15 ms·

Kagi Changelog 2/13: Faster and more accurate instant answers and Wikipedia page

351 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

styren 3y ago
I would love to use Kagi but it just isn't good enough for non-english usage. I might not be the target demographic but it's a real shame.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  What your language then? It works pretty well in French and when it fails, I can simply append "!fr" to force French-focused results. As far as I know, Google doesn't even have that feature and I like to be able to switch between international and local results.
nusl 3y ago
I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time. For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to before, often almost mirroring Google.
- mrmlz 3y ago
  Damnit I was on the narrow path of convincing myself to start paying for Kagi. I've been using QWANT but the search results are a bit off tbh. And they've started doing full-screen ads to turn of my adblock (which well to be fair thats the way they earn their keep).
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    For me, it’s not only the price you pay. Having a username attached to each your searches is the opposite of privacy, no matter how much you trust their legalese wording
    - mrmlz 3y ago
      Oh well I don't assume I'm in anyway "anonymous" no matter if I got a username/ipadress/cookie/deep-state-monitoring attached to my searches. Things I html-POST to the web is no longer private.
      - Erratic6576 3y ago
        That’s another reason not to pay for privacy
    - viraptor 3y ago
      I go the opposite way. I trust a company that takes my money to pay its costs to keep my privacy. As opposed to a company who "doesn't know who I am". (Apart from unique fingerprint https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ over many queries over many months)
      - spiderice 3y ago
        I thought modern browsers were supposed to resist finger printing? This website is slightly horrifying.
        kristofferR 3y ago
        You thought wrong, fingerprinting is impossible to resist.
        viraptor 3y ago
        They try to. But every time a browser gets better at existing methods, it also gains new features which become new methods of identification. The web browser environment is broken. And if you get to fight it by using something with better protection, you're only exposing yourself more because no other users do the same thing.
    - hackideiomat 3y ago
      Go look at MetaGer, they solved that issue
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Check it out for your use case. (Have you used up the free searches?) I've not noticed any degradation for my searches. It's going to be different for everyone.
    - mrmlz 3y ago
      I used them when they first announced their service. Was a nice experience afaik. QWANT is more like internet on hard-mode.. They don't really give you what you're looking for but close enough.. But I've become more dissatisfied with the results of late. I'll mull the decision for a while but I'm probably going to give Kagi another try.
    - nusl 3y ago
      It could very well be different for everyone. Maybe I’m a generic bastard and Kagi doesn’t think I’m very interesting, so my results are also generic.
  - smcleod 3y ago
    I haven’t notice any degradation in quality with Kagi, haven’t heard of it being a problem either?
  - Sebb767 3y ago
    For what it's worth, whenever I've switched to DuckDuckGo, I've found myself adding a !g to nearly every search. Since I've switched to Kagi a few months ago, I've hardly ever had to go to another search engine. If you can spare it, I'd suggest you invest the 5$ for a small account and just test it out for a month.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - nusl 3y ago
    It’s worth giving a try. You get a good amount of free queries to evaluate the product first.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I haven’t had an issue. I recently started getting GPT results, in addition to the normal search results, and they have been very helpful for quick answers to questions.
- sph 3y ago
  I am still a user because Google is worse than ever, but I wish Kagi would stop interpreting my queries and randomly decide to ignore or assign a random weights to my words. If I search for `foo bar baz`, I want pages with `foo`, `bar` and `baz`, please. No, verbatim doesn't cut it because it somehow is far too strict and even common queries return half a dozen results at most. Google started sucking in the 2010s when they decided they know better than me, and the more Kagi improves, the more they follow down Google's path of trying to be outsmart me, and falling short. I just want a 2003 Google experience. A computer is not smarter than me, stop trying to interpret and make assumptions. --- Aside, is it so hard to make a search engine with a query interface like any trigram-based SQL full-text engine? With quotes, AND, OR and -word. I still believe any AI-powered solution of the past 20 years to be a mockery of this gold standard of precision and simplicity, except maybe Google 1.0.
  - __alexs 3y ago
    > I just want a 2003 Google experience. Google in 2003 was good because the web wasn't quite so full of utter garbage. There must be 100x more content at least now.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      That is only going to get worse, with the direct copies of StackOverflow and other popular sites (which are easy enough for search engines to filter out because the body content is practically identical) that exist only to fool less careful clickers into getting their adverts & such, being joined by a multitude of LLM generated rewordings of the same which will be harder to automatically drop (or de-prioritise).
      - nusl 3y ago
        I’ve used browser addons to help with filtering the search spam too. I think uBlacklist? It has lists of sites that are often helpful
    - eitland 3y ago
      Everyone says this. But Kagi often being as good as Google used to be proves this isn't the only reason. Lately I have felt Kagi also sometimes stray down this "knows better than me what I want" path. I recommend using the forums to let them know. They actually read the forums and act on it. I've reported both ux improvements and search quality issues and more and they have always taken it seriously.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  Can you be more specific? I exclusively use Kagi, and I am a heavy search user. I have not noticed anything like what you are mentioning.
  - nusl 3y ago
    I noticed that search queries required more thought and perusal to get desired results than normal. Kagi previously would give good enough results that I could figure it out without having to think about Kagi itself. More recently I noticed that I wasn’t able to find answers like this anymore, and compared the query to Google. The results were pretty much identical. I kept using Kagi for another month but it persisted so I stopped my sub. I was an early adopted with Kagi and initially was very happy. Since Kagi became Google for my purposes, I started using Google again. I don’t have much motivation to curate the customization features personally. I would imagine that it could depend on the general type of query. As a developer I definitely noticed a decline in quality. I’m quite privacy focused but for whatever reason don’t care if Google knows that I want to know how to write a helm chart or eat pasta later
    - freediver 3y ago
      Can you report examples to kagifeedback.org so that we can take a look?
- Sakos 3y ago
  Haven't experienced any decline in search quality. Been using them for over a year now.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Kagi is partly powered by Google, so I can imagine specific searches resulting in results pretty similar to Googles, if none of their other source have any matches. I noticed something similar with Ecosia, they apparently switched to using both Bing and Google, and the results, while still pretty good seems a little worse. That's all anecdotal and may be completely random, but I think one issue could be that Google is getting worse.
  - nusl 3y ago
    I tried a few searches side-by-side and they were pretty much identical. I get that Kagi offers customization etc but that’s not worth the money for me personally. I just went back to Google because the results were the same.
- SyneRyder 3y ago
  I'm still using & paying for Kagi, but I have noticed a sudden drop in search results quality in the last month or two. Unfortunately I didn't take note of the specific searches, but I jumped over to Brave Search and everything I was looking for was right on the top, instead of down around page 2 of Kagi. There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.
  - nusl 3y ago
    Okay. Seems our experiences are similar. The timeline is roughly within the last two months that I noticed the same.
  - freediver 3y ago
    That would be unusual. Did you turn on verbatim search option in kagi and forgot to turn it off?
    - SyneRyder 3y ago
      Nope, I don't think so? I'm going through my settings now, and I have Safe Search and Image Safe Search both enabled. Which makes it even more surprising that it was returning hacked government sites mentioning porn in the search snippet. (Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I would have always had Personalized turned on instead. Seeing those results would be the first time I even encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the domain until then. Since the domain is still in my blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian government sites.) I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked results, it's only common at times when I'm really researching something and need to get to a second page of results. I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too. Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN, that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can block those domains from my own personal results.
