14 ms·

Kagi – Sourcing from Brave Search, improved image search, and new Safari ext

80 points by mroche 3y ago

terhechte 3y ago
I switched to the Kagi paid search 2 months ago and I'm very happy with it. Of course, Google is free, but "search" is a product that is critical to my job and I use it countless times per day. As such it felt reasonable to me to pay for a better search experience. That's in line with me spending extra for my computer, monitor, keyboard, etc. Because they're my tools of trade and I use them 8+ hours a day. I can recommend giving Kagi a try if you're in a similar position as me.
- corytheboyd 3y ago
  Also started using it a few months ago, and it’s so good that I forget it’s there most of the time. It’s fast, accurate, clutter free, and gets out of your way. More than happy to pay for this experience, because I want it to stick around forever.
- Fabricio20 3y ago
  This might come off weird but I can't help but comment on how markety/"I need to justify myself" your comment looked to me at first. You started off very normal "I switched ... and i'm very happy with it." But then there's almost an entire paragraph of "yes it makes sense, yes I made the right decision, it's just like spending on other things, etc..", up until the very end where you come back to "give it a try if you are in a similar position". Not trying to offend or anything and happy that it works out well for you! Just struck me weird when I first read it.
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything. I also pay for Kagi. I'm not sure it is justified - it's not that cheap. They're pretty open about their costs though, and I think that demonstrates how much advertising is paying for other services. So I'm happy to pay for now just because I really dislike adverts.
    - mattrick 3y ago
      I agree with this. The only real advantage to Kagi over just using Google + Adblock for me is an easy way to just completely block certain sites from ever appearing in searches. It's probably not worth $10 a month but I pay for it because SEO spam sites bother me on a personal level.
      - beej71 3y ago
        I don't know how true this is, but I really like the concept of a customer-driven search engine versus an ad-driven one. The incentives are better aligned, and it frees Kagi up to really try to kick ass at search instead of kicking ass at ad revenue. I'm enjoying the features they've been adding, and an looking forward to more. Besides, what else was I going to do with that YouTube Premium money? ;)
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      > luxury item/service The price for Kagi is not really in the class of "luxury" at $10 per month. It's peanuts really. In exchange you have the best search engine in the world. If you could upgrade an economy flight ticket to first class for $10, that would be a bargain. If you could buy the best bottle of wine in the world for just $10 more than your average bottle of wine, that would be a bargain. Kagi is the best search engine in the world, that's why I pay for it.
      - jemmyw 3y ago
        Luxury is a loaded term, I probably should have used something less vague. The examples you gave are still luxuries even if they're only $10 more than the basic version - the cheaper plane ticket still gets you there, the cheaper wine... I'm not really into wine, expensive wine doesn't taste especially different to me... still gets you drunk? Google still returns search results. You have to crawl through ads or search in different ways, but your result is still going to be in there. So if Kagi is a price and has extra comfort, it's a luxury.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    Every Kagi post is filled with comments like these and I've been wondering for a while whether it's organic or not. I'm inclined to think it's organic but the early adopters of Kagi are the type of people to write comments that sound like astroturfing, mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service. Or to put it another way: I'd place more trust in a review from someone who received a lifetime of free Kagi access than I would in one from somebody who just started paying for it.
    - dhc02 3y ago
      I've been paying for about a year. Every time I'm reminded how much I'm paying, I think it sounds like too much. But every time I sit at a new computer or accidentally use the default Google search on my phone's home screen, I think, "Crap, this is terrible. I'm glad I am paying for Kagi."
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Or they just provide a really good service in the environment of ad-driven internet crap. I'm paying for it for the same reason as I pay for zerotier and give bcachefs donations - voting with my wallet for my environment to be a bit more like I wish it looked. And I'm happy to tell people about those things as long as they are better than alternatives.
    - beej71 3y ago
      Thing is, though, it's free to try it for yourself and see if it's worth it to you. I don't know that astroturfing is necessary or useful.
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      > mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service I find this take quite odd. If you're paying for a service you're unhappy with, you stop. What's the element that's holding users in a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario?
- rspoerri 3y ago
  kagi is the first search engine i dont regularely fall back to google when i get bad search results. because googles good results are usually none the better. In google i get more results however most of the added results are spam or duplicates.
- ubutler 3y ago
  For me, the ability to create custom bangs is worth it alone. I probably have close to a hundred bangs now and even created a bang to edit my bangs. I’m sure there are extensions that can replicate this behaviour but Kagi works on any device without any prior setup. My ‘site:reddit.com’ (!r) bang has to be my favourite, although I have found myself needing it less with Kagi since I’m already able to preference Reddit in search results.
  - rhabarba 3y ago
    DuckDuckGo can do that for free though.
    - gkbrk 3y ago
