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As a user of Kagi and search.marginalia.nu I can tell you: Quite a bit. So much that now that I have what "everyone" asked Google for for years - that is blac

As a user of Kagi and search.marginalia.nu I can tell you: Quite a bit. So much that now that I have what "everyone" asked Google for for years - that is blacklists - I hardly use them. Why? Because with Kagi I get much better results out of the box. I am fairly sure Googlers will tell me there are multiple safeguards to prevent the inclusion of Google ads from affecting ranking, to which I just have to say that the results speak for themselves. Please note: I have only used Kagi for two years. I am only one user. But I am a user with 20 years of experience with Google and that got to count for something.

abhijat 2y ago
I switched to Kagi in June last year. I just realized I tried it initially because I wanted to try out blocking sites in search results, and I have only ever needed to block three domains.
- eitland 2y ago
  Thats exactly what I am talking about. Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking ... but also: - more modern - more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot) - blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower) - with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes - no tracking
  - nolist_policy 2y ago
    Is it only me or do these constant Kagi ads on HN sound fishy?
    - ysavir 2y ago
      I wouldn't necessarily call them fishy, but I am very tired of them. They have a very evangelizing tone. But I think they're ultimately just people excited about the tool they're using and wanting to share it with others.
    - drpossum 2y ago
      Maybe they're not ads but people who genuinely like the service?
    - mannycalavera42 2y ago
      kagi is the new crossfit
    - epr 2y ago
      Did we not all evangelize Google in it's early days? Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.
      - orangevelcro 2y ago
        I don't know...my spidey sense has been going off a bit. Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google. Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.
        eitland 2y ago
        Go check my history. Send me a mail and I'll send a photo of the fields and the wind breaks here that you can geolocate. I am definitely not a bot. I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).
    - breakfastduck 2y ago
      Google Search being a bit rubbish has been in the zeitgeist for a while, it's not surprising that people then talk about an alternative they've found that is much better in their experience
    - tomrod 2y ago
      I took a screenshot years ago where 10/14 of the viewable top headlines on my screen where positive Google discussion. From an advertising perspective it was all earned marketing (satisfied customers speaking highly). While these situations could be a pg-style astroturf submarine, or they could be satisfied customers (the best kind of advertising), I wouldn't necessarily say fishy (you can look at the satisfied users' previous contributions to make that judgment yourself! :)). Personally, I've not used Kagi, but I hear positive things from people I trust that use it. So I'll likely try it in the future.
    - danielheath 2y ago
      It’s not surprising that folks who pay for a service when there’s a free alternative are pretty serious fans.
    - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
      I never say it but here it is: for the price of 2 packs of cookies, I went from being a 1x programmer to a 1.5x programmer without doing anything. If the results are good, it’s good for me and my job which brings me way more money and satisfaction than $10. The alternative is Searx and I may try it sometimes, but so far Kagi is cheap and very efficient for me (C++ coding and other languages).
  - dustincoates 2y ago
    I like Kagi a lot (just look at my comment history), but I'm letting my subscription lapse when it comes time to renew. I've found myself going to Google a lot more often, and I'm finding more and more transparently spammy sites in the Kagin index. Some, for example, are clearly Gen AI created. If I were a rich man, I would probably keep my subscription just to support a Google competitor. Alas, I'm not, and so I'll be going back to Google.
    - eitland 2y ago
      I see your point. I was not always this well paid. Did you try blocking the problematic sites and if it didn't work, did you file support requests?
      - dustincoates 2y ago
        I didn't block them, because they were rarely the same site repeatedly, so I'm not sure it would help. I didn't on support requests, either, perhaps I should. I have before, and the team did a great job at addressing what wasn't working.
    - freediver 2y ago
      Have you reported any of this to Kagi? (things that are reported usually get fixed)
  - elorant 2y ago
    I use FastGPT quite often although I’m not a subscriber to Kagi itself. For me it’s everything an AI search engine should be. Here is your answer, and here are a bunch of links to research further. Something that works without making the web obsolete. Not like the walled off garden of OpenAi which often hallucinates links, or Google’s “I through everything at the wall to find what sticks” effort.
Nevolihs 2y ago
I actually use pinning, blocking and raising/lowering the value of individual sites every day. I wish this is the direction search engines went in the first place and it's the direction I hope Kagi continues. I want a personalized search engine that's personalized by me, not by a company trying to profile me and make money off of my clicks.
