12 ms·

Why pay for a search engine

163 points by lr0 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 2y ago
To be in the top 1% you would likely need to depend on search on a daily basis for your livelihood. As a reminder the Starter plan is USD $5/month with 300 searches included. 99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. That's interesting and hard to accept but might be true with many living in apps and wall gardens like facebook. I wonder what the mode number is for those 99%. 1 or 2 searches a day.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  And Google is making 23 dollars on less than 300 searches which means Google makes 8c to 1 dollar per search.
- supriyo-biswas 2y ago
  I'd assume searches for the majority might be very "bursty", and while they may indeed spend most of their time in Facebook, Tiktok etc. when planning a vacation, searching for stuff to purchase or looking up recipes to try and the like, they'd issue a number of queries to narrow down into their area of interest which would blow past your estimate of 10 queries/day. There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these.
  - xigoi 2y ago
    > There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these. There would be fewer of these queries if people had a financial incentive to learn to use bookmarks and the address bar.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. that's pretty crazy to hear. Especially since on this day alone, a weekend, I seem to have 20 unique searches. I can easily hit triple digits a day when researching for a project or on the job. Search is invaluable to me.
  - devjab 2y ago
    What sort of job relies on internet searches? I’m not trying to be rude or anything like that at all, I’m genuinely curious.
    - daelon 2y ago
      Pro... gramming? I'm sorry, are you aware of what website you're on?
      - devjab 2y ago
        I’m a software developer, have been for two decades. I was suspecting it may be the case which is why I asked. Again, I’m not meaning to be rude or snide or anything, but what do you use search engines for? I almost never use them, I tend to head directly to the documentation when I need to look up the APIs for a library. This is mainly because “free” search engines suck at it these days, and I’m curious if Kagi doesn’t.
        Mashimo 2y ago
        How do you find the documentation in the first place? ;-) I search for Errors / StackTraces that I get. For me stackoverflow / reddit / forum answers are often more helpful. Or examples on how to implement something, the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together. Give me some working code that I can fiddle with. High level comparison between two frameworks / libs that I'm not familiar with.
        devjab 2y ago
- aniviacat 2y ago
  I assume these numbers are heavily skewed by the amount of people doing 0 searches a day. Lots of people hardly use their webbrowser, spending almost all their time within apps. YouTube and TikTok have become popular search engines, partly for this reason. If you only count people for whom paying a monthly subscription for search wouldn't be completely ridiculous, I'd guess these numbers would skyrocket.
jaysonelliot 2y ago
The idea of paying for services online that most people expect to get for free is great, actually. There was a time when you simply expected to pay for anything that had value. Whether that was a newspaper, a magazine, a movie, music, or even an online service like AOL or CompuServe, you paid for it and you expected a certain level of quality in return. In the early days of the Web, it wasn't clear at all that sites could pay their bills with advertising. Then in the mid-'90s, Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up ad (he's apologized since) and things progressed - or regressed, if you prefer - and we slid down the long slope to companies selling your data, hyper-targeting ads, and worse. So many of society's ills right now can be traced to the ad-driven model. It's why clickbait is lucrative, why it's more profitable to run a populist site filled with misinformation than a trustworthy news org, it's how scammers and spammers are incentivized to flood social media sites with slop. I'd love to see Kagi succeed, and others to follow their lead. I'd much rather spend an extra $20, $30, even $50 a month or more to subscribe to a bunch of ad-free sites that I can trust than to get it all for "free" at the cost of ads, data mining, and scammy clickbait.
- Sajarin 2y ago
  I’m curious if you (or anyone else) know of any other services that are paid-only in a traditionally free/freemium product space. Perhaps for news, or video content, or music, or something else. What else do you use today for free that often feels like a Faustian bargain? As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?
  - evoke4908 2y ago
    Jetbrains. Well, up until recently. Now I'm paying hundreds of dollars for a cheap copy of VSCode and I'm really not sure why I shouldn't just use the free version.
    - avh02 2y ago
      Because of the new ui? Seriously it's terrible, but the classic ui is still benevolently available as a plugin. Don't know for how long.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
andreagrandi 2y ago
I’ve been an happy subscriber for nearly one year now. I even tried DuckDuckGo for some time but the quality just wasn’t the same.
- winwang 2y ago
  Agreed. Kagi even works well with Reddit. Great that I can just fall back to google easily too.
- freediver 2y ago
  Thanks Andrea!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jasonpeacock 2y ago
Because: > If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. -- Andrew Lewis
- iml7 2y ago
  Are you looking for windows?
- asddubs 2y ago
  I don't really like that quote. Many services you do pay for still treat you like an asset to make money off. And many services that are free, like the internet archive for example, are not.
  - iml7 2y ago
    Are you looking for windows?
  - santoshalper 2y ago
    I'd put it this way... if you're paying a company, you might still also be the product, but if you're not paying for something that a company is spending money to make, you're definitely the product.
    - asddubs 2y ago
      Again, not true. There's many services like the internet archive that do not operate to make a profit. Lots of open source also fits this bill. The absolutism of the quote is just overly cynical. On the other hand, if the company is VC funded I would say this is generally true but it also dismisses basically all of non-commercial open source. How are you the product when you use debian?
    - SansGuidon 2y ago
      I service people for free because I can afford it despite I'm a company. It's part of the philosophy of sharing value for free. There are many services and products I use for free and I then make a donation to them because I love what they do. So clearly it's not true, maybe just true for the companies that do not care much about doing something good for people with only optional contribution in return.
moonlion_eth 2y ago
Paying customer here. Kagi all day every day
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
johannessjoberg 2y ago
I can highly recommend switching to kagi. Happy paying customer here.
iml7 2y ago
[removed]
- tjpnz 2y ago
  If they did that they would lose the bulk of their paying subscribers.
- thesuitonym 2y ago
  And someone else can take up the mantle. But perhaps, just perhaps, a business can just exist and turn a modest profit, without trying to scorch the earth raising revenue infinitely.
  - zorked 2y ago
    I would pay extra for services from a company that promise not to try to grow indefinitely.
dr__mario 2y ago
I didn't have much success with Kagi for Spanish/local searches. Has this improved?
- benhurmarcel 2y ago
  For local searches (meaning in your city or even more local) I find Google better. For national searches, I find Kagi good at long as you specify the country. That’s one of my favorite features actually, you can leave it international by default, and add “!es” to search in Spain.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Kagi even mentions in their FAQ that you’ll have better luck on google for local stuff than you would on Kagi