- elxx 3y ago
  Did you start to notice things getting worse around the new year when they added Brave to their search results? That was the turning point for me, I was a huge advocate but then quality went downhill and then a few weeks later they proudly announced that they had spent a third of their funding on...t-shirts. Between that and this huge push towards being just like Google and Bing with LLM hallucinated nonsense, I'm not sure what their aim is anymore.
hackideiomat 3y ago
They do not take security and privacy seriously
- elaus 3y ago
  Could you elaborate? I didn't find anything in the change log that made this obvious to me.
  - hackideiomat 3y ago
    Ha, exactly! They rarely fix bugs. E.g., XSS / HTML injection in summarizer or discuss document. Or their broken CSP which allows injecting forms to e.g., change settings. They haven't fixed many reported issues in a while, and just to prove I'm not lying: https://kagi.com/discussdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2Fchangelog%3F"><h1>lol https://kagi.com/discussdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2Fcha...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - tmikaeld 3y ago
      While it doesn't look good, it doesn't inject or execute scripts. Still, would have liked an official take on this. I was about to re-signup but now I'll hold off on that.
      - hackideiomat 3y ago
        Oh yes because of the CSP. The CSP that allows forms that can change your settings... you could easily use the above bug to get some impact with an additional click on a form's submit button. Admittedly, no full XSS anymore, but still dangerous and shows their lack of understanding and caring about security. It's not the only place you can inject HTML and not every page has a CSP...
        tmikaeld 3y ago
tastyminerals2 3y ago
Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don’t know a single service that packs that many features for the that price nowadays.
- mhitza 3y ago
  I hope they don't stray too far of course with other features. Been using Kagi continuously since August, and I've developed a pattern where I still jump to Google when I need to buy stuff, get latest news and find local (national, or EU) content. It's great for technical lookup, and answers, but for general search usage it's not there yet. I'd love to give actionable feedback on how they could improve, but can't figure out exactly what's missing on that department. It could just as well be a small crawled index.
  - sergiosgc 3y ago
    I switched to Kagi almost two years ago. I have an experience opposite to yours. I never ever use the google bang. I did in the beginning, when a query wouldn't give me results, only to get worse, more verbose, equally useless results from Google. Quickly learned that if Kagi can't answer a query, Google will fare no better (and will waste my time with junk). I'll note that to get local news, I do have to switch the region selector from "International" to "Portugal". Kagi doesn't have Google's behaviour of using my IP location. Which is good. Getting international results from Google is a struggle.
    - mdhen 3y ago
      Been using kagi for awhile, also in Portugal. Google shopping is the one thing that Kagi can't beat them at yet. If i'm looking to buy a product online not from amazon it's still the best option.
  - anneessens 3y ago
    I don't know what you're searching for, but I'm also from EU and I'm able to use Kagi for everything, including content from my own country. Sometimes I might have to change the country or language filter, but I've never had a situation where something was available on Google but wasn't available on Kagi. Nowadays, I'm only using Google for some quick answers, like showing the score of a football match or the population of a country. Kagi doesn't seem to support quick answers for these queries yet, although I have seen quick answers for weather, calculations and shipping and flight tracking. So I'm sure more quick answers will be added eventually.
tastyminerals2 3y ago
Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.
- stavros 3y ago
  Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it returns something than if it returns nothing.
  - elaus 3y ago
    If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of reading through pages of irrelevant search results.
    - dewey 3y ago
      I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.
      - internetter 3y ago
        This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such
    - thuruv 3y ago
      Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.
    - deliriumchn 3y ago
      if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.
hansonpeter 3y ago
[dead]
raffraffraff 3y ago
Great to see continued improvements. One area where I continue to use google is specific local information, like opening hours, commute timetables. Try these two searches in Google and Kagi to compare: "train from Galway to Dublin" "Ilac shopping centre opening hours" Kagi gives you a bunch of links that might be absolutely trash, if the service provider (eg: rail company) has a shitty website. Google gives you precisely what you're looking for, eg: a table of departure/arrival times for the next 5 trains, with a date picker. It can even handle the atrocious TFI (transport for ireland) car-crash, providing me with the precise info I need to get a bus from one part of Dublin to another. You can't even get that with the official TFI app, and they notoriously block access to their data API (breaking the only decent Play Store app for buses in the city) I'm not sure if this is because Google have a budget for curated content like this, or if they have some magic way to extract that data without making a balls of it.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  So funny these are almost the exact two usecases I mentioned in my comment.
- ambigious7777 3y ago
  I can't imagine the black magic they have to do to scrape that data.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > or if they have some magic way to extract that data without making a balls of it. They have a system where public transport operators can upload their routes in a specific and quite complicated file format. Google does not integrate any public transit unless the authorised organisation uploads the data to them.
Einenlum 3y ago
Whether we like it and use it or not (I love it and use it), I think we can only be super impressed by the productivity of the Kagi team. Look at these dates. It's insane.
- xigoi 3y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to them using Crystal for the backend.
  - _aaed 3y ago
    It's a general purpose programming language like any other mainstream language.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      Being a statically typed variant of Ruby, it’s well suited for fast development without making a mess.
  - ksec 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised it make huge difference. I would like to point to [1] compmike's comment. You get 80% Ruby along with Types benefit plus many Times the RUNTIME speed improvement. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216786
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I’m actually currently pretty annoyed with them, as it’s been over 2 weeks of non-English searches being borderline-broken [0] with no feedback or ETA. [0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-english-results-given-too-much-preference https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-english-results-given-too-mu...
  - kristofferR 3y ago
    You aren't using the correct language though, you are on International. Local language searches has improved vastly lately. Now I can just keep it on my local language, even while doing English searches. Previously I had to switch between national and international all the time, that was a pain.
souvlakee 3y ago
Kagi is good, but they claim they're faster than others, but it depends. In my country, Cyprus (I know nobody cares), it's significantly slower than Google, so I decided to stick with a classic.
- GrumpySloth 3y ago
  Same in Poland. I suspect they’re generally slower in Europe than US due to location of servers.
  - jpalomaki 3y ago
    At least according to status page [1] they have locations in Europe, US and Asia. Haven't noticed any speed issues in Finland. [1] https://status.kagi.com/ https://status.kagi.com/
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    They have deployed to multiple datacenters, your nearest one should be eu-west. You can see the datacenter where you connect to by opening the drawer on the right by clicking on the settings icon in the top right, and at the bottom is the datacenter location + the latency to it. Maybe you could open an issue in kagifeedback, as they listen to the feedback, and for example deployed to south america because someone complained https://kagifeedback.org/d/2347-creation-of-new-server-in-south-america https://kagifeedback.org/d/2347-creation-of-new-server-in-so... Region list: https://status.kagi.com/ https://status.kagi.com/
- yowayb 3y ago
  No speed issues in Turkiye for me
- freediver 3y ago
  Can you report this to kagifeedback.org so we can dig deeper?
GrumpySloth 3y ago
