13 ms·

Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

253 points by sbeckeriv 2y ago

ldayley 2y ago
I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing with less tech-savvy peers than most mainstream media explainers on this subject! Edit: wording Edit 2: Can you imagine a world where Google's Internet Search Index is legally considered an "Essential Facility"!? https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/ https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/
- pennybanks 2y ago
  i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free
  - baggachipz 2y ago
    Then you don't understand what you're getting. If you want to be targeted and misled by opposing incentives, that's on you.
  - jbaber 2y ago
    Nothing stopping you from trying for one month to confirm.
  - NetOpWibby 2y ago
    You get what you pay for
  - aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
    The other three answers to your question were dumb, so I'll try to do better. Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches without requiring a credit card to sign up. Honest to god, try it. Just bookmark it and search once or twice when Google or Bing is giving you meh results. As an engineer... googling for stuff is a good fraction of your job. It's quite reasonable to pay to improve that experience. The only real question is what is reasonable to pay.
    - orhmeh09 2y ago
      I don't think it's that amazing for an engineer. Google is much better if you're looking for things related to Intel compilers, for example. Try searching for «intel ipo fuse-ld=lld icx» on both engines. Note: I am a paying Kagi customer
      - freediver 2y ago
        I did - and Kagi results look pretty darn good to me. What were you trying to point out?
  - endisneigh 2y ago
    You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site. Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).
  - enasterosophes 2y ago
    When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests. When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines which you already admitted are pretty good.
    - abcdefg12 2y ago
      I wonder if there are any big companies paying for kagi for their workers.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    Kagi allows you to permanently blacklist Pinterest from appearing in any search ever. It also gives you exactly what you ask for. If you put words in quotes, you only get results matching that phrase. Same with +- modifiers, and all the other "advanced" search operators. Meanwhile on any free engine, they often completely ignore your query to show you unrelated SEO slop. You can completely forget modifiers and advanced queried, they aren't even parsed. About the only thing that still works is the site: modifier. And I'm pretty sure they only keep that because 40% of google searches include site:reddit As well, if Kagi can't find a result for your query, it returns nothing. Try searching something incredibly obscure on google or DDG. You get pages upon pages of results and they're all useless garbage or just straight up ads disguised as results. That's why I pay for Kagi. It stays the hell out of my way and only gives me exactly what I ask for and absolutely nothing else.
- somethoughts 2y ago
  I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services. Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services. Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to: - IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google) - Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt - The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers
  - squiggy22 2y ago
    I'd argue the minute they turn to an advertising model that subscriptions would churn overnight, but in the same vein as the don't be evil motto being dropped I nod at the scepticism.
poikroequ 2y ago
> Apple has stated that Bing does not match Google’s search result quality, and they are unwilling to compromise on user experience by offering subpar results. I wouldn't take this statement at face value. This is most likely a BS PR excuse for Apple to maintain their current deal with Google. I wouldn't expect anything less from any large corporation looking to protect $20 billion in annual revenue.
- jpc0 2y ago
  Universally every single time I've used bing, including this week. My response was to scroll through the entire first oage of results, swear, open google and with the exact same search params what I wanted was the first result. Bing is objectively worse.
  - xipho 2y ago
    Use DDG (Bing), append `!g` after you get nothing and search again? Do this with many many different `!`.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    Maybe Bing is managed by the same people that haven't managed to get Windows search right despite trying for many, many years?
- skinkestek 2y ago
  Last I tried at least: - Current Google was bad compared to original Google (it ignores my keywords, even if I use doublequotes and verbatim) - DuckDuckGo and Bing managed to be worse - Kagi is like old Google
baggachipz 2y ago
This essentially advocates for the same thing defined in Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. That point being, requiring open protocols from big tech will enable competition and innovation. This will return the creative inspiration to the technologists. I completely agree with it, and I hope we are reaching an inflection point where walled data gardens are cracked open.
chrisweekly 2y ago
I switched from Google to DDG for default search a few years ago, and then to Kagi maybe 18 months ago. Kagi's simply excellent.
cube2222 2y ago
I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent! Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on. The quick assist triggered by a question mark at the end of a search query which makes a quick ai-generated summary of the few top results is something I use constantly. The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is also excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well. All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.
- baybayblonde 2y ago
  What is "Lenses", is it the Google Lens?
  - cube2222 2y ago
    Here's the docs[0]. It's basically a saved partial filter that you can use when searching. So you can e.g. say you only want to search reddit and have that saved as an easily-accessible button. But there's also predefined ones like "Forums" and "Academic", so that's the general idea. The cool thing is you can enable a Lens when using the AI assistant with internet access, so its searches are also constrained to that Lens. [0]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      It's essentially search-space limitation, based on what you want to nudge the engine into responding with. I.e. what power users used to do with Google, before it decided to ignore user intent
      - Brian_K_White 2y ago
        I don't know how you could ever do kagi small web with google. That's not a simple hard filter but changes what types of results are more or less preferred.