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  You have to select your country as the default region to get better results, the "International" region is not as good as it was before, and leans very heavily to English. The good part is that after you've selected your country as the region, you still get good results in English or other languages.
vachina 2y ago
Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet. Once Kagi gains traction I guarantee result quality will nosedive.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  The magic is in letting real humans curate what gets boosted and what doesn't. My results tend to be quite good because I've hidden tons of sites that I don't care about. It's the same reason uBlock works: filter lists can be shared.
- EZ-E 2y ago
  > Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet This seems like a hard problem to solve, the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution? Can AI even help? Do we need to go back to manual curation after all? I remember in the 90s there were manually curated lists of websites, something like a website directory. At this point I'd rather get recommended a list of websites from a reddit user than relying on Google's ranking.
  - joe_the_user 2y ago
    I don't think SEO actually beat Google. Rather, Google simply capitulated or was captured. I distinctly remember a 2019 update where things really went bad. Part of the situation is that a company that relies on ad revenue will get gradually feel the pull of the advertisers more and more. I'd be more worried about someone nefarious buying Kagi if it got big. Someone else would be willing to pay a whole lot of money for those eyeballs.
    - dannyw 2y ago
      SEO spam is correlated with ads. Google dominates web advertising. Google’s interests are aligned with SEO spammers, as long as it’s not so terrible you switch to another search engine or stop searching.
  - interroboink 2y ago
bobek 2y ago
I am on Family plan for over a year. Very happy z including czech sites.
RamiAwar 2y ago
I would convert, but price is too high for me personally. I'd be willing to pay up to 3$ a month for my searches, but also per-use. If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay? A replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap, it's so easy to ignore sponsored search results (for now).
- wartijn_ 2y ago
  > If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay? Do you ever have months in which you don’t use a search engine at all? If so you might just not be the target audience.
- evoke4908 2y ago
  You either pay a flat fee, or you have to deal with the added baggage of considering that each search costs you a very real half a cent or whatever. Would you use your search engine more if every search query were an implicit microtransaction? Would you use it more or less if you had to consider that your first search of the month cost $3, or if it's the last day of the month and you need to search for something but you have to wait to not incur a full month's fee. This is one of those arguments that sounds reasonable but isn't. Nothing but a flat fee structure makes sense for something you'll be doing hundreds if not thousands of times a month. And let's be real: if you're the kind of person who could go a full month with no web searches, you don't want or need what Kagi is offering.
  - bbutterworth 2y ago
    [dead]
  - pzmarzly 2y ago
    Almost everyone is paying for their electricity based on usage, and yet people don't seem to think "this will cost me a dollar" when turning on the washing machine (unless really short on money). I think usage-based SaaS subscriptions could make sense from user's perspective, they are just too uncommon right now.
  - eviks 2y ago
thesuitonym 2y ago
I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different. Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall. For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches. Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.
- raybb 2y ago
  Fyi you can search "titanic movie Wikipedia !" And when you use a bang it doesn't count against your searches. Or at least that's what it was like before I moved to the unlimited plan :)
  - paradox460 2y ago
    You can just use !w to search Wikipedia, no need for the "I'm feeling lucky" bang
  - ivandenysov 2y ago
    Thank you! I think I’ll use quick bangs even more: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs
- theshrike79 2y ago
  I hit my year too just two weeks ago. I always think "is it worth it" when the payment hits my credit card, but every time I come to the conclusion that it is very much worth it. Just the universal summariser has saved me insane amounts of time. I can feed any rambling youtube video (with subtitles) or a long article to it and it'll give me the key points of it. Then I can decide whether it's worth spending an time on or not. Something like this is the future of "AI" in my opinion, you can "teach" the system what you're interested in and it can curate content just for you - locally, without an unicorn startup getting all your data.
blindriver 2y ago
I would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly. I think search engines are a dead technology pretty quickly and the entire ecosystem will die in the next 2-3 years.
- seattle_spring 2y ago
  ChatGPT answers range from completely correct to deranged God-awful wrong, which means I have to use a regular search engine to verify the answers for anything remotely complex. Relying entirely on generative models for information is asking for trouble. Especially because the wrong answers often "look" correct/plausible.
  - gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
    If you’re using chatGPT, you can add a prompt (I’ve set it in my rules) to “fact check from other websites” when I’m asking it things I’m not an expert in. It then provides some links which I then open up. I’ve found that to be a lot more efficient than searching from google straight up especially with very specific questions I sometimes query. Half the websites it shows are those I wouldn’t have found on google and are relatively high signal for what I’m looking for (including very niche blogs from experts from the field).
- a57721 2y ago
  There are lots of use cases when you want references to reliable sources written by real people instead of AI slop. Science, law, technical documentation, etc. If you ask an LLM for the sources, it is happy to generate bogus citations for false claims, and the only way to verify the answer is by using the good old web search. I hope real search engines never die, only those that turn to AI slop like Google.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly Kagi integrates GPT 4 and other LLMs, as well as its own Quick Answer product. The Quick Answer product is 9 times out of 10 superior to any of the pre-trained LLMs. Mostly because it's accessing live information. Put another way, I'd love to go head to head with a competitor who relies on ChatGPT for their queries.
smoovb 2y ago
I would pay for Chrome Premium, as I pay for Youtube Premium. Prefer the Brave/YT Premium model where creators and sites get some share of your payment. The Kagi model, unless I missed it, seems to be "just pay us" with nothing going to creators.
- evoke4908 2y ago
  Kagi is just a search engine. You're paying to access their index. There is no advertisement of any kind and Kagi has no relation to any site in their index. This is like being miffed that Yellowpages doesn't pay businesses to list them in the phone book.
- freediver 2y ago
  Kagi's mission is to humanize the web and it is boosting creators (small, personal blogs and websites) in search results: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web How would you design a system where creators are paid in a search engine? We have always had an idea of profit share for showing up in results but we would need to reach about 10M members for this to be more than few cents a month. (Kagi CEO here)