      Where is the place to add personal bangs to DuckDuckGo? I can't find it in https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs or https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings.
      - rhabarba 3y ago
        AFAIR you can use and submit custom bangs. That said, they're curated, I think. See: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
account-5 3y ago
I recently started paying for email service and it's been somewhat of a revelation to me. I started after getting sick of the constant attempts by the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al, trying to force more and more details from me. The point I'm making is I can now see the benefit of not being the product. Why would I pay for search?
- hellcow 3y ago
  Because it's far better than Google. I'd encourage you to try it.
- dharmab 3y ago
  Kagi's killer feature is that you can create personalized rankings for search results. In my results, I: - Pin official documentation sources to the top of results - Raise consistently good sources - Lower poorer quality sources - Block sources that I find spammy entirely, like Pinterest, or the many sites that copy StackOverflow/GitHub content. Within a couple of days of tuning these I was getting much better results from Kagi than Google. You can see how people are using this feature at https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
  - account-5 3y ago
    I think my main worry would be price increases, it's a worry I have with the email service. 300 a year is fairly steep too.
    - dharmab 3y ago
      300? It's $54 a year for a starter plan and 108 for the unlimited. The 270/year option is for early access to new stuff.
      - account-5 3y ago
        I was rounding up.
  - 3y ago
colesantiago 3y ago
It's really and very odd to sign in to use a search engine just so that the search engine can know every search about me. I'm really upset and just baffled about this trend that this is going on the web especially for search engines. And Kagi isn't open source either.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  You're signing in so a paid service can know you paid for the service. Is there an alternative im unaware of?
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    But they have a free plan? Why does that need me to sign in? It should just let me search, when I want to pay then I pay. I would like Kagi to do something like Mullvad does without knowing who I am so I don't need to fiddle around with emails or passwords.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      But you're not going to want to pay, are you? You'll just clear your cookies every time you hit the usage limit, and start fresh.
      - colesantiago 3y ago
        Of course I'll pay, but not with my identity attached. I pay for Mullvad, and would pay for Kagi but only if I can not have my identity attached to their service and not have any emails associated with them. Mullvad is doing it right.
        jsnell 3y ago
        But the complaint I was responding to was about the free plan requiring signing in, not about the identity being attached to your account. A free plan just cannot work if anyone can mint new identities for free. You paying for Mullvad doesn't seem very relevant to that complaint. They have no free plan. They also require creating an account and signing in to use their service at all.
endisneigh 3y ago
I've tried Kagi, didn't find it better than Google. YMMV. You can try it yourself, free for 100 searches on their site. I felt the things that might be nice about Kagi, e.g. personalized rankings, were solved simply by using Google or Bing and scoping to that site, and bookmarking the sites I frequent. A good example of this for me is MDN web docs. another example of I'd say few people, even on here know that google has Programmable Search Engines. Once you understand how to use them you'll realize you can recreate most of the nice stuff that Kagi has for free. here's one I just made for hacker news and techcrunch (https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=13608d055ebfc44ab#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=headphones&gsc.sort= https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=13608d055ebfc44ab#gsc.tab=0&gs...). You can even exclude sites like Pinterest. in any case it's nice to have options, though. it's probably worth the money, but I'm very particular about spending money when there are free alternatives and don't really care about Google and Microsoft tracking me with Google and Bing respectively since I consider them decent stewards of my data. If you care about your absolute privacy and willing to pay it's worth a look.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  Time is money. Not saying it's worth $10, but not having to redo your search 9 times is worth something.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    if you're redoing your search queries in Google 9 times you should read the advanced search Google docs: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890?hl=en&co=G... e.g. quotes "", do not do what you think in Google. You need to explicitly go to Advanced Search and use "This exact word or phrase". I almost never do searches without site scopes. reddit is a frequent one, as well as foxnews, nyt, washingtonpost, etc. IMO searching without site scopes is just shooting in the dark. You should think about the top 3 sites that probably are good for what you're looking for and restrict to those. Kagi can help with this sort of thing, but I pretty much have it memorized so there's not much value for me.
    - 3y ago
atticora 3y ago
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber but I find that I frequently have to switch to one of the competitors for a particular search. The problem is that when Kagi can't find a good match, it just says so and returns nothing. That's fine for some things, but other times I want any results, no matter how tenuously related, so that I can use their verbiage to iterate on my search to get some results. It's not a big problem since you can just prepend a `!g` etc,, but it makes a clean shift to Kagi a bit harder.
malablaster 3y ago