adamcharnock 2y ago
> The Google Search Index is a unique and irreplaceable resource within the digital ecosystem. Mandating fair access to it or treating it as an essential facility could address the core issues... The article estimates the Google Search Index at 12.5PB. If Kagi thinks that is a big enough moat to be the primary target then, well, I suppose they should know. But I'm also skeptical. You could fit that on about 50 Hetzner SX295, so about $20k/month. Plus the cost of gathering the data. It is surely a huge resource. But weighed against the combination of Google Search + AdWords + Android + YouTube + Chrome, all in a single company? To me a 12.5PB search index feels like small change in comparison. NB: Happy Kagi-paying customer here.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  This puts it in enough perspective for me to ask: why doesn’t a university create a public/open source search index? Seems like a way to get a ton of attention. Moreover, archive.org has all the data and data storage capabilities many times over. What prevents them from creating an open source search engine?
  - scroot 2y ago
    Or the Library of Congress, if it had the right appropriations. Google itself started with an NSF grant to explore the future of libraries.
- dmonitor 2y ago
  I assume that the major hurdle is not storing an equivalently-sized search index, but building one from scratch. Crawling takes time, and Google has had a many years head start.
  - pierrefermat1 2y ago
    Yes OP is hilariously out of touch, the storage would be sub 1% of total costs.
abtinf 2y ago
This is an extremely disappointing post. In the past, I’ve enthusiastically supported and advocated for Kagi. But Kagi advocating for using force to destroy its competitors is completely unacceptable to me and an admission that they do not believe they have a viable product. Antitrust law is arbitrary and evil. If you make more money than your competitors, you have undue market power. If you price below your competitors, you are dumping. If you price the same as your competitors, you are colluding. The whole thing is a naked power grab by politicians and inferior companies. This is a sad day. Kagi is the best thing that’s happened to the internet in the past decade. And now I have to stop my auto renew.
- freediver 2y ago
  > But Kagi advocating for using force to destroy its competitors is completely unacceptable to me Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, but that is not what the article advocates at all. The article is about what is best for the user given the circumstances, where all other proposed remedies have focused on how to hurt Google, which article argues to be counter-productive. The ruling has already been made and a remedy will be chosen whether we agree with the ruling or not - so which one is the best for the users? The solution that is proposed in the article would actually mean increased competition in the space, including to Kagi.
  - abtinf 2y ago
    You have benefited my life immensely, so I will take the time to write the most helpful response I can. *What is the nature of competition in the free market?* The premise that Google’s success constitutes a monopoly that must be dismantled to protect consumers is rooted in a flawed interpretation of the market and the moral principles governing it. In a free market, companies make money by offering the products and services demanded by customers. Google's dominance is not the result of coercion but its ability to meet customer demand effectively. Antitrust law declares that the choices of billions of individuals are wrong — not because those trading with the company have been treated unfairly (if they had, they wouldn’t have traded), but because those who know better through some mystical connection with the good declare it so using arbitrary standards. There have been many competitors to Google, with at least one of them extremely well funded. There are other massive internet-scale companies that could compete with Google, though they’ve often failed in past attempts. Punishing the owners of Google for its success is to punish the very qualities that drive progress and prosperity. You suggest that Google's control over the search index and its associated business models warrant government intervention to force “fair” access, because it would promote competition. Whatever else you mean by “fair”, you certainly don’t mean “terms that Google would find agreeable”. If one of the parties to a transaction is an unwilling participant, then it cannot be a fair transaction. We have names for this when the coercing party is anyone but the government: blackmail, protection rackets, theft, mugging, and so on. *What about property rights?* Simply put, Google’s indexes are the property of Google’s shareholders. Their property was created through decades of sustained investment and innovation. To force it to share its core technologies with competitors would be a gross violation of property rights—the very foundation of a free and productive society. Your proposal to treat Google’s search index as an "essential facility" that must be shared “fairly” is a call for expropriation—the forced redistribution of Google’s property for the benefit of those whose sole claim to it is that they have not earned it. The entire argument against Google is that they must be punished because they are successful. Kagi, even as a PBC, will one day be subject to the exact same arguments if it creates as much value as Google—someone will claim that some aspect of Kagi’s operations constitute a monopoly and Kagi should be forced to provide access to some data or service. *What does it mean for the government to intervene?* You claim consumers are harmed by the lack of choice in search experiences. Well, what about me? I love your product and pay for it. So do another 32,633 other subscribers. Apparently, we are free to choose your product, and I’m certain many of us advocate for your products to our friends and family. But your product isn’t for everyone. Maybe not even for most. If people want Google and free search, and no one’s rights are being violated, by what authority does anyone get to tell them they are wrong? Consumers choose Google because they think it meets their needs, not because they are coerced into using it. Government’s only tool is violence. It can force people to do something (rare, and usually ineffective), or force people to not do something (very common, and usually equally ineffective but with disastrous side effects). Government can’t create "more diverse competition" by forcing Google’s to share its property; competition is the result of companies striving to innovate and offer better products. Government can’t level the playing field by forcing the competitors to do better, it can only cut off the legs of the best players to bring them down to the level of the competition. Were your proposal for the Google index actually implement, I speculate it would be a few short years until you would see the government declare all other company’s indices to be illegal and subject to regulation--after all, if its a public good, then it must be supported and defended by the public against threats. I would expect to see forced mergers of other indices into the Google index. *What about non-moral arguments?