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Using Kagi Search with Low Vision
- damnesian 6mo agoI know it's a completely different thing- but the neurodiverse face similar struggles of having to wade through reams of completely superfluous content to get to anything usuable. Having done plenty of text to speech testing of my own website, I've never thought to turn it onto a Google search results page. It's abysmal. Of course Google is an accessibility nightmare.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jacobmarble 6mo agoOne more reason to love Kagi Search.
- retired_account 6mo agoThe custom css is tight, love using inky blacks on my oled devices with just a single style sheet.
- equasar 6mo agothe thing I really miss when I use magic, is recommended places from Google maps, where to watch certain movie/series, a lot of things like that, where you can infer recommendations based on your location. Kagi might be good to filter everything scored "bad", but makes you work more.
- freediver 6mo agoWe have a big overhaul of Kagi Maps coming, stay tuned :)
- user3939382 6mo agoKagi is awesome! Good luck w the updates
- ExMachina73 6mo agoLooking forward to this.
- ziml77 6mo agoHow do you feel your data for Kagi Maps compares to Google Maps? It's the kind of thing that's harder to test than switching web searches over to Kagi. I need to already know that the business and transit data is reliable which is why I still go to Google Maps.
- dgacmu 6mo agoLocal queries are the I've things I use Google for still -- but Kagi makes it easy, you just start your query with !g and it redirects you. So it's pretty safe to switch the default.
- Semaphor 6mo agoI’m looking forward to it. I never stopped using Google Maps because no alternative was as ubiquitously useful (OSM is better in certain areas, but it’s hard to say when, which eventually resulted in me switching back to GM full time).
- Marsymars 6mo agoI don't have low vision (yet), but do a fair amount of my reading sitting ~3m from a 65" screen, and I gotta say, the UI of this blog is lovely for that.
- amarant 6mo ago[dead]
- payphonefiend 6mo agoObservation on the author's site: it's cool you can tell their site is designed for them by them, or other people with low vision. big font, high contrast, etc...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- slopinthebag 6mo agoIt's also nice for everyone. Like, very readable, pleasant, way better than the trendy modern designs.
- willio58 6mo agoI love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that. I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw. The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent. What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.
- Esn024 6mo agoI agree, I found it hard and frustrating to read on my (small) phone because the text is just too big. I usually skim long articles to some extent to focus on reading the parts I'm most interested in, but this format makes that impossible. I can't skim anything because barely a sentence is on my screen at one time.
- robin_reala 6mo agoFor me too, but I just hit the reader button to get an experience tailored to my needs.
- tamimio 6mo agoKagi is one of the few services that I will never use, it’s a privacy nightmare. Imagine all your search history are tied to one account, an account that id you with your payment information, and is hosted in the US? Google is better at this point, at least you can use it without an account.
- Skunkleton 6mo agoYou must be joking. Google ties all of your searches to you wether you log in or not.
- tamimio 6mo agoI’m certainly not joking. Google when it started it wasn’t as evil as now, but the bigger it gets the more evil it becomes, who knows what kagi will turn into if they got as big as google. But again on principle, can you use google search in the library without an account? Yes. Can you use kagi in the library without an account? No. So whenever and whatever you do, your queries are logged and tracked back to you, only waiting for xyz to be pulled out.
- acdha 6mo agoGoogle still lets you do some things without logging in but that doesn’t mean that they don’t build profiles or try to link them with other activity sources. Most of their revenue comes from advertisers paying for targeting.
- tempest_ 6mo agoThe paranoia but also the naïveté of internet tracking is a bit of a rare combination I think. Shadow profiles have been a thing for 15 years or more and they have only gotten more sophisticated. Browser fingerprints are surprisingly unique. Unless this guy is rotating machines / vpns / using qubes / etc Google can very likely pinpoint within a degree of certainly which searches are theirs.
- ajyoon 6mo agoKagi is the one and only product I will ever stan
- mixmastamyk 6mo ago?
- Ampersander 6mo agoBiggest fan like in the Eminem song Stan
- dredmorbius 6mo ago<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stan https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stan>
- saint11 6mo agoI've been using Kagi for a while now and I'm never going back to Google. Everything is just so much better when you are not the product.