The Kagi Safari extension for iOS is driving me crazy. Half the time it sends my searches to the default search engine. So annoying after paying for a year of Kagi.
- jamies 3y ago
  It’s a bummer indeed, but more an issue of iOS not supporting 3rd party search engines without a wonky extension.
  - orhmeh09 3y ago
    I don't think this is why -- this behavior was hardcoded for certain search providers. See: https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo... The last 1.x version specifically doesn't seem to do this on Google searches. In addition, the old version did not require you to change your default search engine to one you don't use. This is because they changed their framework: > We've updated the Kagi Search for Safari extension to be cross-platform, using Safari Web Extensions instead of Safari App Extension framework. This will require you to grant access to the Extension on the search engine during your first run. See the instructions in the app for details > - [Fixed] Redirects should not experience intermittent failures > - [Changed] You can override which search engine redirects to Kagi manually. The first time you install/ upgrade to this version, the extension will attempt to detect your current Safari search engine > - [Changed] You only need to provide extension access to urls on the search engine you are overriding.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  The new version (2.0) seems to fix this behavior. The published source on GitHub, from version 1.0.9, shows how this worked. https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo...
  - 3y ago
orhmeh09 3y ago
This seems to fix a behavior in the earlier version of the extension that was on the App Store: searches on certain websites were automatically redirected to Kagi. The published source on GitHub, from version 1.0.9, outlines she me of this behavior. In the last 1.0.10 release, all of the providers defined in the code *except for Google* (eg baidu, yandex, Bing) would have searches performed on their home page redirected to Kagi. I found this behavior rather mysterious and an impediment. https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo...
aragonite 3y ago
I recently discovered, and confirmed from several different machines that it's not just my own account, that if I google 'channel', a perfectly standard English word, Google asks if I meant Chanel instead! https://archive.is/avc2L https://archive.is/avc2L
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  If ten people search "channel" a day and a thousand search "Chanel," that makes sense. It still gave you results for "channel." I dislike Google, but I bet more people find that "did you mean" helpful than annoying, mostly as I can't think of a reason to regularly search "channel."
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    Yeah, I can't think of any real reason to search for "channel" either. Now "What channel is the Habs-Leafs game on" is more likely, and hopefully it doesn't find Hockey inspired Chanel ads.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  It is probably an extremely common mistake from people who are actually searching for Chanel. It's possible that people searching for the single word "channel" are more often actually searching for Chanel and being frustrated instead of actually searching for whatever is returned for Channel. Not sure why I felt the need to play Devil's Advocate for Google of all things but there you are I guess.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tomduncalf 3y ago
Last time I tried Kagi, the mobile Safari extension didn’t work well so I gave up. Hopefully this new one works better (shame Apple don’t just let you set any search engine!) Also interested to see if Kagi feels as potentially necessary as it used to a year ago - I now tend to go to ChatGPT for searches which I expect to be full of spam on Google…
Exoristos 3y ago
Kagi's fine, and I'd pay $5–10 per year for it, but not per month.
alphabettsy 3y ago
Really happy with Kagi so far. Started using it two or so months ago after seeing a comment here on HN about search and decided to go ahead and pay for a sub. Especially liking the ability to adjust rankings and remove low-quality sites from my searches entirely and up-rank those I want like Reddit or StackOverflow. I tried DDG for awhile then quality seemed to tank for some reason. Went back to Google and wasn’t happy with that either leading me to often use more than one search engine in a given day. Now, if only Apple would allow changing the default search engine on iOS..
- Shadowmist 3y ago
  They have a Safari extension that will redirect the searches to Kagi, but you can still manually go to Google.com and do stuff. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... Their Orion web browser is pretty nice. I’ve run into a few minor quirks while evaluating it, then tried Firefox, then Safari again, but I keep getting pulled back to Orion.
hprotagonist 3y ago
Image searches got better -- but I don't think i can yet add pintrest to my killfile, alas.
bluecalm 3y ago
I've been using Kagi for a few months now. It's able to find things Google doesn't on regular basis and I think the results are better in general. For some things Google is still better but then you can easily use it as well using !g command which is very convenient. Ability to blacklist or promote websites along with ability to use arrows to go through results are reasons good enough for me to switch even if the search results weren't better tbh.
andag 3y ago
Anyone found a good alternative to the android google search widget using kagi? I kind of want to switch, but I want consistency across searches in different places, and I find that widget very good...
- rataerix 3y ago
  You can use the Firefox widget to provide a search bar and set your search provider in Firefox to Kagi. I assume you could also do that with chrome.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
I've been a Kagi user since the early days, and it is one of my must-haves. It's the only engine I've used that doesn't flood me with SEO trash, allows me to ban Pinterest forever, and has working exclusion operators.