* I’m not going to go into detail, but based on my education and extensive past research, in good faith I assert the following to be true: there are no documented instances of long-lasting monopolies that are not perpetuated by governments; every antitrust intervention has made consumers materially worse off; government interventions nearly always have the effect of significantly reducing competition. If you identify of a robust counter example to any of those claims, you could probably win a Nobel prize. *What could you do instead?* A judge has made an unjust ruling advancing an unjust law toward unjust ends--that doesn’t mean the conversation should shift to deciding on the best unjust punishments. That would be a contradiction: there is no such thing as the most-just-unjust punishment. You could continue your education and advocacy of the true cost of “free” search. Take out an OpEd in NYT hammering Apple’s duplicitous claims of being privacy respecting while sending every customer’s most intimate thoughts to the Google monstrosity by default. Demonstrate the cost to privacy. Demonstrate how your product exposes resources that are hidden by the search giants. Show people the super powers they can have for a modest fee. And build a better product. Hell, make a Kagi Phone—I’d preorder one even if it were years away from release—and free us from the Apple/Google hegemony.
moonlion_eth 2y ago
Paying kagi user. All day every day
endisneigh 2y ago
A smaller competitor wants and advocates for itself. Makes sense but is it really surprising? It would be strange otherwise. I do wonder how far one can get charging for search.
throwaway14356 2y ago
> Google has built a massive index of the internet that covers close to 100% of the accessible web. While their index (of other peoples stuff) is enormous it far from includes everything. It is easy to disqualify and people would be screaming if content farms would be included. What even is a content farm nowadays? One can return a reasonable article for any query with llms rich in links to other pages that don't exist but could be indexed and are part of the accessible web If you make a new website with a few thousand pages and a few thousand images it takes quite a while for google to pick up the entire thing, if it even bothers to. google tries to fill the result page with a small subset of websites. A good thing for users most of the time and the easiest ad money but horrible for new players. it use to be quite common for bloggers (and others) to follow everything written about them or of interest. google (blog search) and technorati were very useful for that kind of discovery. The average user might never have noticed that but when it was killed off the www stopped being a community. We can pretend the index is still there. If you cant get to it it's s much like the llm content.
- pierrefermat1 2y ago
  It seems like in their mind the snake ate it's tail without realising, so they don't even know what's outside of Google's index.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    on the outside are people who could make websites but cant see the point of it. They are on Reddit on facebook on hn on twitter on youtube or they just don't bother. On platforms they make very crappy low effort content (with unearned audience) compared to what they could be making. There is room for casual chatter but almost anyone can make an effort to write down their perspective on something and with some practice enlighten someone or a lot of someones. One might become someone if only in the world of pokemon collectors.
madrox 2y ago
I think Kagi is correct and that the way we explore information on the internet will look very different in X years with all the changes LLMs will bring. I think the real question will be what will it look like. I don't think it looks like search today. Google got where they were because they were 10x better than everything else and had an experience focusing on what mattered at the time. I don't think the 10x experience will look like ten blue links. I don't know what that next experience is, but I'll know it when I see it.
freefaler 2y ago
I've used Kagi for a year and it was better than Google for most of the searches. However I think the model will be changed to something more like Perplexity.ai I've switched to Perplexity and for most of the searches it works better than Kagi. They'd need to add something like this to survive in the long run, because for exploratory searches tools like Perplexity are really good.
- cube2222 2y ago
  I admit I haven’t used Perplexity much, but isn’t that already mostly covered by the researcher[0] and newly added assistant that can do web searching [1]? [0]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html#research https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html#research [1]: https://kagi.com/changelog#4529 https://kagi.com/changelog#4529
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  AI is expensive to host, and I don't trust their puke. I'd rather get a classic result page. Kagi is great.
- Terretta 2y ago
  Perplexity lets a firm switch on SSO and give perplexity to employees without a big barrier to entry. So, we bought it for our employees and if they use it great, if they don't great. Even though we're a small startup, this is true of almost any SaaS we find that lets us control the login to stay regulation compliant. If you like it, and show how it helps your day, and the SaaS let us control the login, we'll "just pay for it". We will not, however, pay some four or five figure SSO tax for every SaaS. We'd be bankrupted. Kagi should do this, or at least enable domain-specific OIDC/Oauth2 — the ubiquitous "Sign in with" or "Continue with" buttons like http://xsplit.com/user/auth http://xsplit.com/user/auth or http://id.atlassian.com/login http://id.atlassian.com/login since MSFT and Google accounts hit almost all businesses — and then just bill the same as the individual pro price + usage pricing. As it stands, we reimburse employees who buy Kagi individually, this costs us more than the cost of Kagi, and means it's only one off. PS. Don't get me started on the MacOS and iOS apps that have no retail price version available. Apple provides no way for a firm to provide employees with IAP subscription apps whether BYOD or managed devices. We can, and do, provide any retail priced app for both BYOD and MDM. It shows up in a catalog on the device, people install it, you get a retail sale. Thank you to those devs who make a retail version available, even if its 2x - 5x the annual cost. Empowering employees with apps is a no brainer if devs just let firms pay them to do it.