I’ve been using Kagi for a while. Unfortunately, its website on mobile is much lower quality than say DDG. One issue I find often is that when I want to edit a previously-entered query in the search box, sliding the text cursor is very hard – it often stops at search box boundary and doesn’t scroll the text inside. Another is that sometimes the search results page freezes after I come back to it from a different tab. When I try to scroll, it refuses to scroll and only briefly shows some white space around the currently-viewed part. I blame all those on some JS that’s too creative for its own good. Aside from that, I wish Safari had a setting to add custom search URLs, so that I can paste my Kagi auth token, instead of having to use xxSearch, which also has some annoyances. Obviously, this part is not Kagi’s fault. I’ve stopped using Kagi on mobile and went back to DDG. It’s still stellar on desktop though.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  They’ve got a new “blessed” method, which involves installing their custom Safari extension, which redirects. It works fairly well. Obviously not as good as Apple just not having a whitelist of search providers.
  - GrumpySloth 3y ago
    I’ve used it, but it often failed to redirect my searches. It was hit-and-miss. xxSearch works better.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > Obviously, this part is not Kagi’s fault. It is totally their fault. They should release a Kagi App for iOS and be done with it. No normal person is going to mess with hacky extensions and permissions to pay for a search engine. If I can tell people to download the Kagi App and search from there, all of my friends and acquaintances would be able to use it and probably happy to pay.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    They actually have the Orion Browser - though personally I found it a bit rough on the edges so I'm fine with stock Safari + the Kagi extension. I do agree that they should just release a Kagi app - or even better, just rename Orion to "Kagi browser" and have Kagi as a first-class citizen (with account login).
gtirloni 3y ago
Kagi's domain block list is worth the subscription alone.
- 7839284023 3y ago
  If you just want a domain block list, you could use https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Nice! It works pretty well and the subscription lists are a great feature. Thanks for suggesting it. I was able to import all the block rules from Kagi there. At least for blocking it's great but I also lower/raise results in Kagi so that's a bit harder for this extension. Still like Kagi better for the results (especially technical stuff), but I do still use Google for regional/news/shopping searches or things where Google Search behaves more like an assistant. I think this is an area where Kagi will have some trouble competing because of Google's data moat and the fact they have been honing non-web integrations for a long time. This long tail must be 90% of the job.
altgans 3y ago
How does Kagi fare for scholarly use-cases? Ie. searching articles, papers, citations?
- bluish29 3y ago
  Do you mean Kagi search function or their LLM? If it is the former, I use it as a daily driver and I do a lot of scholarly work and I rarely felt the need to switch to something else. Maybe sometimes I go to google scholar itself (not google search) but this again wouldn't be different from using google search itself.
- mastercheif 3y ago
  Amazing. You can use the website ranking feature to boost results from certain domains ie. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
Kagi is good, I’ve been an unlimited subscriber for a while. Two low hanging fruit opportunities though: 1. Location based or aware searching - it keeps giving me the UK versions of storefronts or the identically-named steakhouse a thousand miles away and not the one I can walk to. Kind of lame, particularly giving me random countries’ versions of sites. 2. The map — maybe this is a setting, but the map always gives me nearly useless results. This is probably tied to geolocation or location aware results.
- wrboyce 3y ago
  One of my main complaints (aside how bad the iOS extension is, but I guess Apple can shoulder most of the blame there) is that I often get US storefronts despite using the "United Kingdom (GB)" region. How odd! I even get amazon.com results, but never amazon.co.uk.
  - brookst 3y ago
    The iOS extension has a kludgey install, but it works perfectly for me. Did the weird stuff once, never had to think about it again , and all I get are Kagi results.
    - wrboyce 3y ago
      I've had to disable it since a recent update as it broke the "!g" bang which I still occasionally find useful. It seems to insist on intercepting Google searches even when I explicitly use Google. It also ruins the UX of the address/search bar somewhat (my search term becomes a Kagi URL so is less easily editable), but that is Apple's fault.
      - bootsmann 3y ago
        Switched to using duckduckgo as the proxy search engine you have to select, now it works fine for me.
        3y ago
api 3y ago
Kagi has been my go to for some time now. For the past few months I rarely consult others. I’d say toward the end of 2023 we passed the inflection point where Google is now generally worse. In fact these days Google is often worse or at least no better than Bing and DuckDuckGo. Kagi is better than all of them. It seems like the Internet being winner take all is only part of the story. The reality is winner takes all, then turns to shit, then an unbundling occurs.
aryonoco 3y ago
Another addition, those on Duobor Family plans can now upgrade individual accounts within the Family to Ultimate. I always wanted to try Ultimate but I was in a Duo account with my wife so it wasn't really possible. Now I can, and trying out all those LLMs is fun!
freedomben 3y ago
> In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer: This is the type of attention to detail that makes me a happy user. Killer feature for me, no more having to type !quick (and yes I set up quick bangs but always seem to forget). I have been really pleased with Kagi, though I do live in perpetual fear that they'll be acquired. Please no. And God help us if Apple acquires them, which seems like a risk given Kagi's great work on search and AI, two things Apple really wants. Don't do it Kagi!
- lolinder 3y ago
  The founder has previously said that they're bootstrapped specifically so that they don't have to chase an exit to get a return for investors. Obviously that doesn't mean they won't change their minds at some point, but it does give a lot of comfort.
  - hmnd0 3y ago
    Technically not 100% bootstrapped anymore as of last year. They raised a $670k SAFE round in June [1]. But they're being cautious with it, so I'm optimistic. I'm still a happy supporter and user. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
- berdon 3y ago
  I also live in this fear and have specifically communicated it to Vlad in an email before. He gave the same response as one of your other responders - they have no intention of selling. Of course, that's the only answer any successful founder would give you...so I still live in fear :(
  - freediver 3y ago
    Kagi founder here. I wake up every morning loving my job, our member community, our mission and the change we make in the world. We are basicallly sustainable at this point and I am in awe of the opportunities in front of us as a user-centric company, bringing a friendly version of the internet to homes worldwide. Things are looking good, we have no plans to change any of that.
mattbaker 3y ago
I’ve been using Kagi full time and I like it a lot. It’s been worth the price. I expected to like lenses and favoring/blocking specific domains. What I didn’t expect was how much their “Quick Answer” would change how I search. I’ve been “AI hesitant”, in general the chance that an LLM will hallucinate makes these kinds of tools more trouble than they’re worth for me personally. In Kagi’s case, though, the individual facts it states in the quick answers have citations linking to the site it drew that information from. Here’s what I’ve found: - it’s been accurate most of the time, but not 100% (as expected) - citations are pretty accurate most of the time - every so often the citation links to a page that seemingly doesn’t back the claim in the quick answer Unsurprisingly, I don’t trust the AI generated quick answer in isolation, what it does do is let me scan a few paragraphs, find the one that answers my question most specifically, and visit the sites it links to as citations for that piece of the answer. This saves me the time of clicking through the top $N results and scanning each page to find the one that seems to answer my query most directly. It’s like a layer on top of the page rank. I remember using Google the first time and being impressed how the top answers were so much more relevant than Yahoo, it was a huge time saver. Now I find myself wondering if the “quick answer” citations will prove to be a similar jump in accelerating my ability to find the right web page. It also makes me wonder if their own page rank algorithm could incorporate the quick answer output as an input to a site’s rank? That would be an interesting experiment!
- freedomben 3y ago
  Same experience with quick answer. I originally thought of it as a gimmick, but it's really changed the way I search now. The summaries are good, and the citations are amazing. I (nearly) always click through to the cited sites to decide how much I trust them, but the vast majority of the time the summary is spot on and extremely helpful. On a side note, as a software dev I was curious about how it would "answer" queries that weren't questions, so I've tried feeding it queries like "linux distro" or other things that are most certainly not questions. About half the time it does a pretty good job at answering! For the really hard ones, it seems to just morph it into "what is <query>?" so nothing real complicated, but I did find it interesting.
- joshuakogut 3y ago
mortallywounded 3y ago
It's really cool to see a search engine alternative. I wonder about the practicality in the wake of large language models? It would seem almost easier to build a model that acts as a search engine than to build a traditional search engine.
aomix 3y ago
I really need to try Kagi out this weekend. Whenever I try to change search engines I hit the same wall in that ~20 years of Google has trained me to think in terms of their search algorithm when searching.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
