able to compete with Google in the short or medium term on business reviews and opening hours, because the business owners send their information and opening hours themselves to Google, and they have billions of Google Maps users to write reviews. There's nothing Kagi can do to compete, at best they should start purchasing this stuff from Google and integrate it. Or we as users have to learn to open Kagi for web searches and Google Maps for local business searches. That's the easiest way.

martin82 3y ago

I think during the last three months or so, I only used the !g flag four or five times. It seems as if Kagi has indeed become a truly viable alternative to Google. Whenever I do use the !g flag, the results over at Google are just awful, sometimes I have to scroll 1.5 screens just to get past the ads. Imagine running a search engine and not delivering meaningful results above the fold. Google is a zombie company now.