Destiner 2y ago
i feel bad for kagi/ddg they are still trying to fight the google by building pretty much the same product while perplexity is obviously in the lead by being ai-first
- freediver 2y ago
  For many people (me included) being AI-first is a bug, not a feature :)
rychco 2y ago
I’ve been a happy Kagi customer for probably 2 years(?) now. Highlights for me, as a professional: - I can blacklist low-value domains (such as geeksforgeeks) that dominate the top of many programming searches. - I can increase/decrease the priority of domains or pin domains to the top of searches, such as official documentation for languages/libraries. - I can use “Lenses” to filter results for programming/academic/forum results.
- abcdefg12 2y ago
  The big question is wtf google isn’t doing the same? Instead they keep removing features and dumbing down their product
  - rychco 2y ago
    Allowing users to re-prioritize search results directly harms their true product: ads
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
As someone who hasn’t used paid search services, what sort of problems has this solved for other HN users that make it worth it? How does it compare to “AI” based search tools like Perplexity?
- pbronez 2y ago
  For me, Kagi is super fast and provides high quality, customizable results. Web search Just Works. When I use a new computer/browser and accidentally search with Google, it is a viscerally unpleasant surprise. As for perplexity - I got a free year of Perplexity because I bought a Rabbit R1. I tried it, wasn’t impressed. I use Kagi’s AI assistant all the time. It’s my primary way of getting information from the web. I just type a a free form question into my address bar, append !expert for general questions or !code for technical ones, and seconds later my question is answered and I’m back to work.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  I use the internet basically as an extension of my brain. There's very little barrier between having a thought and seeking information. Search is the usual way those two come together. Google, these days, seems to mostly ignore whatever I've tried to search for and instead return results that I'd call "more popular". So the top results are mostly generic, useless results and below that it's mostly blog spam or wildly unrelated things. This is especially bad when I'm looking for specific technical documentation or trying to understand unusual or obscure problems. Usually it's returning nothing useful at all. Kagi returns results actually related to what I'm looking for more often than not. The thing that convinced me to pay for it was a single search. I kept hitting _something_ that was causing the Apple TV to stop showing how much time was remaining in a show and instead show something else. I went to Kagi and searched "netflix apple TV showing wrong time remaining" (my incomplete but best understanding of the problem at the time). Kagi surfaced a result that explained what this was and how it was getting triggered as the fourth result. I went back to Google and searched the same. Top result was "If you can't change the time or time zone on your Apple Device" from Apple. Second was "Netflix audio is out of sync" from Netflix. With the benefit of knowing what the answer was, I did find a single relevant result about 25 results down mixed in with some blog spam on removing a show from "Continue Watching" on Disney Plus, listicles on hidden ways to make the Apple TV app on your phone even better, and a link to a Google Books copy of a 2008 Men's Health Magazine (?!). Every time I accidentally end up back on Google it's... jarring to say the least.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web? There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing. I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web? I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something? Does anyone know of anything like this?
- firecall 2y ago
  Webrings? There was an attempt to push a return of Webrings I think... But funnily enough, whilst browsing this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389642 I commented to my colleagues: Remember when people would find good websites and share them!
- ColinHayhurst 2y ago
  Google indexes widely. DuckDuckGo and Kagi have small specialised indexes and as such rely on the larger indexes like Google, Bing and Mojeek. DuckDuckGo used to use Yandex. More information here: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  There have been some websites in the past that allowed one to browse www content by IP address, covering what seemed to be the full range of IPv4 address space. For example, a page with a list of IP address ranges where each address range is a hyperlink. One could then drill down by following hyperlinks to a specific IP address and view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting). Not sure why these websites do not persist. Quite useful. IMHO. DNS zone files are a decent starting point for exploring the web. Not every registered domain name has an associated website but most do. The largest zone files are available to the public for free.
  - nucleardog 2y ago
    > view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting). Not sure why these websites do not persist. You probably answered your own question here--I imagine at this point the amount of things on the internet that aren't using some sort of virtual hosting are quite tiny. Even ignoring everything else, with the IP address exhaustion and the push for SSL (can't get a certificate for an IP address), websites available directly at an IP address just aren't really a thing anymore.
mediumsmart 2y ago
Now it dawns on me that in this new era I can write an article for the public good and by balancing the wording I am able to place it before the 3852 competing public good articles on the search results page. lets innovate
icar 2y ago
I wish Kagi was cheaper. It's expensive in many countries and it doesn't help that we are bombarded with subscriptions everywhere.
- bugtodiffer 2y ago
  I wish Kagi would use the money to build a search engine. But instead they use it to build a browser no one wants and an email service no one needs. Yet their search website is still broken here and there...
  - benhurmarcel 2y ago
    I’ve had good results requesting fixes on https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/ , even minor/aesthetics stuff.
  - abcdefg12 2y ago
    I do want their browser. Especially with chrome v3 going crapware route. At least there is brave.
pbronez 2y ago
Here’s a 30min audio version of TFA: https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2626-dawn-of-a-new-era-in-search-balancing-innovation-competition-and-public-good-kagi-blog https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2626-dawn-of-a-new-era-in-sear...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