I switched full time from Google to Kagi last month and it's been an improvement, or at worst a neutral change. There was a frustrating period of adjustment as I had to learn what Kagi's limitations and quirks were. Google has them too but I've long since learned how to compensate for them. Now I know Kagi's. These integrations with other services and specific data are remarkably useful. Glad to see more! One weak spot of Kagi for me is their local / maps search. It's Apple Maps which is still not as good as Google Maps. But moreso Google Local has become a very strong product with a unique database. Nothing stopping me from using Google for local business info when I need it though.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  I wish services like Kagi and others would make it easier to contribute to OSM so more people would update places information (like business names, opening hours, etc). It doesn't help to rely on Apple Maps when everyone can contribute to OSM directly. It's also easy to make it accessible enough (but not to much to avoid trolls) just to increase OSM contributors base. That's what Kagi does with their Wikipedia oneboxes and I regularly open the article to correct it when I notice an issue. I wish Kago (and others) would do that with places, so we can avoid opening the Maps tab to have quick place info.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Disagree. It is up to the businesses to send their up to date information to map providers, because it is in their direct interest that customers find them. If they're too lazy and cheap to do that, then it is their problem that they get fewer customers. They shouldn't rely on free labour and you shouldn't do this for free for them. If they don't know how to put their info on a map, then they should hire an agency that does. Imagine being a business owner and ignoring the very basics...
    - thiht 3y ago
      Business owners: "everyone uses Google Maps". That’s it.
Zelphyr 3y ago
As an aside, and I said this in a thread yesterday but, what I'm hearing about Kagi (I've not used it yet but I'm signing up today to try it out) and the contrast between the Sora and Gemini 1.5 announcements make me genuinely concerned about the future of Google. Search is so much their golden goose and they've let it languish and now there are real dangers to that product from several flanks. They have Gmail after that but is that enough to keep the coffers full? I had so much hope in Google Workspace as competition to Microsoft 365 but even that is in trouble if you ask me. I've been helping a company migrate from Workspace to M365 and one of their reasons was because they couldn't get any support from Google. Also, Workspace is hard to use. Not that M365 is easy, or that their support is any good but, Google has clear perception problems here. I almost never hear of anyone talking about GCP anymore so I'm guessing they're losing mindshare in addition to market share. Dart and Flutter are wonderful projects but it seems to me that since there's no way to stick ads on them, Google is content to give that department a little money and let them do their thing. But, of course, when some of the aforementioned products start losing more money, great products like Dart and Flutter will certainly be cut. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe Google's time has come and companies like Kagi can come in and fill the void Google seems hell-bent on leaving behind.
- williamstein 3y ago
  “Even though Microsoft (with 23% of the market) and Google (with 10%) each gained just one percentage point of market share year-on-year, that’s more than AWS can claim, which continued to hover around 32% market share.”. https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/microsoft-and-google-inch-closer-to-aws-in-q1-cloud-market/2023/05/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/microsoft-and-googl...
- moneywoes 3y ago
  How would you contrast the Gemini 1.5 and Sora announcements?
  - digging 3y ago
    Summarizing what I read in the threads the other day, Gemini 1.5 was "announced" and you can't use it or see what it really does, it's just "better". (Admittedly, the context length sounds incredible, but we can't really test it and hype only works when there are no alternatives.) Sora then dropped immediately afterward and was showing numerous really impressive demos and then taking user requests all day.
kagiftw 3y ago
About a month ago I noticed I could no longer use Kagi search from Firefox 78 esr on an aging OSX 10.9.5 laptop I like to use due to a Javascript problem. GitHub's directory view also seemed to stop working on it about the same time with the same tell-tale Javascript error. The latest Firefox ESR I can run on my old laptop doesn't like ??= and some other newer JS syntax. I see this sort of problem in my own daily development and I know with tools like esbuild you can simply specify --target=firefox78 and end up JS that works fine on older yet perfectly working hardware. So what does this have to do with Kagi? Well after a bit of looking around I found https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org and reported the issue [1]. A day or so later Vlad triaged it and it was fixed within the next few days. A month later the problem reappeared in another place[2], Vlad triaged it again and it was promptly fixed. Needless to say I'm very impressed with attention Vlad and people at Kagi give to problems and the effort they spend improving their product. Makes me want to learn Crystal :-) 1- https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-longer-works-on-firefox-esr https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-lon... 2- https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-give-js-error-previously-fixed-but-happening-again https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-g...
rtev 3y ago
Yahoo returns thousands of results for dorking queries where Kagi and Google return an identical list of 5-6 results. Pretty disappointing for me as a paying customer to learn that Kagi is basically a Google wrapper
strogonoff 3y ago
What do I need from a search engine? Not an LLM chatbot, not any of the auxiliary “smart” stuff. I want customizable results, and to be able to jump into searching quickly and intuitively. (Decent results, sure, but that is subjective.) So, a big reason I was using DDG over Google, despite often subpar results, was bangs. Now I pay for Kagi, and guess what convinced me to subscribe? Bangs indicate caring about power users. How cool would it be if I could set Kagi as default search in any browser and get powerful shortcuts at my fingertips across all devices? Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after (not before). If you don’t do it just right, you’ll just be on Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought. I’m sure I’m in a minority but I swear, if Kagi is not going to make bangs work properly soon, I’m not renewing. If you do emulate DDG, go all the way, otherwise it’s just taunting your users… /rant
- berdon 3y ago
  What? My !bangs work as a prefix to my query. I didn't even know you could append them and have that work.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    it seems the parent user either wants to put the bang in the middle of the query or does not want to put a space in. !yt cat videos (works) cat videos !yt (works) cat !yt videos (not working) cat videos!yt (not working) I always prefix but I did that on ddg too, because chromium's tab search thingy has trained me to do it.
    - wiether 3y ago
      From a programmatic and practical point of view, I don't understand why would someone want to put a bang in the middle of a request or within a word. Basically you have your request and you add a criteria on it, not in it. It's like ordering at a restaurant : you wouldn't say "I'll have a burger to take away, some fries and a coke". You either specify how you'll have your order before or after the actual order. And you don't create a new word like "a cokedinein". Furthermore, I want Kagi to be able to reply to the request "how do the !g bang works?"; if I want something else to reply, I'll add the relevant bang around my request. Or I'm missing something?
doakes 3y ago
I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but it was missing a couple things I use on Google. Maybe someone knows if there's a way to achieve the following: 1) Sports schedules and scores; i.e. searching "nba" or "nfl" 2) Local business hours; i.e. searching "walmart" gives the hours of my local Walmart
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Google has local business hours because businesses provide them with this information. Kagi needs to purchase this data from Google if they need it, because businesses will only play ball with Google and in rare cases with Apple. As for sports schedules and scores, I've seen this request a lot, but don't you have any dedicated website that you can bookmark for that?
- drewbitt 3y ago
  I just do the google !g bang or !espn for sports. That said, if you look up an individual team Kagi will usually show their last games and results on the right
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
I'm using Kagi since November, and they have improved a lot since then. Moving really fast!
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
I wish the maps functionality was better. When I want to find directions to a place, or see how long it will take me, the easiest thing to do it "cmd+L cmd+V" or "highlight --> right-click --> search for ____", but with kagi set as my default search, the UX is terrible. The top results are often for zillow or similar, instead of a map, and when it shows a map, it's many clicks and slow loads to get directions.
- drewbitt 3y ago
  Search with `!gm` to go to Google Maps.
Sikul 3y ago
Thanks Kagi team. It's really cool to see a search engine change in positive ways!