- eitland 2y ago
  I am all for Kagi keeping that feature. If for nothing else then to rub it in the face of every googler who have argued that it was impossible. And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around. I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  When each user can personalize the results themselves, you make SEO completely impractical because they can no longer target a single monolithic algorithm controled by one entity. Websites would actually have to have organic appeal to users, who get the final say to hide away bad sites from the results page (looking at you, Quora, Pinterest, and Fandom).
beeboobaa3 2y ago
Is kagi good for finding things like old forum posts (not reddit)? I know some of those sites are still up but google seems to ignore them.
- stuffoverflow 2y ago
  In my experience kagi is decent, definitely gives more forum results than google. I've found yandex to be the best at finding all kinds of forum /discussion sites.
- eitland 2y ago
  There is a seperate "lens" (think like "images", "videos" and "news" in Google, only there are more and you can create your own) for "Small Web" which only includes what they describe as "Results that favor noncommercial domains and topics". (Other standard lenses include - Forums - Fediverse forums - Usenet/archive and I think 7 others.)
- nalinidash 2y ago
  Try search.marginalia.nu From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
amelius 2y ago
How do you know that Kagi won't become as bad as Google at some point?
- breakfastduck 2y ago
  We don't, but a model where a user pays for a service rather than being free and ad supported is significantly less likely to enact user unfriendly changes. If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
  - glitchc 2y ago
    Tell that to cable companies, sports broadcasts and now streaming services. The one incontrovertible fact of modern society is that ads eat everything else. No other revenue source compares.
    - karma_pharmer 2y ago
      ads eat everything else Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc. We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
      - sseagull 2y ago
        Partly. But also because it's just a way to make more money. If you make X from payments, and you can make Y from ads, then X+Y > X. You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.
        glitchc 2y ago
        Also because Y>>X.
esperent 2y ago
Kagi is worth the money, but it isn't magic. It's about as good as Google was ~five years ago, before they made all the search operators stop work. There's also a whole bunch of things it's worse at that Google - especially local search and shopping. Plus I still get plenty of blogspam and AI generated crap from Kagi.
- mozman 2y ago
  The search operators makes big difference in result quality, I also don’t like how Google now returns zero results for something obscure. In the past I could find something peripheral and eventually get to what I was looking for.
  - orangevelcro 2y ago
    Exactly! It's so frustrating because the results were usually useful enough to at least point me in the right direction or help me figure out what I was doing wrong to find what I wanted.
karma_pharmer 2y ago
Kagi is simply reselling google search results.
- super256 2y ago
  They do more than that: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
  - karma_pharmer 2y ago
    Then why does kagi have the same artificially-massive github boost that google does and no other engine (bing, duckduckgo) does? They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.
    - eitland 2y ago
      Because that is what most of us prefer? Or at least I thought so? But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.
      - karma_pharmer 2y ago
        > Because that is what most of us prefer? If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it? The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.
- ptman 2y ago
  They have many sources https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
  - karma_pharmer 2y ago
scutrell 2y ago
I was excited to try Kagi, but I couldn't justify the cost. I find DDG with the occasional Google search to function almost as well. I'll try Kagi again at some point, but it wasn't the panacea people here made it out to be
packetlost 2y ago
I dunno, the first thing I did was blacklist G**ksf*rG**ks from my search results (and others, of course) and I couldn't be happier.
p3rls 2y ago
Kagi is the same garbage as google in my niche. Even worse, maybe. It looks like it's weighing backlinks and SEO garbage even higher. Well done. I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.
- eitland 2y ago
  Well, don't use it then. I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
  - p3rls 2y ago
    I won't use it. I am pushing back on your belief that it has figured something out about anything, because to me it looks like Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse. I have total shit ranking #1 on Kagi and Google. On other pages I am struggling to break into the top 10 where I should be right under wikipedia in a just world. I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned. Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
    - bitcharmer 2y ago
      > Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
      - p3rls 2y ago
        > And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all. I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then

abhijat 2y ago

I switched to Kagi in June last year. I just realized I tried it initially because I wanted to try out blocking sites in search results, and I have only ever needed to block three domains.

