About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.
This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.
What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.
But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.
I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.
Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.
The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.
I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.
Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.
Did you miss the part about them using DDG? They do have access to their search engine.
If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.
I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.
YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.
That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.
It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.
Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.
I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present.
It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.
With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected.
I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users.
Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.
is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.
Have you ever written software? Especially to manage payments? This is a very plausible bug around a corner case. Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers that they're also trying to win back, or maybe sometimes bugs happen.
That particular reply however is gross and controversial on so many levels.
If you have a bug at a partner, you don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected". If it affects multiple users, you don't do opt-in refunds (which is again, illegal, and is a scam if intentional).
> Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers
Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen.. And is also taking the user input back to his employer to hopefully find a way to improve the user experience.
It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.
It’s plausible that I didn’t see the email because it got spam filtered away, so I totally believe that one was sent.
On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.
[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]
Email is not the best notification method these days. I'd suggest having a notifications delivered directly in kagi's interface as well. Maybe a banner for an ending trial period.
I have been using Kagi since the start. You guys are doing an incredible job.
> This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present.
I'm not sure if it's a Norwegian law or an EU law, but companies here are forced to regularly send reminders that you are subscribed to them, I've gotten them from all the major streaming services I've subscribed to.
I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)
Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:
As I mentioned in my previous comment, it does not convert IF you do not have a payment method set.
In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.
I did mention a workaround we could do, and that's something that we will ensure gets done asap.
Just FYI, if you run out of your 300, you can simply renew on that date. So if 300 searches lasts you 21 days, you're effectively paying between $5 and $10 per month. If you run out halfway, though, it's cheaper to pay for unlimited.
FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all
As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.
I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.
I think the point the OP is making is that just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I agree.
If you feel streamers are offering a bad deal, don't take them up on the deal and find something else to do. If you want to watch shows your friends and family are watching, take the deal.
As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.
Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
In my opinion, no it's too shit compared to Google Maps, Apple Maps is also not great. Kagi have their own maps, which it seems is based on Apple Maps. Apple has no information outside the US (heard its better in the US but I just know it's not great in Europe or Africa). Things like operating hours.
Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.
I've never had any issue using any Google service with an ad blocker. They make plenty off of me via YouTube Premium and Google Flights commissions - both services that I think are valuable, and one that I actually gladly pay for.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)
I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.
> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.
Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.
Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.
99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.
If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.
This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)
Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.
Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches
> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?
"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.
Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.
You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.
I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.
I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.
My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.
Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.
I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.
I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.
I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.
I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.
Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad.
Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.
I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly.
My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.
Me too, actually. I'm starting to think this "buy Kagi!" movement is being pushed by people who didn't even know they could change their default search provider.
Session links are what you’re looking for. Privacy Pass doesn’t work if you clear cookies, and in fact will lock you out of Privacy Pass for a month if you clear cookies maybe four times. Ask me how I found out.
I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time
My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill.
So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it.
It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.
FYI, I think the $10 plan that's now "basic AI" used to just be the unlimited search plan and they just recently added a limited capacity of the AI stuff to it.
Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.
This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
I've also found that the extension configuration isn't very durable. I wound up having to re-do the arcane setup process semi-annually on each device or my searches would 403. Eventually just gave up. Brave search seems to work just as well.
> I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work
There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.
Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
I think there might be more to it. While it might just be me, I think Kagi could use some improvement here. I've been using Kagi with Safari on Mac for about a year, and never got the search extension to work consistently. It would sometimes give me Google, and sometimes Kagi. And sometimes it would give me one site then switch to the other after a several second delay.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
I don't know the details well enough to pinpoint the problem, but the fact that StopTheMadness is able to redirect consistently and the Kagi extension wasn't makes me think there is something they could fix to make it work better.
If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.
It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real
Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
> Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.
I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I guess I'm a power user, I'm at
> Total searches this period 1,216
> Assistant interactions this period 92
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.
No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!
The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same.
There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.
Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.
It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.
I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.
But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.
I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.
[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.
I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects
Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search
The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|
I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.
"0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1
yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.
0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.
yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.
This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.
Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.
1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.
2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.
Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.
I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either.
That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)
Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng
You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm.
It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.
The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice.
I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ...
With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.
I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.
Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.
For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?
What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.
To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity).
If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.
Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...
If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.
That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).
For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.
I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service
I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).
> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.
I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.
I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)
Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.
It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.
I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.
Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results.
Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi
DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.
Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.
with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.
Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.
I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.
I like it, but that still leaves metadata like the fact that I have an account at all. With the low user numbers of Kagi any privacy guarantee by them is an illusion. Since Kagi is operating out of a country without any privacy laws that could protect me, I will not use their services.
That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.
I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page.
But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.
That would be very kind, if you still have it available. I have been on the fence - skeptical as is my nature, but I wonder if I am in the wrong here :)
Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.
another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook
- you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN
- you can add shortcuts to the search box
- it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.
searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.
The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.
Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English.
The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches.
That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.
Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi.
For those niche cases I have !g
I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site.
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools
2. Mozilla's documentation
3. The Cambridge dictionary
4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology
5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.
This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.
What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.
But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.
I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.
Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.
10 dollars is like, a sandwich. Access to your search engine for a month is less useful than a sandwich?
The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.
I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.
Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.
$10 is many sandwiches.
Did you miss the part about them using DDG? They do have access to their search engine.