351 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

I would love to use Kagi but it just isn't good enough for non-english usage. I might not be the target demographic but it's a real shame.

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
What your language then? It works pretty well in French and when it fails, I can simply append "!fr" to force French-focused results. As far as I know, Google doesn't even have that feature and I like to be able to switch between international and local results.

nusl 3y ago

I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time. For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to before, often almost mirroring Google.

mrmlz 3y ago
Damnit I was on the narrow path of convincing myself to start paying for Kagi. I've been using QWANT but the search results are a bit off tbh. And they've started doing full-screen ads to turn of my adblock (which well to be fair thats the way they earn their keep).
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  For me, it’s not only the price you pay. Having a username attached to each your searches is the opposite of privacy, no matter how much you trust their legalese wording
  - mrmlz 3y ago
    Oh well I don't assume I'm in anyway "anonymous" no matter if I got a username/ipadress/cookie/deep-state-monitoring attached to my searches. Things I html-POST to the web is no longer private.
    - Erratic6576 3y ago
      That’s another reason not to pay for privacy
  - viraptor 3y ago
    I go the opposite way. I trust a company that takes my money to pay its costs to keep my privacy. As opposed to a company who "doesn't know who I am". (Apart from unique fingerprint https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ over many queries over many months)
    - spiderice 3y ago
      I thought modern browsers were supposed to resist finger printing? This website is slightly horrifying.
      - kristofferR 3y ago
        You thought wrong, fingerprinting is impossible to resist.
      - viraptor 3y ago
        They try to. But every time a browser gets better at existing methods, it also gains new features which become new methods of identification. The web browser environment is broken. And if you get to fight it by using something with better protection, you're only exposing yourself more because no other users do the same thing.
  - hackideiomat 3y ago
    Go look at MetaGer, they solved that issue
- viraptor 3y ago
  Check it out for your use case. (Have you used up the free searches?) I've not noticed any degradation for my searches. It's going to be different for everyone.
  - mrmlz 3y ago
    I used them when they first announced their service. Was a nice experience afaik. QWANT is more like internet on hard-mode.. They don't really give you what you're looking for but close enough.. But I've become more dissatisfied with the results of late. I'll mull the decision for a while but I'm probably going to give Kagi another try.
  - nusl 3y ago
    It could very well be different for everyone. Maybe I’m a generic bastard and Kagi doesn’t think I’m very interesting, so my results are also generic.
- smcleod 3y ago
  I haven’t notice any degradation in quality with Kagi, haven’t heard of it being a problem either?
- Sebb767 3y ago
  For what it's worth, whenever I've switched to DuckDuckGo, I've found myself adding a !g to nearly every search. Since I've switched to Kagi a few months ago, I've hardly ever had to go to another search engine. If you can spare it, I'd suggest you invest the 5$ for a small account and just test it out for a month.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nusl 3y ago
  It’s worth giving a try. You get a good amount of free queries to evaluate the product first.
al_borland 3y ago
I haven’t had an issue. I recently started getting GPT results, in addition to the normal search results, and they have been very helpful for quick answers to questions.
sph 3y ago
I am still a user because Google is worse than ever, but I wish Kagi would stop interpreting my queries and randomly decide to ignore or assign a random weights to my words. If I search for `foo bar baz`, I want pages with `foo`, `bar` and `baz`, please. No, verbatim doesn't cut it because it somehow is far too strict and even common queries return half a dozen results at most. Google started sucking in the 2010s when they decided they know better than me, and the more Kagi improves, the more they follow down Google's path of trying to be outsmart me, and falling short. I just want a 2003 Google experience. A computer is not smarter than me, stop trying to interpret and make assumptions. --- Aside, is it so hard to make a search engine with a query interface like any trigram-based SQL full-text engine? With quotes, AND, OR and -word. I still believe any AI-powered solution of the past 20 years to be a mockery of this gold standard of precision and simplicity, except maybe Google 1.0.
- __alexs 3y ago
  > I just want a 2003 Google experience. Google in 2003 was good because the web wasn't quite so full of utter garbage. There must be 100x more content at least now.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    That is only going to get worse, with the direct copies of StackOverflow and other popular sites (which are easy enough for search engines to filter out because the body content is practically identical) that exist only to fool less careful clickers into getting their adverts & such, being joined by a multitude of LLM generated rewordings of the same which will be harder to automatically drop (or de-prioritise).
    - nusl 3y ago
      I’ve used browser addons to help with filtering the search spam too. I think uBlacklist? It has lists of sites that are often helpful
  - eitland 3y ago
    Everyone says this. But Kagi often being as good as Google used to be proves this isn't the only reason. Lately I have felt Kagi also sometimes stray down this "knows better than me what I want" path. I recommend using the forums to let them know. They actually read the forums and act on it. I've reported both ux improvements and search quality issues and more and they have always taken it seriously.
mdekkers 3y ago
Can you be more specific? I exclusively use Kagi, and I am a heavy search user. I have not noticed anything like what you are mentioning.
- nusl 3y ago
  I noticed that search queries required more thought and perusal to get desired results than normal. Kagi previously would give good enough results that I could figure it out without having to think about Kagi itself. More recently I noticed that I wasn’t able to find answers like this anymore, and compared the query to Google. The results were pretty much identical. I kept using Kagi for another month but it persisted so I stopped my sub. I was an early adopted with Kagi and initially was very happy. Since Kagi became Google for my purposes, I started using Google again. I don’t have much motivation to curate the customization features personally. I would imagine that it could depend on the general type of query. As a developer I definitely noticed a decline in quality. I’m quite privacy focused but for whatever reason don’t care if Google knows that I want to know how to write a helm chart or eat pasta later
  - freediver 3y ago
    Can you report examples to kagifeedback.org so that we can take a look?
Sakos 3y ago
Haven't experienced any decline in search quality. Been using them for over a year now.
mrweasel 3y ago
Kagi is partly powered by Google, so I can imagine specific searches resulting in results pretty similar to Googles, if none of their other source have any matches. I noticed something similar with Ecosia, they apparently switched to using both Bing and Google, and the results, while still pretty good seems a little worse. That's all anecdotal and may be completely random, but I think one issue could be that Google is getting worse.
- nusl 3y ago
  I tried a few searches side-by-side and they were pretty much identical. I get that Kagi offers customization etc but that’s not worth the money for me personally. I just went back to Google because the results were the same.
SyneRyder 3y ago
I'm still using & paying for Kagi, but I have noticed a sudden drop in search results quality in the last month or two. Unfortunately I didn't take note of the specific searches, but I jumped over to Brave Search and everything I was looking for was right on the top, instead of down around page 2 of Kagi. There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.
- nusl 3y ago
  Okay. Seems our experiences are similar. The timeline is roughly within the last two months that I noticed the same.
- freediver 3y ago
  That would be unusual. Did you turn on verbatim search option in kagi and forgot to turn it off?
  - SyneRyder 3y ago
    Nope, I don't think so? I'm going through my settings now, and I have Safe Search and Image Safe Search both enabled. Which makes it even more surprising that it was returning hacked government sites mentioning porn in the search snippet. (Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I would have always had Personalized turned on instead. Seeing those results would be the first time I even encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the domain until then. Since the domain is still in my blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian government sites.) I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked results, it's only common at times when I'm really researching something and need to get to a second page of results. I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too. Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN, that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can block those domains from my own personal results.
elxx 3y ago
Did you start to notice things getting worse around the new year when they added Brave to their search results? That was the turning point for me, I was a huge advocate but then quality went downhill and then a few weeks later they proudly announced that they had spent a third of their funding on...t-shirts. Between that and this huge push towards being just like Google and Bing with LLM hallucinated nonsense, I'm not sure what their aim is anymore.