- m-schuetz 6mo agoThe feature that sold me was the domain block feature. Search results are so much better when they dont include SEO'd garbage, sites with entirely AI generated content, or userbenchmark.com
- pasc1878 6mo agoGoogle a long time ago did that, but I assume those sites are where they get money from and so they removed that choice.
- skrtskrt 6mo agoI also love the ability to prioritize domains. I push docs.rs up because otherwise I often get the crates.io page which I never want. And I push GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg sites up so I get actual repos instead of product pages.
- duskdozer 6mo agoI use https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist for that. ~10k blocked domains and rules. There is just so so much spam
- hankbond 6mo agoI love when people make personal websites (seemingly) purely for themselves. The design of this website really reflects the perspective of the author in a way that was immediately apparent. I've never seen a website with a menu that large.
- lynndotpy 6mo agoThis author is excellent. I found their blog earlier today when relaying advice on setting up an iPhone for someone to use after a stroke. ( https://veroniiiica.com/iphone-accessibility-settings-for-stroke/ https://veroniiiica.com/iphone-accessibility-settings-for-st... )
- delis-thumbs-7e 6mo agoMy eyesight is not even that bad, but I fpund the large contrast and for really easy and enjoyable to read.
- MavisBacon 6mo agoIt is nice but the website has some obvious contrast issues such as in the header. "Veronica With Four Eyes" is black text on a dark grey background
- duskdozer 6mo agoI think that's something on your end. Looking at the CSS (and checking in dev browser) it should be #0a0a0a on #fff (light) or #fff on #111 (dark)
- poetril 6mo agoKagi has been one of my all time favorite products. It has enriched my search experience drastically. One of my favorite features I don't see talked about enough is the keybindings. Using vim keys for navigating search results is such a fantastic user experience, and much like normal vim I'm not sure I could go back to navigating search any other way. I also really appreciate their AI quick-search feature is explicitly opt in and trigger by adding a "?" to the end of search. Their selection of widgets is also quite nice and I find my self reaching for them quite a bit.
- Nathanba 6mo agoI just don't understand how they can think that not giving me a single free search per month is a good idea. I used Kagi when they still had a free plan and it was fine but I still preferred Google. Now I can't even try it again to see if it has additional value.
- SJMG 6mo agoDo you think the potential upside is worth the $5 it would take to explore?
- Nathanba 6mo agono, I check every few months and only do a few searches at most.
- carlosjobim 6mo agoIf you weren't convinced the first 100 times you tried a product, what is the reason to keep trying?
- Valodim 6mo agoSounds like you're just not the target audience, then. Not every product has to have an ads-based or freemium business model.
- 6mo ago
- hod6654 6mo agoI love Kagi, but it is soooo slow compared to Google. Really annoying...
- herrherrmann 6mo agoYou mean the search results are loading slow? I’ve sometimes noticed that, but not really to a degree that it was significantly worse than Google.
- hod6654 6mo agoThe whole page loads slow as compared to google. To the point it's annoying. I'm in Europe though.
- jesterswilde 6mo agoI really appreciate clearly custom websites. My eyes are also quite bad (legally blind.) Nearly ironically, because the site is already created for low vision, it had issues with the things that I do. Dark Reader froze up (uncommon) and the font was, for the first time, too large. I am glad to see someone else enjoying Kagi.
- squigz 6mo agoI was wondering why my browser was not happy with her site. Indeed, Dark Reader was struggling with it. I've never seen that before. Legally blind here too o7
- dmfdmf 6mo agoSo far, so good. I just let Kagi renew after my first year. The nicest thing is getting relevant search links on the first page or two and not pages of SEO links or ads masked as links that are irrelevant to my search. I haven't even used the advanced features yet but just using it in base mode is a huge time (and frustration) saver for me.
- bandrami 6mo agoKagi was the best service provider change I've made in years and if anybody cares for an anonymous HN endorsement, they have mine.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo agoAgree. I admit, I was initially hesitant to pay for a search provider given all the free options, but I'm glad I made the jump. Using Kagi feels like using Google in the early 00s.