n8cpdx 2y ago
Never going back to FASS, Kagi is great. So much better than Google, and getting better every day now that Google is sticking made up nonsense into the results. I like that I get to choose when to use GPT. If you’re on iOS, the Orion browser is great, too - tldr chrome extensions on iOS.
evoke4908 2y ago
Another Kagi user for a year or two. I've honestly never had a single negative experience. Since using Kagi, I've only had to use google a couple of very desperate times. I don't notice the subscription fee because I get excellent value from it. Kagi simply does what you ask and stays out of the way. Because you pay them, they don't need to monetize every pixel on the screen. No tracking or data mining. It's just software that does what it says it does and does what you tell it. It's tragic that "thing that does one thing well and doesn't spy on you" is a scary and alien concept these days.
oefrha 2y ago
A point I hardly ever see anyone bring up: I’m not a fan of the idea of doing all my searches while signed in, potentially creating a company-knows-me-better-than-myself situation. I do my searches in private windows mostly behind commercial VPNs so that it’s difficult enough to profile me that companies probably won’t bother. Public search engines have to get really bad before I move to a sign-in-required one. But given that this community which ostensibly touts privacy at every turn seems to overwhelmingly support feeding everything (not just searches) into OpenAI/Claude, I guess my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe. Btw I’m by no means a privacy maximalist.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe Kagi provides strong privacy guarantees [1]. They could be lying. But so could your VPN providers. [1] https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
  - whilenot-dev 2y ago
    I'm calling marketing fluff here, given that its founder seems to hold a skewed model of kagis power in regard to collecting personal information altogether: "personal information is what you can be identified with as an individual. no information you submit to kagi is personal information except if you use your real email address to register"[0] [0]: https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      The image looks like it's from this post [1]. Long story short, this appears to be a case of a CEO needing to restrain themselves from saying (or typing) everything that comes to mind when faced with a combative user who clearly isn't trying to understand something or bring anything to the table. At the end of the day, what you care about when it comes to privacy in search are your search records. They say--in a way that generates liablity--that they don't store them. I see no reason for them to break that promise. Between a commercial VPN and Kagi, I trust Kagi more. [1] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
pinkmuffinere 2y ago
I’ve considered using kagi before, but I think this blog post finally convinced me not too: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html The quick summary is that they aren’t really privacy focused at all, don’t comply with GDPR, and generally seem ok misleading their customers. The lack-of-privacy doesn’t bother me itself, but misleading customers really troubles me. Why would I trust them with X when I know they’ve lied with Y?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Skimmed. Not seeing how Kagi are lying about anything. To the degree I can fault Vlad, it's in going down irrelevant rabbit holes with these folks.
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    Here’s an easy one: Vlad claims they are GDPR compliant. However, they do not provide a way to download stored personal info, as required by GDPR. This is a contradiction
    - freediver 2y ago
      We do, just email support@kagi.com. Please do not spread disinformation.
      - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
        I’m glad to hear you have updated your policy.
        freediver 2y ago
        That was always our policy.
        pinkmuffinere 2y ago
mholubowski 2y ago
Very serious question: How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker? —- That’s my current solutions, why should I switch to paying for Kagi? Ty!
- xigoi 2y ago
  You get features like manual personalization of results, bangs, redirects, paywall warnings, WolframAlpha integration, etc.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker? Rubber duck to a battleship. The number of times I've found something in seconds that a co-worker was digging around in pursuit of for minutes has by this point escaped me. Were you around for Alta Vista vs. Google? This feels the same. The only difference is it's paywalled, which for the consumer, is generally good--it means the benefits won't be generalised and the product will remain an elite minority offering that doesn't gain traction with SEO bots.
- tanduv 2y ago
  Just tried that example screenshot of 'postgresql query analysis' and got the same results on Kagi vs Google with uBlock. What exactly is novel here?
- byzantinegene 2y ago
  it's not, there's clearly astroturfing going on, there's two articles by kagi on the front page of hackernews.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- commandersaki 2y ago
  Adblockers do not eliminate geekforgeeks in search results.
- freediver 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
taspeotis 2y ago
I use Kagi, it’s pretty good. I pay for it and would recommend everybody at least evaluate. The worst bits, which aren’t even that bad: The maps are a work in progress. No shopping search. If I want something like shopping search I can use Google. Not sure if it’s because I’m in Australia but sometimes it takes a while for the page to load. Subsequent searches are faster.
- slau 2y ago
  I don’t believe I’ve ever used shopping search. I remember seeing it a decade ago or something, but I never understood the point. What is it for?
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    To find where a products is being sold for the cheapest price. For electronics I know 3rd party services that compare prices for different shops. But in cases like "Where can I by this specific dental floss" I sometimes use google shopping search.
  - dagw 2y ago
    I find it super useful for listing all the places in my country where I can buy X, orders by price. Doing a more generic search for a product tends to give results heavily dominated by sites in the US. Also really useful when combined with image search. I can take a picture of a cool lamp and quickly find all the places where I can buy a similar lamp.
youoy 2y ago
Quick questions por people that have used it: is it good for technical searches? Like math/programming? At some point I tried another search engine but I ended up going back to Google for those. For what type of topics do you find yourself going back to Google/other search engine?
- rckclmbr 2y ago
  I’ve been a subscriber for about a year. It’s best at technical searches. I would say other topics, particularly niche questions I have about like sports or something, it has a more difficult time on. Absolutely do not regret subscribing though
- CleverLikeAnOx 2y ago
  I use it for programming and math. When I started using kagi almost 2 years ago, I had to go back to Google occasionally. Now I basically never go back to Google search.
Toutouxc 2y ago
Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions (along with JetBrains and my cloud backup provider), where if it were a local business, I'd go there to pay in person, and smile while doing it. I feel respected as a customer and I feel like I'm getting great value from the service. A LLM-fueled storm might be brewing on the web, but I'm definitely riding into it with Kagi.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions Funny, in terms of (non-niche) brand loyalty and evangelism, I'd say it's up there for me with Apple and Delta.