253 points by sbeckeriv 2y ago

I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing with less tech-savvy peers than most mainstream media explainers on this subject! Edit: wording Edit 2: Can you imagine a world where Google's Internet Search Index is legally considered an "Essential Facility"!? https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/ https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/

pennybanks 2y ago
i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free
- baggachipz 2y ago
  Then you don't understand what you're getting. If you want to be targeted and misled by opposing incentives, that's on you.
- jbaber 2y ago
  Nothing stopping you from trying for one month to confirm.
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  You get what you pay for
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  The other three answers to your question were dumb, so I'll try to do better. Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches without requiring a credit card to sign up. Honest to god, try it. Just bookmark it and search once or twice when Google or Bing is giving you meh results. As an engineer... googling for stuff is a good fraction of your job. It's quite reasonable to pay to improve that experience. The only real question is what is reasonable to pay.
  - orhmeh09 2y ago
    I don't think it's that amazing for an engineer. Google is much better if you're looking for things related to Intel compilers, for example. Try searching for «intel ipo fuse-ld=lld icx» on both engines. Note: I am a paying Kagi customer
    - freediver 2y ago
      I did - and Kagi results look pretty darn good to me. What were you trying to point out?
- endisneigh 2y ago
  You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site. Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).
- enasterosophes 2y ago
  When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests. When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines which you already admitted are pretty good.
  - abcdefg12 2y ago
    I wonder if there are any big companies paying for kagi for their workers.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  Kagi allows you to permanently blacklist Pinterest from appearing in any search ever. It also gives you exactly what you ask for. If you put words in quotes, you only get results matching that phrase. Same with +- modifiers, and all the other "advanced" search operators. Meanwhile on any free engine, they often completely ignore your query to show you unrelated SEO slop. You can completely forget modifiers and advanced queried, they aren't even parsed. About the only thing that still works is the site: modifier. And I'm pretty sure they only keep that because 40% of google searches include site:reddit As well, if Kagi can't find a result for your query, it returns nothing. Try searching something incredibly obscure on google or DDG. You get pages upon pages of results and they're all useless garbage or just straight up ads disguised as results. That's why I pay for Kagi. It stays the hell out of my way and only gives me exactly what I ask for and absolutely nothing else.
somethoughts 2y ago
I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services. Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services. Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to: - IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google) - Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt - The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers
- squiggy22 2y ago
  I'd argue the minute they turn to an advertising model that subscriptions would churn overnight, but in the same vein as the don't be evil motto being dropped I nod at the scepticism.

poikroequ 2y ago

> Apple has stated that Bing does not match Google’s search result quality, and they are unwilling to compromise on user experience by offering subpar results. I wouldn't take this statement at face value. This is most likely a BS PR excuse for Apple to maintain their current deal with Google. I wouldn't expect anything less from any large corporation looking to protect $20 billion in annual revenue.

jpc0 2y ago
Universally every single time I've used bing, including this week. My response was to scroll through the entire first oage of results, swear, open google and with the exact same search params what I wanted was the first result. Bing is objectively worse.
- xipho 2y ago
  Use DDG (Bing), append `!g` after you get nothing and search again? Do this with many many different `!`.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  Maybe Bing is managed by the same people that haven't managed to get Windows search right despite trying for many, many years?
skinkestek 2y ago
Last I tried at least: - Current Google was bad compared to original Google (it ignores my keywords, even if I use doublequotes and verbatim) - DuckDuckGo and Bing managed to be worse - Kagi is like old Google

baggachipz 2y ago

This essentially advocates for the same thing defined in Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. That point being, requiring open protocols from big tech will enable competition and innovation. This will return the creative inspiration to the technologists. I completely agree with it, and I hope we are reaching an inflection point where walled data gardens are cracked open.

chrisweekly 2y ago

I switched from Google to DDG for default search a few years ago, and then to Kagi maybe 18 months ago. Kagi's simply excellent.

cube2222 2y ago

I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent! Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on. The quick assist triggered by a question mark at the end of a search query which makes a quick ai-generated summary of the few top results is something I use constantly. The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is also excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well. All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.

baybayblonde 2y ago
What is "Lenses", is it the Google Lens?
- cube2222 2y ago
  Here's the docs[0]. It's basically a saved partial filter that you can use when searching. So you can e.g. say you only want to search reddit and have that saved as an easily-accessible button. But there's also predefined ones like "Forums" and "Academic", so that's the general idea. The cool thing is you can enable a Lens when using the AI assistant with internet access, so its searches are also constrained to that Lens. [0]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It's essentially search-space limitation, based on what you want to nudge the engine into responding with. I.e. what power users used to do with Google, before it decided to ignore user intent
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      I don't know how you could ever do kagi small web with google. That's not a simple hard filter but changes what types of results are more or less preferred.

adamcharnock 2y ago

> The Google Search Index is a unique and irreplaceable resource within the digital ecosystem. Mandating fair access to it or treating it as an essential facility could address the core issues... The article estimates the Google Search Index at 12.5PB. If Kagi thinks that is a big enough moat to be the primary target then, well, I suppose they should know. But I'm also skeptical. You could fit that on about 50 Hetzner SX295, so about $20k/month. Plus the cost of gathering the data. It is surely a huge resource. But weighed against the combination of Google Search + AdWords + Android + YouTube + Chrome, all in a single company? To me a 12.5PB search index feels like small change in comparison. NB: Happy Kagi-paying customer here.