80 points by mroche 3y ago

I switched to the Kagi paid search 2 months ago and I'm very happy with it. Of course, Google is free, but "search" is a product that is critical to my job and I use it countless times per day. As such it felt reasonable to me to pay for a better search experience. That's in line with me spending extra for my computer, monitor, keyboard, etc. Because they're my tools of trade and I use them 8+ hours a day. I can recommend giving Kagi a try if you're in a similar position as me.

corytheboyd 3y ago
Also started using it a few months ago, and it’s so good that I forget it’s there most of the time. It’s fast, accurate, clutter free, and gets out of your way. More than happy to pay for this experience, because I want it to stick around forever.
Fabricio20 3y ago
This might come off weird but I can't help but comment on how markety/"I need to justify myself" your comment looked to me at first. You started off very normal "I switched ... and i'm very happy with it." But then there's almost an entire paragraph of "yes it makes sense, yes I made the right decision, it's just like spending on other things, etc..", up until the very end where you come back to "give it a try if you are in a similar position". Not trying to offend or anything and happy that it works out well for you! Just struck me weird when I first read it.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification
- jemmyw 3y ago
  When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything. I also pay for Kagi. I'm not sure it is justified - it's not that cheap. They're pretty open about their costs though, and I think that demonstrates how much advertising is paying for other services. So I'm happy to pay for now just because I really dislike adverts.
  - mattrick 3y ago
    I agree with this. The only real advantage to Kagi over just using Google + Adblock for me is an easy way to just completely block certain sites from ever appearing in searches. It's probably not worth $10 a month but I pay for it because SEO spam sites bother me on a personal level.
    - beej71 3y ago
      I don't know how true this is, but I really like the concept of a customer-driven search engine versus an ad-driven one. The incentives are better aligned, and it frees Kagi up to really try to kick ass at search instead of kicking ass at ad revenue. I'm enjoying the features they've been adding, and an looking forward to more. Besides, what else was I going to do with that YouTube Premium money? ;)
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > luxury item/service The price for Kagi is not really in the class of "luxury" at $10 per month. It's peanuts really. In exchange you have the best search engine in the world. If you could upgrade an economy flight ticket to first class for $10, that would be a bargain. If you could buy the best bottle of wine in the world for just $10 more than your average bottle of wine, that would be a bargain. Kagi is the best search engine in the world, that's why I pay for it.
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      Luxury is a loaded term, I probably should have used something less vague. The examples you gave are still luxuries even if they're only $10 more than the basic version - the cheaper plane ticket still gets you there, the cheaper wine... I'm not really into wine, expensive wine doesn't taste especially different to me... still gets you drunk? Google still returns search results. You have to crawl through ads or search in different ways, but your result is still going to be in there. So if Kagi is a price and has extra comfort, it's a luxury.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Every Kagi post is filled with comments like these and I've been wondering for a while whether it's organic or not. I'm inclined to think it's organic but the early adopters of Kagi are the type of people to write comments that sound like astroturfing, mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service. Or to put it another way: I'd place more trust in a review from someone who received a lifetime of free Kagi access than I would in one from somebody who just started paying for it.