hackideiomat 3y ago

They do not take security and privacy seriously

elaus 3y ago
Could you elaborate? I didn't find anything in the change log that made this obvious to me.
- hackideiomat 3y ago
  Ha, exactly! They rarely fix bugs. E.g., XSS / HTML injection in summarizer or discuss document. Or their broken CSP which allows injecting forms to e.g., change settings. They haven't fixed many reported issues in a while, and just to prove I'm not lying: https://kagi.com/discussdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2Fchangelog%3F"><h1>lol https://kagi.com/discussdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2Fcha...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tmikaeld 3y ago
    While it doesn't look good, it doesn't inject or execute scripts. Still, would have liked an official take on this. I was about to re-signup but now I'll hold off on that.
    - hackideiomat 3y ago
      Oh yes because of the CSP. The CSP that allows forms that can change your settings... you could easily use the above bug to get some impact with an additional click on a form's submit button. Admittedly, no full XSS anymore, but still dangerous and shows their lack of understanding and caring about security. It's not the only place you can inject HTML and not every page has a CSP...
      - tmikaeld 3y ago

tastyminerals2 3y ago

Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don’t know a single service that packs that many features for the that price nowadays.

mhitza 3y ago
I hope they don't stray too far of course with other features. Been using Kagi continuously since August, and I've developed a pattern where I still jump to Google when I need to buy stuff, get latest news and find local (national, or EU) content. It's great for technical lookup, and answers, but for general search usage it's not there yet. I'd love to give actionable feedback on how they could improve, but can't figure out exactly what's missing on that department. It could just as well be a small crawled index.
- sergiosgc 3y ago
  I switched to Kagi almost two years ago. I have an experience opposite to yours. I never ever use the google bang. I did in the beginning, when a query wouldn't give me results, only to get worse, more verbose, equally useless results from Google. Quickly learned that if Kagi can't answer a query, Google will fare no better (and will waste my time with junk). I'll note that to get local news, I do have to switch the region selector from "International" to "Portugal". Kagi doesn't have Google's behaviour of using my IP location. Which is good. Getting international results from Google is a struggle.
  - mdhen 3y ago
    Been using kagi for awhile, also in Portugal. Google shopping is the one thing that Kagi can't beat them at yet. If i'm looking to buy a product online not from amazon it's still the best option.
- anneessens 3y ago
  I don't know what you're searching for, but I'm also from EU and I'm able to use Kagi for everything, including content from my own country. Sometimes I might have to change the country or language filter, but I've never had a situation where something was available on Google but wasn't available on Kagi. Nowadays, I'm only using Google for some quick answers, like showing the score of a football match or the population of a country. Kagi doesn't seem to support quick answers for these queries yet, although I have seen quick answers for weather, calculations and shipping and flight tracking. So I'm sure more quick answers will be added eventually.

tastyminerals2 3y ago

Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.

stavros 3y ago
Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it returns something than if it returns nothing.
- elaus 3y ago
  If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of reading through pages of irrelevant search results.
  - dewey 3y ago
    I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.
    - internetter 3y ago
      This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such
  - thuruv 3y ago
    Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.
  - deliriumchn 3y ago
    if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.

hansonpeter 3y ago

[dead]

raffraffraff 3y ago

Great to see continued improvements. One area where I continue to use google is specific local information, like opening hours, commute timetables. Try these two searches in Google and Kagi to compare: "train from Galway to Dublin" "Ilac shopping centre opening hours" Kagi gives you a bunch of links that might be absolutely trash, if the service provider (eg: rail company) has a shitty website. Google gives you precisely what you're looking for, eg: a table of departure/arrival times for the next 5 trains, with a date picker. It can even handle the atrocious TFI (transport for ireland) car-crash, providing me with the precise info I need to get a bus from one part of Dublin to another. You can't even get that with the official TFI app, and they notoriously block access to their data API (breaking the only decent Play Store app for buses in the city) I'm not sure if this is because Google have a budget for curated content like this, or if they have some magic way to extract that data without making a balls of it.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
So funny these are almost the exact two usecases I mentioned in my comment.
ambigious7777 3y ago
I can't imagine the black magic they have to do to scrape that data.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> or if they have some magic way to extract that data without making a balls of it. They have a system where public transport operators can upload their routes in a specific and quite complicated file format. Google does not integrate any public transit unless the authorised organisation uploads the data to them.

Einenlum 3y ago

Whether we like it and use it or not (I love it and use it), I think we can only be super impressed by the productivity of the Kagi team. Look at these dates. It's insane.

xigoi 3y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to them using Crystal for the backend.
- _aaed 3y ago
  It's a general purpose programming language like any other mainstream language.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Being a statically typed variant of Ruby, it’s well suited for fast development without making a mess.
- ksec 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised it make huge difference. I would like to point to [1] compmike's comment. You get 80% Ruby along with Types benefit plus many Times the RUNTIME speed improvement. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216786
Semaphor 3y ago
I’m actually currently pretty annoyed with them, as it’s been over 2 weeks of non-English searches being borderline-broken [0] with no feedback or ETA. [0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-english-results-given-too-much-preference https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-english-results-given-too-mu...
- kristofferR 3y ago
  You aren't using the correct language though, you are on International. Local language searches has improved vastly lately. Now I can just keep it on my local language, even while doing English searches. Previously I had to switch between national and international all the time, that was a pain.

souvlakee 3y ago

Kagi is good, but they claim they're faster than others, but it depends. In my country, Cyprus (I know nobody cares), it's significantly slower than Google, so I decided to stick with a classic.

GrumpySloth 3y ago
Same in Poland. I suspect they’re generally slower in Europe than US due to location of servers.
- jpalomaki 3y ago
  At least according to status page [1] they have locations in Europe, US and Asia. Haven't noticed any speed issues in Finland. [1] https://status.kagi.com/ https://status.kagi.com/
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  They have deployed to multiple datacenters, your nearest one should be eu-west. You can see the datacenter where you connect to by opening the drawer on the right by clicking on the settings icon in the top right, and at the bottom is the datacenter location + the latency to it. Maybe you could open an issue in kagifeedback, as they listen to the feedback, and for example deployed to south america because someone complained https://kagifeedback.org/d/2347-creation-of-new-server-in-south-america https://kagifeedback.org/d/2347-creation-of-new-server-in-so... Region list: https://status.kagi.com/ https://status.kagi.com/
yowayb 3y ago
No speed issues in Turkiye for me
freediver 3y ago
Can you report this to kagifeedback.org so we can dig deeper?