eitland 2y ago
Thats exactly what I am talking about. Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking ... but also: - more modern - more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot) - blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower) - with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes - no tracking
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  Is it only me or do these constant Kagi ads on HN sound fishy?
  - ysavir 2y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily call them fishy, but I am very tired of them. They have a very evangelizing tone. But I think they're ultimately just people excited about the tool they're using and wanting to share it with others.
  - drpossum 2y ago
    Maybe they're not ads but people who genuinely like the service?
  - mannycalavera42 2y ago
    kagi is the new crossfit
  - epr 2y ago
    Did we not all evangelize Google in it's early days? Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.
    - orangevelcro 2y ago
      I don't know...my spidey sense has been going off a bit. Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google. Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.
      - eitland 2y ago
        Go check my history. Send me a mail and I'll send a photo of the fields and the wind breaks here that you can geolocate. I am definitely not a bot. I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).
  - breakfastduck 2y ago
    Google Search being a bit rubbish has been in the zeitgeist for a while, it's not surprising that people then talk about an alternative they've found that is much better in their experience
  - tomrod 2y ago
    I took a screenshot years ago where 10/14 of the viewable top headlines on my screen where positive Google discussion. From an advertising perspective it was all earned marketing (satisfied customers speaking highly). While these situations could be a pg-style astroturf submarine, or they could be satisfied customers (the best kind of advertising), I wouldn't necessarily say fishy (you can look at the satisfied users' previous contributions to make that judgment yourself! :)). Personally, I've not used Kagi, but I hear positive things from people I trust that use it. So I'll likely try it in the future.
  - danielheath 2y ago
    It’s not surprising that folks who pay for a service when there’s a free alternative are pretty serious fans.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    I never say it but here it is: for the price of 2 packs of cookies, I went from being a 1x programmer to a 1.5x programmer without doing anything. If the results are good, it’s good for me and my job which brings me way more money and satisfaction than $10. The alternative is Searx and I may try it sometimes, but so far Kagi is cheap and very efficient for me (C++ coding and other languages).
- dustincoates 2y ago
  I like Kagi a lot (just look at my comment history), but I'm letting my subscription lapse when it comes time to renew. I've found myself going to Google a lot more often, and I'm finding more and more transparently spammy sites in the Kagin index. Some, for example, are clearly Gen AI created. If I were a rich man, I would probably keep my subscription just to support a Google competitor. Alas, I'm not, and so I'll be going back to Google.
  - eitland 2y ago
    I see your point. I was not always this well paid. Did you try blocking the problematic sites and if it didn't work, did you file support requests?
    - dustincoates 2y ago
      I didn't block them, because they were rarely the same site repeatedly, so I'm not sure it would help. I didn't on support requests, either, perhaps I should. I have before, and the team did a great job at addressing what wasn't working.
  - freediver 2y ago
    Have you reported any of this to Kagi? (things that are reported usually get fixed)
- elorant 2y ago
  I use FastGPT quite often although I’m not a subscriber to Kagi itself. For me it’s everything an AI search engine should be. Here is your answer, and here are a bunch of links to research further. Something that works without making the web obsolete. Not like the walled off garden of OpenAi which often hallucinates links, or Google’s “I through everything at the wall to find what sticks” effort.