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IgorPartola 2y ago
This puts it in enough perspective for me to ask: why doesn’t a university create a public/open source search index? Seems like a way to get a ton of attention. Moreover, archive.org has all the data and data storage capabilities many times over. What prevents them from creating an open source search engine?
- scroot 2y ago
  Or the Library of Congress, if it had the right appropriations. Google itself started with an NSF grant to explore the future of libraries.
dmonitor 2y ago
I assume that the major hurdle is not storing an equivalently-sized search index, but building one from scratch. Crawling takes time, and Google has had a many years head start.
- pierrefermat1 2y ago
  Yes OP is hilariously out of touch, the storage would be sub 1% of total costs.

abtinf 2y ago

This is an extremely disappointing post. In the past, I’ve enthusiastically supported and advocated for Kagi. But Kagi advocating for using force to destroy its competitors is completely unacceptable to me and an admission that they do not believe they have a viable product. Antitrust law is arbitrary and evil. If you make more money than your competitors, you have undue market power. If you price below your competitors, you are dumping. If you price the same as your competitors, you are colluding. The whole thing is a naked power grab by politicians and inferior companies. This is a sad day. Kagi is the best thing that’s happened to the internet in the past decade. And now I have to stop my auto renew.

freediver 2y ago
> But Kagi advocating for using force to destroy its competitors is completely unacceptable to me Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, but that is not what the article advocates at all. The article is about what is best for the user given the circumstances, where all other proposed remedies have focused on how to hurt Google, which article argues to be counter-productive. The ruling has already been made and a remedy will be chosen whether we agree with the ruling or not - so which one is the best for the users? The solution that is proposed in the article would actually mean increased competition in the space, including to Kagi.
- abtinf 2y ago
  You have benefited my life immensely, so I will take the time to write the most helpful response I can. *What is the nature of competition in the free market?* The premise that Google’s success constitutes a monopoly that must be dismantled to protect consumers is rooted in a flawed interpretation of the market and the moral principles governing it. In a free market, companies make money by offering the products and services demanded by customers. Google's dominance is not the result of coercion but its ability to meet customer demand effectively. Antitrust law declares that the choices of billions of individuals are wrong — not because those trading with the company have been treated unfairly (if they had, they wouldn’t have traded), but because those who know better through some mystical connection with the good declare it so using arbitrary standards. There have been many competitors to Google, with at least one of them extremely well funded. There are other massive internet-scale companies that could compete with Google, though they’ve often failed in past attempts. Punishing the owners of Google for its success is to punish the very qualities that drive progress and prosperity. You suggest that Google's control over the search index and its associated business models warrant government intervention to force “fair” access, because it would promote competition. Whatever else you mean by “fair”, you certainly don’t mean “terms that Google would find agreeable”. If one of the parties to a transaction is an unwilling participant, then it cannot be a fair transaction. We have names for this when the coercing party is anyone but the government: blackmail, protection rackets, theft, mugging, and so on. *What about property rights?* Simply put, Google’s indexes are the property of Google’s shareholders. Their property was created through decades of sustained investment and innovation. To force it to share its core technologies with competitors would be a gross violation of property rights—the very foundation of a free and productive society. Your proposal to treat Google’s search index as an "essential facility" that must be shared “fairly” is a call for expropriation—the forced redistribution of Google’s property for the benefit of those whose sole claim to it is that they have not earned it. The entire argument against Google is that they must be punished because they are successful. Kagi, even as a PBC, will one day be subject to the exact same arguments if it creates as much value as Google—someone will claim that some aspect of Kagi’s operations constitute a monopoly and Kagi should be forced to provide access to some data or service. *What does it mean for the government to intervene?* You claim consumers are harmed by the lack of choice in search experiences. Well, what about me? I love your product and pay for it. So do another 32,633 other subscribers. Apparently, we are free to choose your product, and I’m certain many of us advocate for your products to our friends and family. But your product isn’t for everyone. Maybe not even for most. If people want Google and free search, and no one’s rights are being violated, by what authority does anyone get to tell them they are wrong? Consumers choose Google because they think it meets their needs, not because they are coerced into using it. Government’s only tool is violence. It can force people to do something (rare, and usually ineffective), or force people to not do something (very common, and usually equally ineffective but with disastrous side effects). Government can’t create "more diverse competition" by forcing Google’s to share its property; competition is the result of companies striving to innovate and offer better products. Government can’t level the playing field by forcing the competitors to do better, it can only cut off the legs of the best players to bring them down to the level of the competition. Were your proposal for the Google index actually implement, I speculate it would be a few short years until you would see the government declare all other company’s indices to be illegal and subject to regulation--after all, if its a public good, then it must be supported and defended by the public against threats. I would expect to see forced mergers of other indices into the Google index. *What about non-moral arguments?* I’m not going to go into detail, but based on my education and extensive past research, in good faith I assert the following to be true: there are no documented instances of long-lasting monopolies that are not perpetuated by governments; every antitrust intervention has made consumers materially worse off; government interventions nearly always have the effect of significantly reducing competition. If you identify of a robust counter example to any of those claims, you could probably win a Nobel prize. *What could you do instead?* A judge has made an unjust ruling advancing an unjust law toward unjust ends--that doesn’t mean the conversation should shift to deciding on the best unjust punishments. That would be a contradiction: there is no such thing as the most-just-unjust punishment. You could continue your education and advocacy of the true cost of “free” search. Take out an OpEd in NYT hammering Apple’s duplicitous claims of being privacy respecting while sending every customer’s most intimate thoughts to the Google monstrosity by default. Demonstrate the cost to privacy. Demonstrate how your product exposes resources that are hidden by the search giants. Show people the super powers they can have for a modest fee. And build a better product. Hell, make a Kagi Phone—I’d preorder one even if it were years away from release—and free us from the Apple/Google hegemony.