  - slau 2y ago
    I’d put it in the “I’m paying for this but I’m not sure the CEO will never make me regret that fact” category. There’s been some… ego-fuelled decision making happening in Kagi’s communication.
unstuck3958 2y ago
Why are there so many paying Kagi customers who feel the to write multiple paragraphs of testimonies? This is so unusual of HN. Reeks of astroturfing.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  You really can't distinguish enthusiasm for a product in a sea of crap from astroturfing?
  - deely3 2y ago
    Its hard to check is person geniune on internet. Also, too often we all see a lot of prise for not-so-good products.
- slau 2y ago
  Disclaimer: I’m a paying customer of Kagi. It felt truly bizarre to subscribe to a search engine. To actually pay for access. There’s been a bit of drama with the CEO directly emailing people when they left poor reviews. Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality. I’m not surprised there’s a lot of people having thoughts and feelings about Kagi and expressing them. The fact that there’s a significant overlap between HN and Kagi’s user bases is hardly a surprise either.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality As someone who uses Orion as their daily driver, I'll admit I'm somewhat confused by why Kagi isn't staying mission focussed. That said, it may be the case that they're a premium company for a small, well-defined niche. In that case, broadening the service offering makes sense--it's what Apple did.
- lompad 2y ago
  Because a massive share of the kagi users are part of the hn-adjecent crowd. When you look at the most manually upranked domains, you'll probably get a clearer picture. https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6 https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6 The typical kagi user uses hn. In the past, hn was even further up, though I guess they're slowly getting "normal" people too.
ricardo81 2y ago
The interesting thing about their calculation of Google's $23/m revenue per user, is how much of that is simply by matching a user's query and location to ads? i.e. Is all the additional data collection and abandonment of privacy entirely necessary to reach anywhere near that number? Also it's not clear if the numbers used in the article omits publisher ads from Adsense. It would be great if G's advertisers were opened up to competitors, I think a CPA model would work out well since combatting click fraud involves a lot of profiling.
inquisitor27552 2y ago
i liked the idea but here in SEA the latency is just nuts compared to google.
Peteragain 2y ago
As a bit of a socialist I guess I should at least suggest that in the information age search is infrastructure. IP addresses are the commons. Capitalism will, of course, argue it's right to make money where it can but .. And I am sure it is not in the national interest to have another country in a position to turn off your infrastructure.
discardedrefuse 2y ago
I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it. SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?) You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access. We have entered the internet's dark age. Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).
- amatheus 2y ago
  I think there may be a way forward for the internet. Why isn't hacker news being strangled by SEO spam for example? I think the way forward is a much smaller internet predicated on tight-knit communities approving everything that's shared. I don't know how this could scale but maybe that's the point, it must stay small to succeed.
- knadh 2y ago
  > I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it. I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general. [1] https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/ https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/
- n_ary 2y ago
  I do not blame Google for web’s current wasteland landscape, I blame ads and all the grifters who poison the landscape with SEO waste to try make some bucks with ads or other similar means.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Freedom5093 2y ago
The only time I think about using or paying for Kagi is when I see these posts on HN and get FOMO. I think that's because I actually don't have that SEO garbage problem anymore. AI apps have made search, and learning in particular, a lot easier.
- Veen 2y ago
  AI apps like Perplixity and Phind index and rank web content too. They have the same problem.
pptr 2y ago
When I do a Google search for the example query "postgresql query analysis" on mobile chrome (no ad block), I get 0 ads. Same thing if I select the "Example" filter as shown in the demo image.
lowleveldesign 2y ago
Apart from search customizations, I also use the bang searches (a few mine and many from https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs). I also recently switched to ultimate and created a few assistants with system prompts for my various needs (coding, learning chemistry, etc.)
renegat0x0 2y ago
People are sad over google demise, but we have more tools than before, and easily we can mitigate. - there are other search engines, like kagi - we have AI, chatgpt, which some people find use for. I use it to ask general questions about programming problem solving and it often helps me. I do not know every language, and when I needed to write browser extension it saved me a lot of time - bookmarking software. I wrote my own self-hosted software [1], with search ability. I do not have to 'research' everything I find interesting. Google will not bury inconvenient news anymore, or filter it I think we need is adapt. When Google entered, Yahoo was not able to change. IBM was not able to change. Old tech is replaced by new solutions. We need to reconsider how to find things online. [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
nbenitezl 2y ago
Another happy Kagi user here, I also love the fact they also give FastGPT as a bonus.
yorick 2y ago
To provide some counterweight to all the overwhelmingly positive reviews: I've used kagi for 6 months and have over 7500 searches with them. It mostly works, but there are a few downsides compared to Google: - The latency is a lot higher than google, taking over a second to display any results. - The results are often not as relevant, I have to frequently retry my search in Google. - The results for anything local (I'm not in the US) are abysmal. Searching for anything in my city instead only gives me results for the city's history. Still, I persist in using Kagi, mainly because it's not Google and I want them to succeed. The results are frequently good enough for me to stay with them.
- dannyw 2y ago
  You can use multiple search engines. I use Kagi, Bing, and occasionally Yandex.
- __jonas 2y ago
  I mentioned my issue with the latency last time Kagi was posted, I would love it if they could bring it to be a bit closer to Google
maxehmookau 2y ago
I love my Kagi account, and will continue to pay. It is too US-centric, something I've been asked to report in HN comments (I have), and something that continues to be a problem. But as with all of these things, I'm paying to no longer be the product. That's the value for me, and so "it not working exactly as I expect 100% of the time" is actually a small price worth paying. Generally speaking, I find the quality of results usually on a par with Google.
dave_walko 2y ago
I have signed up off and on. For me, the starter is just a tad to few searches per month. If I had 400 I would most likely just pay the $5 out of support for the team as I am also hoping to see Orion do better (bitwarden issue) I have some months where I search for stuff I already know. Like I goto url bar and just type imdb which then initiates a search. I know the dang url but am lazy lol. I wish the team tons of luck, I monitor the pricing page monthly usually, just hoping to see a small uptick in starter limits as unlimited is just not my use case. $8.00 for unlimited and again, I would sign up just to support them.