GrumpySloth 3y ago

I’ve been using Kagi for a while. Unfortunately, its website on mobile is much lower quality than say DDG. One issue I find often is that when I want to edit a previously-entered query in the search box, sliding the text cursor is very hard – it often stops at search box boundary and doesn’t scroll the text inside. Another is that sometimes the search results page freezes after I come back to it from a different tab. When I try to scroll, it refuses to scroll and only briefly shows some white space around the currently-viewed part. I blame all those on some JS that’s too creative for its own good. Aside from that, I wish Safari had a setting to add custom search URLs, so that I can paste my Kagi auth token, instead of having to use xxSearch, which also has some annoyances. Obviously, this part is not Kagi’s fault. I’ve stopped using Kagi on mobile and went back to DDG. It’s still stellar on desktop though.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
They’ve got a new “blessed” method, which involves installing their custom Safari extension, which redirects. It works fairly well. Obviously not as good as Apple just not having a whitelist of search providers.
- GrumpySloth 3y ago
  I’ve used it, but it often failed to redirect my searches. It was hit-and-miss. xxSearch works better.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> Obviously, this part is not Kagi’s fault. It is totally their fault. They should release a Kagi App for iOS and be done with it. No normal person is going to mess with hacky extensions and permissions to pay for a search engine. If I can tell people to download the Kagi App and search from there, all of my friends and acquaintances would be able to use it and probably happy to pay.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  They actually have the Orion Browser - though personally I found it a bit rough on the edges so I'm fine with stock Safari + the Kagi extension. I do agree that they should just release a Kagi app - or even better, just rename Orion to "Kagi browser" and have Kagi as a first-class citizen (with account login).

gtirloni 3y ago

Kagi's domain block list is worth the subscription alone.

7839284023 3y ago
If you just want a domain block list, you could use https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Nice! It works pretty well and the subscription lists are a great feature. Thanks for suggesting it. I was able to import all the block rules from Kagi there. At least for blocking it's great but I also lower/raise results in Kagi so that's a bit harder for this extension. Still like Kagi better for the results (especially technical stuff), but I do still use Google for regional/news/shopping searches or things where Google Search behaves more like an assistant. I think this is an area where Kagi will have some trouble competing because of Google's data moat and the fact they have been honing non-web integrations for a long time. This long tail must be 90% of the job.

altgans 3y ago

How does Kagi fare for scholarly use-cases? Ie. searching articles, papers, citations?

bluish29 3y ago
Do you mean Kagi search function or their LLM? If it is the former, I use it as a daily driver and I do a lot of scholarly work and I rarely felt the need to switch to something else. Maybe sometimes I go to google scholar itself (not google search) but this again wouldn't be different from using google search itself.
mastercheif 3y ago
Amazing. You can use the website ranking feature to boost results from certain domains ie. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago

Kagi is good, I’ve been an unlimited subscriber for a while. Two low hanging fruit opportunities though: 1. Location based or aware searching - it keeps giving me the UK versions of storefronts or the identically-named steakhouse a thousand miles away and not the one I can walk to. Kind of lame, particularly giving me random countries’ versions of sites. 2. The map — maybe this is a setting, but the map always gives me nearly useless results. This is probably tied to geolocation or location aware results.

wrboyce 3y ago
One of my main complaints (aside how bad the iOS extension is, but I guess Apple can shoulder most of the blame there) is that I often get US storefronts despite using the "United Kingdom (GB)" region. How odd! I even get amazon.com results, but never amazon.co.uk.
- brookst 3y ago
  The iOS extension has a kludgey install, but it works perfectly for me. Did the weird stuff once, never had to think about it again , and all I get are Kagi results.
  - wrboyce 3y ago
    I've had to disable it since a recent update as it broke the "!g" bang which I still occasionally find useful. It seems to insist on intercepting Google searches even when I explicitly use Google. It also ruins the UX of the address/search bar somewhat (my search term becomes a Kagi URL so is less easily editable), but that is Apple's fault.
    - bootsmann 3y ago
      Switched to using duckduckgo as the proxy search engine you have to select, now it works fine for me.
      - 3y ago

api 3y ago

Kagi has been my go to for some time now. For the past few months I rarely consult others. I’d say toward the end of 2023 we passed the inflection point where Google is now generally worse. In fact these days Google is often worse or at least no better than Bing and DuckDuckGo. Kagi is better than all of them. It seems like the Internet being winner take all is only part of the story. The reality is winner takes all, then turns to shit, then an unbundling occurs.

aryonoco 3y ago

Another addition, those on Duobor Family plans can now upgrade individual accounts within the Family to Ultimate. I always wanted to try Ultimate but I was in a Duo account with my wife so it wasn't really possible. Now I can, and trying out all those LLMs is fun!

freedomben 3y ago

> In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer: This is the type of attention to detail that makes me a happy user. Killer feature for me, no more having to type !quick (and yes I set up quick bangs but always seem to forget). I have been really pleased with Kagi, though I do live in perpetual fear that they'll be acquired. Please no. And God help us if Apple acquires them, which seems like a risk given Kagi's great work on search and AI, two things Apple really wants. Don't do it Kagi!

lolinder 3y ago
The founder has previously said that they're bootstrapped specifically so that they don't have to chase an exit to get a return for investors. Obviously that doesn't mean they won't change their minds at some point, but it does give a lot of comfort.
- hmnd0 3y ago
  Technically not 100% bootstrapped anymore as of last year. They raised a $670k SAFE round in June [1]. But they're being cautious with it, so I'm optimistic. I'm still a happy supporter and user. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
berdon 3y ago
I also live in this fear and have specifically communicated it to Vlad in an email before. He gave the same response as one of your other responders - they have no intention of selling. Of course, that's the only answer any successful founder would give you...so I still live in fear :(
- freediver 3y ago
  Kagi founder here. I wake up every morning loving my job, our member community, our mission and the change we make in the world. We are basicallly sustainable at this point and I am in awe of the opportunities in front of us as a user-centric company, bringing a friendly version of the internet to homes worldwide. Things are looking good, we have no plans to change any of that.

mattbaker 3y ago

I’ve been using Kagi full time and I like it a lot. It’s been worth the price. I expected to like lenses and favoring/blocking specific domains. What I didn’t expect was how much their “Quick Answer” would change how I search. I’ve been “AI hesitant”, in general the chance that an LLM will hallucinate makes these kinds of tools more trouble than they’re worth for me personally. In Kagi’s case, though, the individual facts it states in the quick answers have citations linking to the site it drew that information from. Here’s what I’ve found: - it’s been accurate most of the time, but not 100% (as expected) - citations are pretty accurate most of the time - every so often the citation links to a page that seemingly doesn’t back the claim in the quick answer Unsurprisingly, I don’t trust the AI generated quick answer in isolation, what it does do is let me scan a few paragraphs, find the one that answers my question most specifically, and visit the sites it links to as citations for that piece of the answer. This saves me the time of clicking through the top $N results and scanning each page to find the one that seems to answer my query most directly. It’s like a layer on top of the page rank. I remember using Google the first time and being impressed how the top answers were so much more relevant than Yahoo, it was a huge time saver. Now I find myself wondering if the “quick answer” citations will prove to be a similar jump in accelerating my ability to find the right web page. It also makes me wonder if their own page rank algorithm could incorporate the quick answer output as an input to a site’s rank? That would be an interesting experiment!

freedomben 3y ago
Same experience with quick answer. I originally thought of it as a gimmick, but it's really changed the way I search now. The summaries are good, and the citations are amazing. I (nearly) always click through to the cited sites to decide how much I trust them, but the vast majority of the time the summary is spot on and extremely helpful. On a side note, as a software dev I was curious about how it would "answer" queries that weren't questions, so I've tried feeding it queries like "linux distro" or other things that are most certainly not questions. About half the time it does a pretty good job at answering! For the really hard ones, it seems to just morph it into "what is <query>?" so nothing real complicated, but I did find it interesting.
joshuakogut 3y ago

mortallywounded 3y ago

It's really cool to see a search engine alternative. I wonder about the practicality in the wake of large language models? It would seem almost easier to build a model that acts as a search engine than to build a traditional search engine.

aomix 3y ago

I really need to try Kagi out this weekend. Whenever I try to change search engines I hit the same wall in that ~20 years of Google has trained me to think in terms of their search algorithm when searching.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

I switched full time from Google to Kagi last month and it's been an improvement, or at worst a neutral change. There was a frustrating period of adjustment as I had to learn what Kagi's limitations and quirks were. Google has them too but I've long since learned how to compensate for them. Now I know Kagi's. These integrations with other services and specific data are remarkably useful. Glad to see more! One weak spot of Kagi for me is their local / maps search. It's Apple Maps which is still not as good as Google Maps. But moreso Google Local has become a very strong product with a unique database. Nothing stopping me from using Google for local business info when I need it though.