Nevolihs 2y ago

I actually use pinning, blocking and raising/lowering the value of individual sites every day. I wish this is the direction search engines went in the first place and it's the direction I hope Kagi continues. I want a personalized search engine that's personalized by me, not by a company trying to profile me and make money off of my clicks.

eitland 2y ago
I am all for Kagi keeping that feature. If for nothing else then to rub it in the face of every googler who have argued that it was impossible. And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around. I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.
the_snooze 2y ago
When each user can personalize the results themselves, you make SEO completely impractical because they can no longer target a single monolithic algorithm controled by one entity. Websites would actually have to have organic appeal to users, who get the final say to hide away bad sites from the results page (looking at you, Quora, Pinterest, and Fandom).

beeboobaa3 2y ago

Is kagi good for finding things like old forum posts (not reddit)? I know some of those sites are still up but google seems to ignore them.

stuffoverflow 2y ago
In my experience kagi is decent, definitely gives more forum results than google. I've found yandex to be the best at finding all kinds of forum /discussion sites.
eitland 2y ago
There is a seperate "lens" (think like "images", "videos" and "news" in Google, only there are more and you can create your own) for "Small Web" which only includes what they describe as "Results that favor noncommercial domains and topics". (Other standard lenses include - Forums - Fediverse forums - Usenet/archive and I think 7 others.)
nalinidash 2y ago
Try search.marginalia.nu From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

amelius 2y ago

How do you know that Kagi won't become as bad as Google at some point?

breakfastduck 2y ago
We don't, but a model where a user pays for a service rather than being free and ad supported is significantly less likely to enact user unfriendly changes. If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
- glitchc 2y ago
  Tell that to cable companies, sports broadcasts and now streaming services. The one incontrovertible fact of modern society is that ads eat everything else. No other revenue source compares.
  - karma_pharmer 2y ago
    ads eat everything else Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc. We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
    - sseagull 2y ago
      Partly. But also because it's just a way to make more money. If you make X from payments, and you can make Y from ads, then X+Y > X. You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.
      - glitchc 2y ago
        Also because Y>>X.

esperent 2y ago

Kagi is worth the money, but it isn't magic. It's about as good as Google was ~five years ago, before they made all the search operators stop work. There's also a whole bunch of things it's worse at that Google - especially local search and shopping. Plus I still get plenty of blogspam and AI generated crap from Kagi.

mozman 2y ago
The search operators makes big difference in result quality, I also don’t like how Google now returns zero results for something obscure. In the past I could find something peripheral and eventually get to what I was looking for.
- orangevelcro 2y ago
  Exactly! It's so frustrating because the results were usually useful enough to at least point me in the right direction or help me figure out what I was doing wrong to find what I wanted.

karma_pharmer 2y ago

Kagi is simply reselling google search results.

super256 2y ago
They do more than that: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- karma_pharmer 2y ago
  Then why does kagi have the same artificially-massive github boost that google does and no other engine (bing, duckduckgo) does? They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.
  - eitland 2y ago
    Because that is what most of us prefer? Or at least I thought so? But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.
    - karma_pharmer 2y ago
      > Because that is what most of us prefer? If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it? The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.
ptman 2y ago
They have many sources https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- karma_pharmer 2y ago

scutrell 2y ago

I was excited to try Kagi, but I couldn't justify the cost. I find DDG with the occasional Google search to function almost as well. I'll try Kagi again at some point, but it wasn't the panacea people here made it out to be

packetlost 2y ago

I dunno, the first thing I did was blacklist G**ksf*rG**ks from my search results (and others, of course) and I couldn't be happier.

p3rls 2y ago

Kagi is the same garbage as google in my niche. Even worse, maybe. It looks like it's weighing backlinks and SEO garbage even higher. Well done. I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.

eitland 2y ago
Well, don't use it then. I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
- p3rls 2y ago
  I won't use it. I am pushing back on your belief that it has figured something out about anything, because to me it looks like Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse. I have total shit ranking #1 on Kagi and Google. On other pages I am struggling to break into the top 10 where I should be right under wikipedia in a just world. I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned. Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
  - bitcharmer 2y ago
    > Kagi takes Google's results and then makes them worse And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
    - p3rls 2y ago
      > And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all. I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then