moonlion_eth 2y ago

Paying kagi user. All day every day

endisneigh 2y ago

A smaller competitor wants and advocates for itself. Makes sense but is it really surprising? It would be strange otherwise. I do wonder how far one can get charging for search.

throwaway14356 2y ago

> Google has built a massive index of the internet that covers close to 100% of the accessible web. While their index (of other peoples stuff) is enormous it far from includes everything. It is easy to disqualify and people would be screaming if content farms would be included. What even is a content farm nowadays? One can return a reasonable article for any query with llms rich in links to other pages that don't exist but could be indexed and are part of the accessible web If you make a new website with a few thousand pages and a few thousand images it takes quite a while for google to pick up the entire thing, if it even bothers to. google tries to fill the result page with a small subset of websites. A good thing for users most of the time and the easiest ad money but horrible for new players. it use to be quite common for bloggers (and others) to follow everything written about them or of interest. google (blog search) and technorati were very useful for that kind of discovery. The average user might never have noticed that but when it was killed off the www stopped being a community. We can pretend the index is still there. If you cant get to it it's s much like the llm content.

pierrefermat1 2y ago
It seems like in their mind the snake ate it's tail without realising, so they don't even know what's outside of Google's index.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  on the outside are people who could make websites but cant see the point of it. They are on Reddit on facebook on hn on twitter on youtube or they just don't bother. On platforms they make very crappy low effort content (with unearned audience) compared to what they could be making. There is room for casual chatter but almost anyone can make an effort to write down their perspective on something and with some practice enlighten someone or a lot of someones. One might become someone if only in the world of pokemon collectors.

madrox 2y ago

I think Kagi is correct and that the way we explore information on the internet will look very different in X years with all the changes LLMs will bring. I think the real question will be what will it look like. I don't think it looks like search today. Google got where they were because they were 10x better than everything else and had an experience focusing on what mattered at the time. I don't think the 10x experience will look like ten blue links. I don't know what that next experience is, but I'll know it when I see it.

freefaler 2y ago

I've used Kagi for a year and it was better than Google for most of the searches. However I think the model will be changed to something more like Perplexity.ai I've switched to Perplexity and for most of the searches it works better than Kagi. They'd need to add something like this to survive in the long run, because for exploratory searches tools like Perplexity are really good.

cube2222 2y ago
I admit I haven’t used Perplexity much, but isn’t that already mostly covered by the researcher[0] and newly added assistant that can do web searching [1]? [0]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html#research https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html#research [1]: https://kagi.com/changelog#4529 https://kagi.com/changelog#4529
aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
AI is expensive to host, and I don't trust their puke. I'd rather get a classic result page. Kagi is great.
Terretta 2y ago
Perplexity lets a firm switch on SSO and give perplexity to employees without a big barrier to entry. So, we bought it for our employees and if they use it great, if they don't great. Even though we're a small startup, this is true of almost any SaaS we find that lets us control the login to stay regulation compliant. If you like it, and show how it helps your day, and the SaaS let us control the login, we'll "just pay for it". We will not, however, pay some four or five figure SSO tax for every SaaS. We'd be bankrupted. Kagi should do this, or at least enable domain-specific OIDC/Oauth2 — the ubiquitous "Sign in with" or "Continue with" buttons like http://xsplit.com/user/auth http://xsplit.com/user/auth or http://id.atlassian.com/login http://id.atlassian.com/login since MSFT and Google accounts hit almost all businesses — and then just bill the same as the individual pro price + usage pricing. As it stands, we reimburse employees who buy Kagi individually, this costs us more than the cost of Kagi, and means it's only one off. PS. Don't get me started on the MacOS and iOS apps that have no retail price version available. Apple provides no way for a firm to provide employees with IAP subscription apps whether BYOD or managed devices. We can, and do, provide any retail priced app for both BYOD and MDM. It shows up in a catalog on the device, people install it, you get a retail sale. Thank you to those devs who make a retail version available, even if its 2x - 5x the annual cost. Empowering employees with apps is a no brainer if devs just let firms pay them to do it.