163 points by lr0 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

To be in the top 1% you would likely need to depend on search on a daily basis for your livelihood. As a reminder the Starter plan is USD $5/month with 300 searches included. 99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. That's interesting and hard to accept but might be true with many living in apps and wall gardens like facebook. I wonder what the mode number is for those 99%. 1 or 2 searches a day.

ipaddr 2y ago
And Google is making 23 dollars on less than 300 searches which means Google makes 8c to 1 dollar per search.
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
I'd assume searches for the majority might be very "bursty", and while they may indeed spend most of their time in Facebook, Tiktok etc. when planning a vacation, searching for stuff to purchase or looking up recipes to try and the like, they'd issue a number of queries to narrow down into their area of interest which would blow past your estimate of 10 queries/day. There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these.
- xigoi 2y ago
  > There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these. There would be fewer of these queries if people had a financial incentive to learn to use bookmarks and the address bar.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. that's pretty crazy to hear. Especially since on this day alone, a weekend, I seem to have 20 unique searches. I can easily hit triple digits a day when researching for a project or on the job. Search is invaluable to me.
- devjab 2y ago
  What sort of job relies on internet searches? I’m not trying to be rude or anything like that at all, I’m genuinely curious.
  - daelon 2y ago
    Pro... gramming? I'm sorry, are you aware of what website you're on?
    - devjab 2y ago
      I’m a software developer, have been for two decades. I was suspecting it may be the case which is why I asked. Again, I’m not meaning to be rude or snide or anything, but what do you use search engines for? I almost never use them, I tend to head directly to the documentation when I need to look up the APIs for a library. This is mainly because “free” search engines suck at it these days, and I’m curious if Kagi doesn’t.
      - Mashimo 2y ago
        How do you find the documentation in the first place? ;-) I search for Errors / StackTraces that I get. For me stackoverflow / reddit / forum answers are often more helpful. Or examples on how to implement something, the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together. Give me some working code that I can fiddle with. High level comparison between two frameworks / libs that I'm not familiar with.
        devjab 2y ago
aniviacat 2y ago
I assume these numbers are heavily skewed by the amount of people doing 0 searches a day. Lots of people hardly use their webbrowser, spending almost all their time within apps. YouTube and TikTok have become popular search engines, partly for this reason. If you only count people for whom paying a monthly subscription for search wouldn't be completely ridiculous, I'd guess these numbers would skyrocket.

jaysonelliot 2y ago

The idea of paying for services online that most people expect to get for free is great, actually. There was a time when you simply expected to pay for anything that had value. Whether that was a newspaper, a magazine, a movie, music, or even an online service like AOL or CompuServe, you paid for it and you expected a certain level of quality in return. In the early days of the Web, it wasn't clear at all that sites could pay their bills with advertising. Then in the mid-'90s, Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up ad (he's apologized since) and things progressed - or regressed, if you prefer - and we slid down the long slope to companies selling your data, hyper-targeting ads, and worse. So many of society's ills right now can be traced to the ad-driven model. It's why clickbait is lucrative, why it's more profitable to run a populist site filled with misinformation than a trustworthy news org, it's how scammers and spammers are incentivized to flood social media sites with slop. I'd love to see Kagi succeed, and others to follow their lead. I'd much rather spend an extra $20, $30, even $50 a month or more to subscribe to a bunch of ad-free sites that I can trust than to get it all for "free" at the cost of ads, data mining, and scammy clickbait.

Sajarin 2y ago
I’m curious if you (or anyone else) know of any other services that are paid-only in a traditionally free/freemium product space. Perhaps for news, or video content, or music, or something else. What else do you use today for free that often feels like a Faustian bargain? As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?
- evoke4908 2y ago
  Jetbrains. Well, up until recently. Now I'm paying hundreds of dollars for a cheap copy of VSCode and I'm really not sure why I shouldn't just use the free version.
  - avh02 2y ago
    Because of the new ui? Seriously it's terrible, but the classic ui is still benevolently available as a plugin. Don't know for how long.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

andreagrandi 2y ago

I’ve been an happy subscriber for nearly one year now. I even tried DuckDuckGo for some time but the quality just wasn’t the same.

winwang 2y ago
Agreed. Kagi even works well with Reddit. Great that I can just fall back to google easily too.
freediver 2y ago
Thanks Andrea!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jasonpeacock 2y ago

Because: > If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. -- Andrew Lewis

iml7 2y ago
Are you looking for windows?
asddubs 2y ago
I don't really like that quote. Many services you do pay for still treat you like an asset to make money off. And many services that are free, like the internet archive for example, are not.
- iml7 2y ago
  Are you looking for windows?
- santoshalper 2y ago
  I'd put it this way... if you're paying a company, you might still also be the product, but if you're not paying for something that a company is spending money to make, you're definitely the product.
  - asddubs 2y ago
    Again, not true. There's many services like the internet archive that do not operate to make a profit. Lots of open source also fits this bill. The absolutism of the quote is just overly cynical. On the other hand, if the company is VC funded I would say this is generally true but it also dismisses basically all of non-commercial open source. How are you the product when you use debian?
  - SansGuidon 2y ago
    I service people for free because I can afford it despite I'm a company. It's part of the philosophy of sharing value for free. There are many services and products I use for free and I then make a donation to them because I love what they do. So clearly it's not true, maybe just true for the companies that do not care much about doing something good for people with only optional contribution in return.

moonlion_eth 2y ago

Paying customer here. Kagi all day every day

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

johannessjoberg 2y ago

I can highly recommend switching to kagi. Happy paying customer here.

iml7 2y ago

[removed]

tjpnz 2y ago
If they did that they would lose the bulk of their paying subscribers.
thesuitonym 2y ago
And someone else can take up the mantle. But perhaps, just perhaps, a business can just exist and turn a modest profit, without trying to scorch the earth raising revenue infinitely.
- zorked 2y ago
  I would pay extra for services from a company that promise not to try to grow indefinitely.

dr__mario 2y ago

I didn't have much success with Kagi for Spanish/local searches. Has this improved?