- Semaphor 6mo ago> if anybody cares for an anonymous HN endorsement tbf, those are common in every Kagi or Search Engine in general article on HN ;) - A happy user since the beta days before you even had to pay.
- delis-thumbs-7e 6mo agoI have been paying for Kagi since last year and love it. I am not going back to using Google crap.
- jeremyjh 6mo agoI've been using Kagi for a couple of years now. For awhile, my work Chrome profile was still set to use Google for search by default because I don't login to personal accounts on it. I didn't use search that often for programming work - I used ChatGPT or Claude much more often - so it was always incredibly shocking to me how terrible Google search was every time I used it. The AI results were bad beyond all human understanding - the sort of product that I thought only a walking corpse like Microsoft could release so broadly. But, that is essentially what Google Search is now. Clearly no one in a position of responsibility knows or cares about product design or performance and it only continues to exist through sheer inertia. Switching to Kagi is how it felt when I first used broadband internet in college , or when I switched from Alta Vista to Google: the internet works like it should.
- TurdF3rguson 6mo agoI just tried it and the search results are terrible. Maybe because Google knows things about me, I guess I can give them the benefit of that doubt. Clearly inferior to Google though.
- mitchell209 6mo agoDo you have some example searches that you made? I’m not a heavy search user and not a programmer but I’ve still found the experience on par or better for all of my general searching.
- TurdF3rguson 6mo agoI tried with the search I had open which was "cf d1" and I was looking for info on cloudflare d1, Google surfaced it #1 and Kagi it was way at the bottom
- freediver 6mo agoFor the record this is on Google https://imgur.com/a/De1AVpt https://imgur.com/a/De1AVpt definetely not #1 Kagi allows personalization, the difference is you as a user control it. If you used kagi for decade (assuming this is what you used Google for) I am sure the results would be fine tuned to your preference too.
- rldjbpin 6mo ago> In the Site Search section, click Add and fill in the following: > Name: Kagi > Shortcut: k > URL: `https://kagi.com/search?q=%s https://kagi.com/search?q=%s` looks like one can do this and use search without needing to be logged in. pleasantly surprised to see this. i wonder how they would rate limit users this way.
- pasc1878 6mo agoHmm. This page eats memory on both Safari and Vivaldi and Orion even with Javascript off.
- superkuh 6mo agoI paid $10/month to Kagi for 3 months. During that time I quickly learned that Kagi's image results were just repackaged google image search; literally the same images returned in the same order as google image search. I also noticed that Kagi does not ever return more than 250 results. Just 250. Kagi is not the kind of search engine that is useful for someone who is used to web surfing in the kind of style that emerged in the 90s/00s. It is more of a curated corporate search engine that tells you what it thinks you want to see. You are never allowed the resources/results to actually look for yourself. In the end it was the later that put me off using it. Even though other search engines have been gimped as well (Google only returns a maximum of 400 search results these days, Bing 900, etc) 250 was just far too small to be useful.
- theshrike79 6mo ago...you regularly browse to the 25th page of Google results? Why?
- superkuh 5mo agoNo, I regularly browser the 4th page of google results. Why do you only have 10 results per page? That seems really counterproductive. I wish I could do more than the 100 I set it at.
- dpatac 6mo agoI have been using Kagi for years. I use the family plan for my wife and I. I love it and will continue to use it until it either gets bad, they sell it, or get an ipo. There is no noise. Google, to me is just filled with noise. I used to love the innovation and used many of their products. Their search is now filled with ads and you no longer get good results, in my opinion. Their AI will also have ads: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-live-search-ads/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-l... Kagi is refreshing, the results have gotten very good. Occasionally there have been poor results with items at the top that should not have been, but I have noticed that it has been corrected quite quickly. Kagi does not retain any of your search terms nor does Kagi Assisstant. To me, Kagi gives me results like google used to, there are No ads, and they do not retain your search terms. I will gladly pay for that.
- NoSalt 6mo agoIs anybody else old enough to remember when Kagi.com was a place to pay for shareware? https://web.archive.org/web/19970105191743/https://kagi.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970105191743/https://kagi.com/