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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoYes, 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.
- lovich 3y agoReddit to old.Reddit as a feature is enough to make me look into this as a replacement search engine. My search experience for specific information that’s kept on subreddits has been hell since they introduced new Reddit. If it can automate for me navigating to Reddit, then modifying the url to old.Reddit, and hopefully not accidentally clicking on the page and needing to reverse back or get redirected based on the content, then that’s probably worth 10 dollars a month already
- aryonoco 3y agoThere are also browser extensions which can do that redirect, but of course the story of browser extensions on mobile OSes is quite sad, and I'm sure Reddit will get rid of the old UI of these days anyway
- carlosjobim 3y agoYou can also make an empty reddit account and switch to old reddit style in settings.
- Grimburger 3y ago>the story of browser extensions... In general is that you can't ever trust them apart from a few very large ones. A redirect extension is ripe for the usual blackmarket shenanigans.
- civilitty 3y agoThey’re simple enough that you can fork an open source extension and review the source with relative ease, freezing it. I have my own omni extension made up of copy pasted open source extensions. I normally wouldn’t go through the effort but web browsing is crucial and frequent enough to be worth it and it took less than a weekend to get it up and running, especially with Plasmo. It’s also another reason to prefer Firefox and MV2
- 3y ago
- hovering_nox 3y agoI feel like people are sleeping on Kagi FastGPT, its their amazing search combined with their summariser and a llm model that gives me the answers directly without having to search myself. https://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt
- fermiNitambh 3y agoI swear! Kagi FastGPT gives you references too!
- oriettaxx 3y agototally agree!
- goplayoutside 3y agoSame for the Kagi Universal Summarizer: https://kagi.com/summarizer https://kagi.com/summarizer
- byyll 3y agoI asked what's 2 + 2 and it said 4, giving a reference to a YouTube video saying it's a billion.
- llamaInSouth 3y agoFor me, Google search started declining dramatically in quality when they took away the Plus Operator ... which was probably around that time You would think a mega company would think more long term then that
- jve 3y ago"doublequote" word to make it required.
- gandalfgreybeer 3y agoEven this isn’t reliable anymore. I had a double quote word that was being spellchecked. Even the ‘-‘ operator would still include words i explicitly avoid. This isn’t all the time but it happens frequently enough to be annoying.
- llamaInSouth 3y agonot only that it isnt the same and it sucks more, it is harder to type for me
- chrisandchris 3y agoSimilar here. I didn't know Kagi until, as I remember, there was an article here on HN. I thought too why should I pay for search? Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results - now Pinterest, Stackshare and all those AI-generated content filler sites are gone from my search results. Search results are great and it's just worth it. The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is location-aware search. For certain keywords (like "gym") it feels like Google better looks for results that are within your area, whereas Kagi needs some more input (like a city/district name).
- mgaunard 3y agoThat's actually something I dislike, I don't want my results to be different based on where I am.
- pietrrrek 3y agoThe results that you get in Google also depend on your location
- yonatan8070 3y agoYeah I agree on that one, if I wanted results specific to where I physically am I'd append the city/country name to my search. Example where this annoys me with Google: if I search for "gdb", the first result is a local burger place named GDB, and not the GNU Debugger
- 3y ago
- vachina 3y agoDitto. Got to know Kagi via HN and found myself needing to use Kagi more often. Google search feels more like shopping search nowadays.
- widenrun 3y agoExactly, it reminds me of this: "Drift to low performance is a gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance." -- From the book "Thinking in Systems".
- sph 3y agoA very fancy way of saying that the best way to boil a frog is to heat it slowly.
- hprotagonist 3y agountil they jump out.
- tetris11 3y agoif they can
- mderazon 3y agoFor me, Chatgpt / Bard and similar (Perplexity) has replaced 85 percent of Google searches so I feel Kagi will be a step backwards in this regard Perhaps better than Google, but the whole paradigm shifted
- civilitty 3y agoKagi has FastGPT and the AI assistant mode (available via several bangs like !fast, !expert, and !code). Though the latter is beta and only available to Ultimate subscribers
- iainmerrick 3y agoOne thing I like about Kagi's FastGPT is that it always includes citations in the output. This emphasises that I'm still doing a search, just with a fancier interface, not consulting an all-knowing oracle. When I ask an AI tricky questions, the responses usually point me in the right direction without fully solving the problem, so those citation links are really useful. With Bard in particular, I find it often gives a confident but incorrect answer. When I point this out, it apologises then gives another incorrect answer, and so on.
- louthy 3y agohttps://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt
- huggingmouth 3y agoI desperately wish I could use kagi but tying my identity to my searches is an automatic nogo. Is kagi interested in offering a Mulvad-grade option where everything is in ram and NO data is tied to my account? Kagi, if you're listening. Please.
- carlosjobim 3y agoUse a burner credit card?
- huggingmouth 3y agoDon't have'em in my country unfortunately.
- carlosjobim 3y agoPay with Bitcoin?
- anderber 3y agoCan you pay for Kagi with bitcoin?
- carlosjobim 3y agoYes, as of August 2023: https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
- dalore 3y agoThey don't keep and tie your searches to your account. There is an option to enable history but it's disabled and doesn't let you enable it, but there is a message saying that they might add features that use this but since there is no feature currently you can't enable it.
- freediver 3y ago
- lhnz 3y agoI'm also a happy Kagi user. There are only two reasons I still visit Google: 1. I'm based in the UK and often it shows me shops based in the US high up within my search results. 2. Sometimes I specifically like to visit Google Shopping to find the lowest prices online for an item I'm trying to buy. Once Kagi has improved these two areas I'll have no reason at all to ever visit Google (other than Google Maps or Google Translate).
- devin 3y agoI recommend DeepL for translation. Google Translate hasn’t really improved out the years and I find the DeepL translations superior.
- jorams 3y agoNote that you can also search for something like "translate some sentence to french" in Kagi and get a translation widget, which I think is powered by DeepL. It doesn't show alternatives, but it's pretty nice.
- devin 3y agoThanks, I didn't know that. I'm a big fan of Kagi and it turns out I don't use half of the cool stuff I'm paying for.
- agotterer 3y agoNumber 1 is the main reason I haven’t made the switch yet. Google local search results are something I care about and use frequently. If Kagi solves local search, I’ll switch completely over to them.
- beej71 3y agoMaybe this means something other than what I'm thinking, but if I search for "pub" on Kagi, I get a list of pubs near me. And if I click on the link, it brings up a map with pins on the pubs in my town.
- dwighttk 3y agoSounds nice… I just don’t use search enough to want to pay. Perhaps that is because it is not so great though.
- JohnFen 3y agoKagi has a reasonably generous free tier. If you don't use search heavily, that's for you. If you do use search heavily, it lets you "try before you buy".
- plutokras 3y agoI tried out Kagi, but then I asked myself: “why pay for it if it's only marginally better than Google?”. Then I realized Kagi has won. The sentiment about non-Google search engines used to be something like “XY is slightly worse than Google, but it respects your privacy, why not use it instead”?. The trade-off is no more. So I am customer since then. Love the domain ranking system. I hope they will continue to focus on their core product and don't branch out to do something else.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoI tried a lot of search engines and the one that didn't irritate me with out of place results was swisscows.