benhurmarcel 2y ago
For local searches (meaning in your city or even more local) I find Google better. For national searches, I find Kagi good at long as you specify the country. That’s one of my favorite features actually, you can leave it international by default, and add “!es” to search in Spain.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Kagi even mentions in their FAQ that you’ll have better luck on google for local stuff than you would on Kagi
carlosjobim 2y ago
You have to select your country as the default region to get better results, the "International" region is not as good as it was before, and leans very heavily to English. The good part is that after you've selected your country as the region, you still get good results in English or other languages.

vachina 2y ago

Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet. Once Kagi gains traction I guarantee result quality will nosedive.

bastawhiz 2y ago
The magic is in letting real humans curate what gets boosted and what doesn't. My results tend to be quite good because I've hidden tons of sites that I don't care about. It's the same reason uBlock works: filter lists can be shared.
EZ-E 2y ago
> Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet This seems like a hard problem to solve, the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution? Can AI even help? Do we need to go back to manual curation after all? I remember in the 90s there were manually curated lists of websites, something like a website directory. At this point I'd rather get recommended a list of websites from a reddit user than relying on Google's ranking.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  I don't think SEO actually beat Google. Rather, Google simply capitulated or was captured. I distinctly remember a 2019 update where things really went bad. Part of the situation is that a company that relies on ad revenue will get gradually feel the pull of the advertisers more and more. I'd be more worried about someone nefarious buying Kagi if it got big. Someone else would be willing to pay a whole lot of money for those eyeballs.
  - dannyw 2y ago
    SEO spam is correlated with ads. Google dominates web advertising. Google’s interests are aligned with SEO spammers, as long as it’s not so terrible you switch to another search engine or stop searching.
- interroboink 2y ago

bobek 2y ago

I am on Family plan for over a year. Very happy z including czech sites.

RamiAwar 2y ago

I would convert, but price is too high for me personally. I'd be willing to pay up to 3$ a month for my searches, but also per-use. If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay? A replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap, it's so easy to ignore sponsored search results (for now).

wartijn_ 2y ago
> If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay? Do you ever have months in which you don’t use a search engine at all? If so you might just not be the target audience.
evoke4908 2y ago
You either pay a flat fee, or you have to deal with the added baggage of considering that each search costs you a very real half a cent or whatever. Would you use your search engine more if every search query were an implicit microtransaction? Would you use it more or less if you had to consider that your first search of the month cost $3, or if it's the last day of the month and you need to search for something but you have to wait to not incur a full month's fee. This is one of those arguments that sounds reasonable but isn't. Nothing but a flat fee structure makes sense for something you'll be doing hundreds if not thousands of times a month. And let's be real: if you're the kind of person who could go a full month with no web searches, you don't want or need what Kagi is offering.
- bbutterworth 2y ago
  [dead]
- pzmarzly 2y ago
  Almost everyone is paying for their electricity based on usage, and yet people don't seem to think "this will cost me a dollar" when turning on the washing machine (unless really short on money). I think usage-based SaaS subscriptions could make sense from user's perspective, they are just too uncommon right now.
- eviks 2y ago

thesuitonym 2y ago

I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different. Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall. For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches. Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.

raybb 2y ago
Fyi you can search "titanic movie Wikipedia !" And when you use a bang it doesn't count against your searches. Or at least that's what it was like before I moved to the unlimited plan :)
- paradox460 2y ago
  You can just use !w to search Wikipedia, no need for the "I'm feeling lucky" bang
- ivandenysov 2y ago
  Thank you! I think I’ll use quick bangs even more: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs
theshrike79 2y ago
I hit my year too just two weeks ago. I always think "is it worth it" when the payment hits my credit card, but every time I come to the conclusion that it is very much worth it. Just the universal summariser has saved me insane amounts of time. I can feed any rambling youtube video (with subtitles) or a long article to it and it'll give me the key points of it. Then I can decide whether it's worth spending an time on or not. Something like this is the future of "AI" in my opinion, you can "teach" the system what you're interested in and it can curate content just for you - locally, without an unicorn startup getting all your data.

blindriver 2y ago

I would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly. I think search engines are a dead technology pretty quickly and the entire ecosystem will die in the next 2-3 years.

seattle_spring 2y ago
ChatGPT answers range from completely correct to deranged God-awful wrong, which means I have to use a regular search engine to verify the answers for anything remotely complex. Relying entirely on generative models for information is asking for trouble. Especially because the wrong answers often "look" correct/plausible.
- gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
  If you’re using chatGPT, you can add a prompt (I’ve set it in my rules) to “fact check from other websites” when I’m asking it things I’m not an expert in. It then provides some links which I then open up. I’ve found that to be a lot more efficient than searching from google straight up especially with very specific questions I sometimes query. Half the websites it shows are those I wouldn’t have found on google and are relatively high signal for what I’m looking for (including very niche blogs from experts from the field).
a57721 2y ago
There are lots of use cases when you want references to reliable sources written by real people instead of AI slop. Science, law, technical documentation, etc. If you ask an LLM for the sources, it is happy to generate bogus citations for false claims, and the only way to verify the answer is by using the good old web search. I hope real search engines never die, only those that turn to AI slop like Google.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly Kagi integrates GPT 4 and other LLMs, as well as its own Quick Answer product. The Quick Answer product is 9 times out of 10 superior to any of the pre-trained LLMs. Mostly because it's accessing live information. Put another way, I'd love to go head to head with a competitor who relies on ChatGPT for their queries.

smoovb 2y ago

I would pay for Chrome Premium, as I pay for Youtube Premium. Prefer the Brave/YT Premium model where creators and sites get some share of your payment. The Kagi model, unless I missed it, seems to be "just pay us" with nothing going to creators.