  - dhc02 3y ago
    I've been paying for about a year. Every time I'm reminded how much I'm paying, I think it sounds like too much. But every time I sit at a new computer or accidentally use the default Google search on my phone's home screen, I think, "Crap, this is terrible. I'm glad I am paying for Kagi."
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Or they just provide a really good service in the environment of ad-driven internet crap. I'm paying for it for the same reason as I pay for zerotier and give bcachefs donations - voting with my wallet for my environment to be a bit more like I wish it looked. And I'm happy to tell people about those things as long as they are better than alternatives.
  - beej71 3y ago
    Thing is, though, it's free to try it for yourself and see if it's worth it to you. I don't know that astroturfing is necessary or useful.
  - averageRoyalty 3y ago
    > mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service I find this take quite odd. If you're paying for a service you're unhappy with, you stop. What's the element that's holding users in a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario?
rspoerri 3y ago
kagi is the first search engine i dont regularely fall back to google when i get bad search results. because googles good results are usually none the better. In google i get more results however most of the added results are spam or duplicates.
ubutler 3y ago
For me, the ability to create custom bangs is worth it alone. I probably have close to a hundred bangs now and even created a bang to edit my bangs. I’m sure there are extensions that can replicate this behaviour but Kagi works on any device without any prior setup. My ‘site:reddit.com’ (!r) bang has to be my favourite, although I have found myself needing it less with Kagi since I’m already able to preference Reddit in search results.
- rhabarba 3y ago
  DuckDuckGo can do that for free though.
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    Where is the place to add personal bangs to DuckDuckGo? I can't find it in https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs or https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings.
    - rhabarba 3y ago
      AFAIR you can use and submit custom bangs. That said, they're curated, I think. See: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

account-5 3y ago

I recently started paying for email service and it's been somewhat of a revelation to me. I started after getting sick of the constant attempts by the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al, trying to force more and more details from me. The point I'm making is I can now see the benefit of not being the product. Why would I pay for search?

hellcow 3y ago
Because it's far better than Google. I'd encourage you to try it.
dharmab 3y ago
Kagi's killer feature is that you can create personalized rankings for search results. In my results, I: - Pin official documentation sources to the top of results - Raise consistently good sources - Lower poorer quality sources - Block sources that I find spammy entirely, like Pinterest, or the many sites that copy StackOverflow/GitHub content. Within a couple of days of tuning these I was getting much better results from Kagi than Google. You can see how people are using this feature at https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
- account-5 3y ago
  I think my main worry would be price increases, it's a worry I have with the email service. 300 a year is fairly steep too.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    300? It's $54 a year for a starter plan and 108 for the unlimited. The 270/year option is for early access to new stuff.
    - account-5 3y ago
      I was rounding up.
- 3y ago

colesantiago 3y ago

It's really and very odd to sign in to use a search engine just so that the search engine can know every search about me. I'm really upset and just baffled about this trend that this is going on the web especially for search engines. And Kagi isn't open source either.