Destiner 2y ago

i feel bad for kagi/ddg they are still trying to fight the google by building pretty much the same product while perplexity is obviously in the lead by being ai-first

freediver 2y ago
For many people (me included) being AI-first is a bug, not a feature :)

rychco 2y ago

I’ve been a happy Kagi customer for probably 2 years(?) now. Highlights for me, as a professional: - I can blacklist low-value domains (such as geeksforgeeks) that dominate the top of many programming searches. - I can increase/decrease the priority of domains or pin domains to the top of searches, such as official documentation for languages/libraries. - I can use “Lenses” to filter results for programming/academic/forum results.

abcdefg12 2y ago
The big question is wtf google isn’t doing the same? Instead they keep removing features and dumbing down their product
- rychco 2y ago
  Allowing users to re-prioritize search results directly harms their true product: ads

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

As someone who hasn’t used paid search services, what sort of problems has this solved for other HN users that make it worth it? How does it compare to “AI” based search tools like Perplexity?

pbronez 2y ago
For me, Kagi is super fast and provides high quality, customizable results. Web search Just Works. When I use a new computer/browser and accidentally search with Google, it is a viscerally unpleasant surprise. As for perplexity - I got a free year of Perplexity because I bought a Rabbit R1. I tried it, wasn’t impressed. I use Kagi’s AI assistant all the time. It’s my primary way of getting information from the web. I just type a a free form question into my address bar, append !expert for general questions or !code for technical ones, and seconds later my question is answered and I’m back to work.
nucleardog 2y ago
I use the internet basically as an extension of my brain. There's very little barrier between having a thought and seeking information. Search is the usual way those two come together. Google, these days, seems to mostly ignore whatever I've tried to search for and instead return results that I'd call "more popular". So the top results are mostly generic, useless results and below that it's mostly blog spam or wildly unrelated things. This is especially bad when I'm looking for specific technical documentation or trying to understand unusual or obscure problems. Usually it's returning nothing useful at all. Kagi returns results actually related to what I'm looking for more often than not. The thing that convinced me to pay for it was a single search. I kept hitting _something_ that was causing the Apple TV to stop showing how much time was remaining in a show and instead show something else. I went to Kagi and searched "netflix apple TV showing wrong time remaining" (my incomplete but best understanding of the problem at the time). Kagi surfaced a result that explained what this was and how it was getting triggered as the fourth result. I went back to Google and searched the same. Top result was "If you can't change the time or time zone on your Apple Device" from Apple. Second was "Netflix audio is out of sync" from Netflix. With the benefit of knowing what the answer was, I did find a single relevant result about 25 results down mixed in with some blog spam on removing a show from "Continue Watching" on Disney Plus, listicles on hidden ways to make the Apple TV app on your phone even better, and a link to a Google Books copy of a 2008 Men's Health Magazine (?!). Every time I accidentally end up back on Google it's... jarring to say the least.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web? There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing. I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web? I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something? Does anyone know of anything like this?

firecall 2y ago
Webrings? There was an attempt to push a return of Webrings I think... But funnily enough, whilst browsing this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389642 I commented to my colleagues: Remember when people would find good websites and share them!
ColinHayhurst 2y ago
Google indexes widely. DuckDuckGo and Kagi have small specialised indexes and as such rely on the larger indexes like Google, Bing and Mojeek. DuckDuckGo used to use Yandex. More information here: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
There have been some websites in the past that allowed one to browse www content by IP address, covering what seemed to be the full range of IPv4 address space. For example, a page with a list of IP address ranges where each address range is a hyperlink. One could then drill down by following hyperlinks to a specific IP address and view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting). Not sure why these websites do not persist. Quite useful. IMHO. DNS zone files are a decent starting point for exploring the web. Not every registered domain name has an associated website but most do. The largest zone files are available to the public for free.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  > view whatever was hosted at that address (default host in the case of virtual hosting). Not sure why these websites do not persist. You probably answered your own question here--I imagine at this point the amount of things on the internet that aren't using some sort of virtual hosting are quite tiny. Even ignoring everything else, with the IP address exhaustion and the push for SSL (can't get a certificate for an IP address), websites available directly at an IP address just aren't really a thing anymore.

mediumsmart 2y ago

Now it dawns on me that in this new era I can write an article for the public good and by balancing the wording I am able to place it before the 3852 competing public good articles on the search results page. lets innovate

icar 2y ago

I wish Kagi was cheaper. It's expensive in many countries and it doesn't help that we are bombarded with subscriptions everywhere.

bugtodiffer 2y ago
I wish Kagi would use the money to build a search engine. But instead they use it to build a browser no one wants and an email service no one needs. Yet their search website is still broken here and there...
- benhurmarcel 2y ago
  I’ve had good results requesting fixes on https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/ , even minor/aesthetics stuff.
- abcdefg12 2y ago
  I do want their browser. Especially with chrome v3 going crapware route. At least there is brave.

pbronez 2y ago

Here’s a 30min audio version of TFA: https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2626-dawn-of-a-new-era-in-search-balancing-innovation-competition-and-public-good-kagi-blog https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2626-dawn-of-a-new-era-in-sear...

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