evoke4908 2y ago
Kagi is just a search engine. You're paying to access their index. There is no advertisement of any kind and Kagi has no relation to any site in their index. This is like being miffed that Yellowpages doesn't pay businesses to list them in the phone book.
freediver 2y ago
Kagi's mission is to humanize the web and it is boosting creators (small, personal blogs and websites) in search results: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web How would you design a system where creators are paid in a search engine? We have always had an idea of profit share for showing up in results but we would need to reach about 10M members for this to be more than few cents a month. (Kagi CEO here)

n8cpdx 2y ago

Never going back to FASS, Kagi is great. So much better than Google, and getting better every day now that Google is sticking made up nonsense into the results. I like that I get to choose when to use GPT. If you’re on iOS, the Orion browser is great, too - tldr chrome extensions on iOS.

evoke4908 2y ago

Another Kagi user for a year or two. I've honestly never had a single negative experience. Since using Kagi, I've only had to use google a couple of very desperate times. I don't notice the subscription fee because I get excellent value from it. Kagi simply does what you ask and stays out of the way. Because you pay them, they don't need to monetize every pixel on the screen. No tracking or data mining. It's just software that does what it says it does and does what you tell it. It's tragic that "thing that does one thing well and doesn't spy on you" is a scary and alien concept these days.

oefrha 2y ago

A point I hardly ever see anyone bring up: I’m not a fan of the idea of doing all my searches while signed in, potentially creating a company-knows-me-better-than-myself situation. I do my searches in private windows mostly behind commercial VPNs so that it’s difficult enough to profile me that companies probably won’t bother. Public search engines have to get really bad before I move to a sign-in-required one. But given that this community which ostensibly touts privacy at every turn seems to overwhelmingly support feeding everything (not just searches) into OpenAI/Claude, I guess my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe. Btw I’m by no means a privacy maximalist.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe Kagi provides strong privacy guarantees [1]. They could be lying. But so could your VPN providers. [1] https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
- whilenot-dev 2y ago
  I'm calling marketing fluff here, given that its founder seems to hold a skewed model of kagis power in regard to collecting personal information altogether: "personal information is what you can be identified with as an individual. no information you submit to kagi is personal information except if you use your real email address to register"[0] [0]: https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    The image looks like it's from this post [1]. Long story short, this appears to be a case of a CEO needing to restrain themselves from saying (or typing) everything that comes to mind when faced with a combative user who clearly isn't trying to understand something or bring anything to the table. At the end of the day, what you care about when it comes to privacy in search are your search records. They say--in a way that generates liablity--that they don't store them. I see no reason for them to break that promise. Between a commercial VPN and Kagi, I trust Kagi more. [1] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

pinkmuffinere 2y ago

I’ve considered using kagi before, but I think this blog post finally convinced me not too: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html The quick summary is that they aren’t really privacy focused at all, don’t comply with GDPR, and generally seem ok misleading their customers. The lack-of-privacy doesn’t bother me itself, but misleading customers really troubles me. Why would I trust them with X when I know they’ve lied with Y?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Skimmed. Not seeing how Kagi are lying about anything. To the degree I can fault Vlad, it's in going down irrelevant rabbit holes with these folks.
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  Here’s an easy one: Vlad claims they are GDPR compliant. However, they do not provide a way to download stored personal info, as required by GDPR. This is a contradiction
  - freediver 2y ago
    We do, just email support@kagi.com. Please do not spread disinformation.
    - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
      I’m glad to hear you have updated your policy.
      - freediver 2y ago
        That was always our policy.
        pinkmuffinere 2y ago

mholubowski 2y ago

Very serious question: How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker? —- That’s my current solutions, why should I switch to paying for Kagi? Ty!

xigoi 2y ago
You get features like manual personalization of results, bangs, redirects, paywall warnings, WolframAlpha integration, etc.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker? Rubber duck to a battleship. The number of times I've found something in seconds that a co-worker was digging around in pursuit of for minutes has by this point escaped me. Were you around for Alta Vista vs. Google? This feels the same. The only difference is it's paywalled, which for the consumer, is generally good--it means the benefits won't be generalised and the product will remain an elite minority offering that doesn't gain traction with SEO bots.
tanduv 2y ago
Just tried that example screenshot of 'postgresql query analysis' and got the same results on Kagi vs Google with uBlock. What exactly is novel here?
byzantinegene 2y ago
it's not, there's clearly astroturfing going on, there's two articles by kagi on the front page of hackernews.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
commandersaki 2y ago
Adblockers do not eliminate geekforgeeks in search results.
freediver 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

taspeotis 2y ago

I use Kagi, it’s pretty good. I pay for it and would recommend everybody at least evaluate. The worst bits, which aren’t even that bad: The maps are a work in progress. No shopping search. If I want something like shopping search I can use Google. Not sure if it’s because I’m in Australia but sometimes it takes a while for the page to load. Subsequent searches are faster.

slau 2y ago
I don’t believe I’ve ever used shopping search. I remember seeing it a decade ago or something, but I never understood the point. What is it for?
- Mashimo 2y ago
  To find where a products is being sold for the cheapest price. For electronics I know 3rd party services that compare prices for different shops. But in cases like "Where can I by this specific dental floss" I sometimes use google shopping search.
- dagw 2y ago
  I find it super useful for listing all the places in my country where I can buy X, orders by price. Doing a more generic search for a product tends to give results heavily dominated by sites in the US. Also really useful when combined with image search. I can take a picture of a cool lamp and quickly find all the places where I can buy a similar lamp.

youoy 2y ago

Quick questions por people that have used it: is it good for technical searches? Like math/programming? At some point I tried another search engine but I ended up going back to Google for those. For what type of topics do you find yourself going back to Google/other search engine?

rckclmbr 2y ago
I’ve been a subscriber for about a year. It’s best at technical searches. I would say other topics, particularly niche questions I have about like sports or something, it has a more difficult time on. Absolutely do not regret subscribing though
CleverLikeAnOx 2y ago
I use it for programming and math. When I started using kagi almost 2 years ago, I had to go back to Google occasionally. Now I basically never go back to Google search.