xboxnolifes 3y ago
You're signing in so a paid service can know you paid for the service. Is there an alternative im unaware of?
- colesantiago 3y ago
  But they have a free plan? Why does that need me to sign in? It should just let me search, when I want to pay then I pay. I would like Kagi to do something like Mullvad does without knowing who I am so I don't need to fiddle around with emails or passwords.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    But you're not going to want to pay, are you? You'll just clear your cookies every time you hit the usage limit, and start fresh.
    - colesantiago 3y ago
      Of course I'll pay, but not with my identity attached. I pay for Mullvad, and would pay for Kagi but only if I can not have my identity attached to their service and not have any emails associated with them. Mullvad is doing it right.
      - jsnell 3y ago
        But the complaint I was responding to was about the free plan requiring signing in, not about the identity being attached to your account. A free plan just cannot work if anyone can mint new identities for free. You paying for Mullvad doesn't seem very relevant to that complaint. They have no free plan. They also require creating an account and signing in to use their service at all.

endisneigh 3y ago

I've tried Kagi, didn't find it better than Google. YMMV. You can try it yourself, free for 100 searches on their site. I felt the things that might be nice about Kagi, e.g. personalized rankings, were solved simply by using Google or Bing and scoping to that site, and bookmarking the sites I frequent. A good example of this for me is MDN web docs. another example of I'd say few people, even on here know that google has Programmable Search Engines. Once you understand how to use them you'll realize you can recreate most of the nice stuff that Kagi has for free. here's one I just made for hacker news and techcrunch (https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=13608d055ebfc44ab#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=headphones&gsc.sort= https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=13608d055ebfc44ab#gsc.tab=0&gs...). You can even exclude sites like Pinterest. in any case it's nice to have options, though. it's probably worth the money, but I'm very particular about spending money when there are free alternatives and don't really care about Google and Microsoft tracking me with Google and Bing respectively since I consider them decent stewards of my data. If you care about your absolute privacy and willing to pay it's worth a look.

fifteen1506 3y ago
Time is money. Not saying it's worth $10, but not having to redo your search 9 times is worth something.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  if you're redoing your search queries in Google 9 times you should read the advanced search Google docs: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890?hl=en&co=G... e.g. quotes "", do not do what you think in Google. You need to explicitly go to Advanced Search and use "This exact word or phrase". I almost never do searches without site scopes. reddit is a frequent one, as well as foxnews, nyt, washingtonpost, etc. IMO searching without site scopes is just shooting in the dark. You should think about the top 3 sites that probably are good for what you're looking for and restrict to those. Kagi can help with this sort of thing, but I pretty much have it memorized so there's not much value for me.
  - 3y ago

atticora 3y ago

I'm a happy Kagi subscriber but I find that I frequently have to switch to one of the competitors for a particular search. The problem is that when Kagi can't find a good match, it just says so and returns nothing. That's fine for some things, but other times I want any results, no matter how tenuously related, so that I can use their verbiage to iterate on my search to get some results. It's not a big problem since you can just prepend a `!g` etc,, but it makes a clean shift to Kagi a bit harder.

malablaster 3y ago

The Kagi Safari extension for iOS is driving me crazy. Half the time it sends my searches to the default search engine. So annoying after paying for a year of Kagi.

jamies 3y ago
It’s a bummer indeed, but more an issue of iOS not supporting 3rd party search engines without a wonky extension.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  I don't think this is why -- this behavior was hardcoded for certain search providers. See: https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo... The last 1.x version specifically doesn't seem to do this on Google searches. In addition, the old version did not require you to change your default search engine to one you don't use. This is because they changed their framework: > We've updated the Kagi Search for Safari extension to be cross-platform, using Safari Web Extensions instead of Safari App Extension framework. This will require you to grant access to the Extension on the search engine during your first run. See the instructions in the app for details > - [Fixed] Redirects should not experience intermittent failures > - [Changed] You can override which search engine redirects to Kagi manually. The first time you install/ upgrade to this version, the extension will attempt to detect your current Safari search engine > - [Changed] You only need to provide extension access to urls on the search engine you are overriding.
orhmeh09 3y ago
The new version (2.0) seems to fix this behavior. The published source on GitHub, from version 1.0.9, shows how this worked. https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo...
- 3y ago