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
I wish services like Kagi and others would make it easier to contribute to OSM so more people would update places information (like business names, opening hours, etc). It doesn't help to rely on Apple Maps when everyone can contribute to OSM directly. It's also easy to make it accessible enough (but not to much to avoid trolls) just to increase OSM contributors base. That's what Kagi does with their Wikipedia oneboxes and I regularly open the article to correct it when I notice an issue. I wish Kago (and others) would do that with places, so we can avoid opening the Maps tab to have quick place info.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Disagree. It is up to the businesses to send their up to date information to map providers, because it is in their direct interest that customers find them. If they're too lazy and cheap to do that, then it is their problem that they get fewer customers. They shouldn't rely on free labour and you shouldn't do this for free for them. If they don't know how to put their info on a map, then they should hire an agency that does. Imagine being a business owner and ignoring the very basics...
  - thiht 3y ago
    Business owners: "everyone uses Google Maps". That’s it.

Zelphyr 3y ago

As an aside, and I said this in a thread yesterday but, what I'm hearing about Kagi (I've not used it yet but I'm signing up today to try it out) and the contrast between the Sora and Gemini 1.5 announcements make me genuinely concerned about the future of Google. Search is so much their golden goose and they've let it languish and now there are real dangers to that product from several flanks. They have Gmail after that but is that enough to keep the coffers full? I had so much hope in Google Workspace as competition to Microsoft 365 but even that is in trouble if you ask me. I've been helping a company migrate from Workspace to M365 and one of their reasons was because they couldn't get any support from Google. Also, Workspace is hard to use. Not that M365 is easy, or that their support is any good but, Google has clear perception problems here. I almost never hear of anyone talking about GCP anymore so I'm guessing they're losing mindshare in addition to market share. Dart and Flutter are wonderful projects but it seems to me that since there's no way to stick ads on them, Google is content to give that department a little money and let them do their thing. But, of course, when some of the aforementioned products start losing more money, great products like Dart and Flutter will certainly be cut. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe Google's time has come and companies like Kagi can come in and fill the void Google seems hell-bent on leaving behind.

williamstein 3y ago
“Even though Microsoft (with 23% of the market) and Google (with 10%) each gained just one percentage point of market share year-on-year, that’s more than AWS can claim, which continued to hover around 32% market share.”. https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/microsoft-and-google-inch-closer-to-aws-in-q1-cloud-market/2023/05/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/microsoft-and-googl...
moneywoes 3y ago
How would you contrast the Gemini 1.5 and Sora announcements?
- digging 3y ago
  Summarizing what I read in the threads the other day, Gemini 1.5 was "announced" and you can't use it or see what it really does, it's just "better". (Admittedly, the context length sounds incredible, but we can't really test it and hype only works when there are no alternatives.) Sora then dropped immediately afterward and was showing numerous really impressive demos and then taking user requests all day.

kagiftw 3y ago

About a month ago I noticed I could no longer use Kagi search from Firefox 78 esr on an aging OSX 10.9.5 laptop I like to use due to a Javascript problem. GitHub's directory view also seemed to stop working on it about the same time with the same tell-tale Javascript error. The latest Firefox ESR I can run on my old laptop doesn't like ??= and some other newer JS syntax. I see this sort of problem in my own daily development and I know with tools like esbuild you can simply specify --target=firefox78 and end up JS that works fine on older yet perfectly working hardware. So what does this have to do with Kagi? Well after a bit of looking around I found https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org and reported the issue [1]. A day or so later Vlad triaged it and it was fixed within the next few days. A month later the problem reappeared in another place[2], Vlad triaged it again and it was promptly fixed. Needless to say I'm very impressed with attention Vlad and people at Kagi give to problems and the effort they spend improving their product. Makes me want to learn Crystal :-) 1- https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-longer-works-on-firefox-esr https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-lon... 2- https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-give-js-error-previously-fixed-but-happening-again https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-g...

rtev 3y ago

Yahoo returns thousands of results for dorking queries where Kagi and Google return an identical list of 5-6 results. Pretty disappointing for me as a paying customer to learn that Kagi is basically a Google wrapper

strogonoff 3y ago

What do I need from a search engine? Not an LLM chatbot, not any of the auxiliary “smart” stuff. I want customizable results, and to be able to jump into searching quickly and intuitively. (Decent results, sure, but that is subjective.) So, a big reason I was using DDG over Google, despite often subpar results, was bangs. Now I pay for Kagi, and guess what convinced me to subscribe? Bangs indicate caring about power users. How cool would it be if I could set Kagi as default search in any browser and get powerful shortcuts at my fingertips across all devices? Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after (not before). If you don’t do it just right, you’ll just be on Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought. I’m sure I’m in a minority but I swear, if Kagi is not going to make bangs work properly soon, I’m not renewing. If you do emulate DDG, go all the way, otherwise it’s just taunting your users… /rant

berdon 3y ago
What? My !bangs work as a prefix to my query. I didn't even know you could append them and have that work.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  it seems the parent user either wants to put the bang in the middle of the query or does not want to put a space in. !yt cat videos (works) cat videos !yt (works) cat !yt videos (not working) cat videos!yt (not working) I always prefix but I did that on ddg too, because chromium's tab search thingy has trained me to do it.
  - wiether 3y ago
    From a programmatic and practical point of view, I don't understand why would someone want to put a bang in the middle of a request or within a word. Basically you have your request and you add a criteria on it, not in it. It's like ordering at a restaurant : you wouldn't say "I'll have a burger to take away, some fries and a coke". You either specify how you'll have your order before or after the actual order. And you don't create a new word like "a cokedinein". Furthermore, I want Kagi to be able to reply to the request "how do the !g bang works?"; if I want something else to reply, I'll add the relevant bang around my request. Or I'm missing something?

doakes 3y ago

I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but it was missing a couple things I use on Google. Maybe someone knows if there's a way to achieve the following: 1) Sports schedules and scores; i.e. searching "nba" or "nfl" 2) Local business hours; i.e. searching "walmart" gives the hours of my local Walmart

carlosjobim 3y ago
Google has local business hours because businesses provide them with this information. Kagi needs to purchase this data from Google if they need it, because businesses will only play ball with Google and in rare cases with Apple. As for sports schedules and scores, I've seen this request a lot, but don't you have any dedicated website that you can bookmark for that?
drewbitt 3y ago
I just do the google !g bang or !espn for sports. That said, if you look up an individual team Kagi will usually show their last games and results on the right

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

I'm using Kagi since November, and they have improved a lot since then. Moving really fast!

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

I wish the maps functionality was better. When I want to find directions to a place, or see how long it will take me, the easiest thing to do it "cmd+L cmd+V" or "highlight --> right-click --> search for ____", but with kagi set as my default search, the UX is terrible. The top results are often for zillow or similar, instead of a map, and when it shows a map, it's many clicks and slow loads to get directions.

drewbitt 3y ago
Search with `!gm` to go to Google Maps.

Sikul 3y ago

Thanks Kagi team. It's really cool to see a search engine change in positive ways!