Toutouxc 2y ago

Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions (along with JetBrains and my cloud backup provider), where if it were a local business, I'd go there to pay in person, and smile while doing it. I feel respected as a customer and I feel like I'm getting great value from the service. A LLM-fueled storm might be brewing on the web, but I'm definitely riding into it with Kagi.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions Funny, in terms of (non-niche) brand loyalty and evangelism, I'd say it's up there for me with Apple and Delta.
- slau 2y ago
  I’d put it in the “I’m paying for this but I’m not sure the CEO will never make me regret that fact” category. There’s been some… ego-fuelled decision making happening in Kagi’s communication.

unstuck3958 2y ago

Why are there so many paying Kagi customers who feel the to write multiple paragraphs of testimonies? This is so unusual of HN. Reeks of astroturfing.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
You really can't distinguish enthusiasm for a product in a sea of crap from astroturfing?
- deely3 2y ago
  Its hard to check is person geniune on internet. Also, too often we all see a lot of prise for not-so-good products.
slau 2y ago
Disclaimer: I’m a paying customer of Kagi. It felt truly bizarre to subscribe to a search engine. To actually pay for access. There’s been a bit of drama with the CEO directly emailing people when they left poor reviews. Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality. I’m not surprised there’s a lot of people having thoughts and feelings about Kagi and expressing them. The fact that there’s a significant overlap between HN and Kagi’s user bases is hardly a surprise either.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality As someone who uses Orion as their daily driver, I'll admit I'm somewhat confused by why Kagi isn't staying mission focussed. That said, it may be the case that they're a premium company for a small, well-defined niche. In that case, broadening the service offering makes sense--it's what Apple did.
lompad 2y ago
Because a massive share of the kagi users are part of the hn-adjecent crowd. When you look at the most manually upranked domains, you'll probably get a clearer picture. https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6 https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6 The typical kagi user uses hn. In the past, hn was even further up, though I guess they're slowly getting "normal" people too.

ricardo81 2y ago

The interesting thing about their calculation of Google's $23/m revenue per user, is how much of that is simply by matching a user's query and location to ads? i.e. Is all the additional data collection and abandonment of privacy entirely necessary to reach anywhere near that number? Also it's not clear if the numbers used in the article omits publisher ads from Adsense. It would be great if G's advertisers were opened up to competitors, I think a CPA model would work out well since combatting click fraud involves a lot of profiling.

inquisitor27552 2y ago

i liked the idea but here in SEA the latency is just nuts compared to google.

Peteragain 2y ago

As a bit of a socialist I guess I should at least suggest that in the information age search is infrastructure. IP addresses are the commons. Capitalism will, of course, argue it's right to make money where it can but .. And I am sure it is not in the national interest to have another country in a position to turn off your infrastructure.

discardedrefuse 2y ago

I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it. SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?) You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access. We have entered the internet's dark age. Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).

amatheus 2y ago
I think there may be a way forward for the internet. Why isn't hacker news being strangled by SEO spam for example? I think the way forward is a much smaller internet predicated on tight-knit communities approving everything that's shared. I don't know how this could scale but maybe that's the point, it must stay small to succeed.
knadh 2y ago
> I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it. I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general. [1] https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/ https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/
n_ary 2y ago
I do not blame Google for web’s current wasteland landscape, I blame ads and all the grifters who poison the landscape with SEO waste to try make some bucks with ads or other similar means.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Freedom5093 2y ago

The only time I think about using or paying for Kagi is when I see these posts on HN and get FOMO. I think that's because I actually don't have that SEO garbage problem anymore. AI apps have made search, and learning in particular, a lot easier.

Veen 2y ago
AI apps like Perplixity and Phind index and rank web content too. They have the same problem.

pptr 2y ago

When I do a Google search for the example query "postgresql query analysis" on mobile chrome (no ad block), I get 0 ads. Same thing if I select the "Example" filter as shown in the demo image.

lowleveldesign 2y ago

Apart from search customizations, I also use the bang searches (a few mine and many from https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs). I also recently switched to ultimate and created a few assistants with system prompts for my various needs (coding, learning chemistry, etc.)

renegat0x0 2y ago

People are sad over google demise, but we have more tools than before, and easily we can mitigate. - there are other search engines, like kagi - we have AI, chatgpt, which some people find use for. I use it to ask general questions about programming problem solving and it often helps me. I do not know every language, and when I needed to write browser extension it saved me a lot of time - bookmarking software. I wrote my own self-hosted software [1], with search ability. I do not have to 'research' everything I find interesting. Google will not bury inconvenient news anymore, or filter it I think we need is adapt. When Google entered, Yahoo was not able to change. IBM was not able to change. Old tech is replaced by new solutions. We need to reconsider how to find things online. [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

nbenitezl 2y ago

Another happy Kagi user here, I also love the fact they also give FastGPT as a bonus.

yorick 2y ago

To provide some counterweight to all the overwhelmingly positive reviews: I've used kagi for 6 months and have over 7500 searches with them. It mostly works, but there are a few downsides compared to Google: - The latency is a lot higher than google, taking over a second to display any results. - The results are often not as relevant, I have to frequently retry my search in Google. - The results for anything local (I'm not in the US) are abysmal. Searching for anything in my city instead only gives me results for the city's history. Still, I persist in using Kagi, mainly because it's not Google and I want them to succeed. The results are frequently good enough for me to stay with them.

dannyw 2y ago
You can use multiple search engines. I use Kagi, Bing, and occasionally Yandex.
__jonas 2y ago
I mentioned my issue with the latency last time Kagi was posted, I would love it if they could bring it to be a bit closer to Google

maxehmookau 2y ago

I love my Kagi account, and will continue to pay. It is too US-centric, something I've been asked to report in HN comments (I have), and something that continues to be a problem. But as with all of these things, I'm paying to no longer be the product. That's the value for me, and so "it not working exactly as I expect 100% of the time" is actually a small price worth paying. Generally speaking, I find the quality of results usually on a par with Google.

dave_walko 2y ago

I have signed up off and on. For me, the starter is just a tad to few searches per month. If I had 400 I would most likely just pay the $5 out of support for the team as I am also hoping to see Orion do better (bitwarden issue) I have some months where I search for stuff I already know. Like I goto url bar and just type imdb which then initiates a search. I know the dang url but am lazy lol. I wish the team tons of luck, I monitor the pricing page monthly usually, just hoping to see a small uptick in starter limits as unlimited is just not my use case. $8.00 for unlimited and again, I would sign up just to support them.