orhmeh09 3y ago

This seems to fix a behavior in the earlier version of the extension that was on the App Store: searches on certain websites were automatically redirected to Kagi. The published source on GitHub, from version 1.0.9, outlines she me of this behavior. In the last 1.0.10 release, all of the providers defined in the code *except for Google* (eg baidu, yandex, Bing) would have searches performed on their home page redirected to Kagi. I found this behavior rather mysterious and an impediment. https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blob/294ae02be8b728bd5502762cec14f19961266a79/KagiForSafari%20Extension/Resources/content.js https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS/blo...

aragonite 3y ago

I recently discovered, and confirmed from several different machines that it's not just my own account, that if I google 'channel', a perfectly standard English word, Google asks if I meant Chanel instead! https://archive.is/avc2L https://archive.is/avc2L

boomboomsubban 3y ago
If ten people search "channel" a day and a thousand search "Chanel," that makes sense. It still gave you results for "channel." I dislike Google, but I bet more people find that "did you mean" helpful than annoying, mostly as I can't think of a reason to regularly search "channel."
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  Yeah, I can't think of any real reason to search for "channel" either. Now "What channel is the Habs-Leafs game on" is more likely, and hopefully it doesn't find Hockey inspired Chanel ads.
bluefirebrand 3y ago
It is probably an extremely common mistake from people who are actually searching for Chanel. It's possible that people searching for the single word "channel" are more often actually searching for Chanel and being frustrated instead of actually searching for whatever is returned for Channel. Not sure why I felt the need to play Devil's Advocate for Google of all things but there you are I guess.
deleted 3y ago
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tomduncalf 3y ago

Last time I tried Kagi, the mobile Safari extension didn’t work well so I gave up. Hopefully this new one works better (shame Apple don’t just let you set any search engine!) Also interested to see if Kagi feels as potentially necessary as it used to a year ago - I now tend to go to ChatGPT for searches which I expect to be full of spam on Google…

Exoristos 3y ago

Kagi's fine, and I'd pay $5–10 per year for it, but not per month.

alphabettsy 3y ago

Really happy with Kagi so far. Started using it two or so months ago after seeing a comment here on HN about search and decided to go ahead and pay for a sub. Especially liking the ability to adjust rankings and remove low-quality sites from my searches entirely and up-rank those I want like Reddit or StackOverflow. I tried DDG for awhile then quality seemed to tank for some reason. Went back to Google and wasn’t happy with that either leading me to often use more than one search engine in a given day. Now, if only Apple would allow changing the default search engine on iOS..

Shadowmist 3y ago
They have a Safari extension that will redirect the searches to Kagi, but you can still manually go to Google.com and do stuff. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h... Their Orion web browser is pretty nice. I’ve run into a few minor quirks while evaluating it, then tried Firefox, then Safari again, but I keep getting pulled back to Orion.

hprotagonist 3y ago

Image searches got better -- but I don't think i can yet add pintrest to my killfile, alas.

bluecalm 3y ago

I've been using Kagi for a few months now. It's able to find things Google doesn't on regular basis and I think the results are better in general. For some things Google is still better but then you can easily use it as well using !g command which is very convenient. Ability to blacklist or promote websites along with ability to use arrows to go through results are reasons good enough for me to switch even if the search results weren't better tbh.

andag 3y ago

Anyone found a good alternative to the android google search widget using kagi? I kind of want to switch, but I want consistency across searches in different places, and I find that widget very good...

rataerix 3y ago
You can use the Firefox widget to provide a search bar and set your search provider in Firefox to Kagi. I assume you could also do that with chrome.

a_vanderbilt 3y ago

I've been a Kagi user since the early days, and it is one of my must-haves. It's the only engine I've used that doesn't flood me with SEO trash, allows me to ban Pinterest forever, and has working exclusion operators.