4 ms·

> paying kagi customer here! Keep it up, kagi! I still love and need you! What is it with the Kagi sycophancy on this site? Right now there's yet another discu

> paying kagi customer here! Keep it up, kagi! I still love and need you! What is it with the Kagi sycophancy on this site? Right now there's yet another discussion on the front page full of glowing Kagi adoration interspersed with some reality checks about the actual quality of the search results. I understand that Kagi is a Y-Combinator company but does it have to be laid on so thickly? As to what I use for search: a self-hosted SearxNG (a meta-search engine, i.e. it proxies search results from other search engines) instance (started with Searx but followed when development moved there) combined with Recoll for local search, recoll-webui and the recoll 'engine' to integrate results into SearxNG. I also experimented with YaCy (a fully self-hosted search engine with its own web crawler) but have not gotten useable results yet, the system seems to get bogged down once the index grows behind a certain size.

fxtentacle 2y ago
Just try it, I guess. I was also sceptical and ran my own search engine and at one time I was even pitching people a paid indexing service that would allow people to self-host their search engine and by pooling money they gain world-class crawling. But in the end, I noticed that for me, improving search results is mostly about suppressing garbage. Kagi lets me filter out Pinterest and some of the worst SEO spam farms. And with them gone, the results already feel much better. I'd guess Kagi is popular here because they sell what people crave.
immibis 2y ago
Maybe it's a good product or maybe they paid dang off. Two possibilities. Which one is more likely?
input_sh 2y ago
It really reminds me of Roam Research, which was also an overpriced, niche product that was unavoidable for quite some time in these circles. Now if you google it (or kagi it?) you just see a bunch of reddit posts asking if Roam is dead. You'd think Kagi has millions of paying users, and not ~33k, seemingly half of which are on HN. Hopefully this time around they don't actually start referring to their community as a cult like Roam did.
paradox460 2y ago
Kagi is not a yc company. They're privately funded and their last round was for less than a million dollars and was from private investors
28304283409234 2y ago
Didn't even know they were a ycombinator company and now that I do I like them a lot less. I am not a sycophant. Just a happy customer. And happy to have the chance to be a customer, not just a data point. I love kagi trying to serve me, with actual usefulness, instead of serving some dark marketplace of advertisers that have no interest in my wellbeing.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Didn't even know they were a ycombinator company and now that I do I like them a lot less. You didn't know it, because they aren't.

fxtentacle 2y ago

Just try it, I guess. I was also sceptical and ran my own search engine and at one time I was even pitching people a paid indexing service that would allow people to self-host their search engine and by pooling money they gain world-class crawling. But in the end, I noticed that for me, improving search results is mostly about suppressing garbage. Kagi lets me filter out Pinterest and some of the worst SEO spam farms. And with them gone, the results already feel much better. I'd guess Kagi is popular here because they sell what people crave.

immibis 2y ago

Maybe it's a good product or maybe they paid dang off. Two possibilities. Which one is more likely?

input_sh 2y ago

It really reminds me of Roam Research, which was also an overpriced, niche product that was unavoidable for quite some time in these circles. Now if you google it (or kagi it?) you just see a bunch of reddit posts asking if Roam is dead. You'd think Kagi has millions of paying users, and not ~33k, seemingly half of which are on HN. Hopefully this time around they don't actually start referring to their community as a cult like Roam did.

paradox460 2y ago

Kagi is not a yc company. They're privately funded and their last round was for less than a million dollars and was from private investors

28304283409234 2y ago

Didn't even know they were a ycombinator company and now that I do I like them a lot less. I am not a sycophant. Just a happy customer. And happy to have the chance to be a customer, not just a data point. I love kagi trying to serve me, with actual usefulness, instead of serving some dark marketplace of advertisers that have no interest in my wellbeing.

carlosjobim 2y ago
> Didn't even know they were a ycombinator company and now that I do I like them a lot less. You didn't know it, because they aren't.