If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.
I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.
"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"
> 10 dollars is like, a sandwich
In Silicon Valley?
Does Kagi only want to sell to techbros?
[delayed]
YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.
That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.
It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.
Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.
I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.
This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.
With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.
That comment from an actual human being, sir, more than anything else, would be by itself a reason for me to switch to Kagi everywhere.
Fortunately I already switched to Kagi everywhere...
Huh? They are scamming someone,
> I do understand how this may be unexpected.
is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.
How does this make you want to be their user?
Have you ever written software? Especially to manage payments? This is a very plausible bug around a corner case. Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers that they're also trying to win back, or maybe sometimes bugs happen.
As far as I remember, this ‘try us again for 30 days’ promotion was explicitly for previous subscribers, so I would not say this was a corner case.
Having bugs is okay.
That particular reply however is gross and controversial on so many levels.
If you have a bug at a partner, you don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected". If it affects multiple users, you don't do opt-in refunds (which is again, illegal, and is a scam if intentional).
> Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers
They've just admitted it?
Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen.. And is also taking the user input back to his employer to hopefully find a way to improve the user experience.
It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.
> will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users
What more do you want? A user complained, they offered a refund and they said they would look into fixing it.
Dude what's your angle here. Scammers don't offer full refunds.
It’s plausible that I didn’t see the email because it got spam filtered away, so I totally believe that one was sent.
On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.
[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]
Email is not the best notification method these days. I'd suggest having a notifications delivered directly in kagi's interface as well. Maybe a banner for an ending trial period.
I have been using Kagi since the start. You guys are doing an incredible job.
> This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present.
Blaming Stripe?
That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.
I'm not sure if it's a Norwegian law or an EU law, but companies here are forced to regularly send reminders that you are subscribed to them, I've gotten them from all the major streaming services I've subscribed to.
Huh, Norway is not in the EU.
On the contrary, they are the rare SaaS that proactively avoids charging you any period you don't use it.
I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)
Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43308930
Hey,
As I mentioned in my previous comment, it does not convert IF you do not have a payment method set. In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.
I did mention a workaround we could do, and that's something that we will ensure gets done asap.
> In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.
Is this even legal? Ok, maybe in the US...
Just FYI, if you run out of your 300, you can simply renew on that date. So if 300 searches lasts you 21 days, you're effectively paying between $5 and $10 per month. If you run out halfway, though, it's cheaper to pay for unlimited.
FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all
As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.
I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.
As long as your time is worth <$50/yr...
Why not just avoid their services instead of pirating their content and matching the ethics of their execs?
It's not piracy because they've made it clear that digital ownership is not actually ownership.
because their services aren't fungible
Why not just do something else than watch shows your friends and family are watching?
Clearly, they enjoy the content. You don't just stop enjoying things like that.
I think the point the OP is making is that just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I agree.
If you feel streamers are offering a bad deal, don't take them up on the deal and find something else to do. If you want to watch shows your friends and family are watching, take the deal.
Ah, I thought they were just confused.
Hey, what do you do for living? Can I have some of that for free?
Sure! https://kagi.com/search?q=how+to+make+websites&r=us&sh=jJWfn...
As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.
Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
Absolutely agree.
Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.
If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.
Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.
Yeah that’s the only type of search that I always append the !g to
Would an OpenStreetMap integration be sufficient to replace this functionality?
Not OP, but I heavily rely on Google Maps reviews. Haven’t found another platform that replaces them.
No, Google Maps is miles ahead of all competitors.
Just to add a different voice: I prefer OSM and for me it would be great.
In my opinion, no it's too shit compared to Google Maps, Apple Maps is also not great. Kagi have their own maps, which it seems is based on Apple Maps. Apple has no information outside the US (heard its better in the US but I just know it's not great in Europe or Africa). Things like operating hours.
Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
On a search for "avi to mp4":
- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
Google clearly wins there.
Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.
Avi to mp4 is best done with an ffmpeg command written by an llm. But OK, I get that that was not the point.
If you already have ffmpeg, you shouldn't need an LLM to write `ffmpeg -i video.avi video.mp4`.
Happy paying customer of Kagi here. because to me intention counts.
Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.
Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.
Happy to pay kagi.
Use an ad blocker.
Now Google has no intention to serve you
I've never had any issue using any Google service with an ad blocker. They make plenty off of me via YouTube Premium and Google Flights commissions - both services that I think are valuable, and one that I actually gladly pay for.
Did the same here on my Android phone.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)
I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.
[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...
> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.
Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.
that sounds good until you want to buy that uniquely named ingredient in the usa and it will only give results elsewhere and you have little control
Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.
99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!
The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.
If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.
This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)
Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.
Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches
duck duck go have a drop down where you select any county anywhere you are.
want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.
> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches.
Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.
I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?
"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.
Use reader mode on your browser, and you can read most of the paywalled sites.
Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.
You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
Here's some stats that kagi publishes on how people are using their blocking and a great place to great started with it as well.
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
You can do that on Kagi, too. You just don't _need_ to.
Normal users don't want to have to remember magic incantations to not have to sift through malicious "businesses".
Normal users also don't want to have to go through curating their own blacklist of sites to get decent results.
Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.
I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
To me, it is not the results that are the kicker. It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.
Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.
And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.
one I like to use to demonstrate is "how to fix a leaking faucet"
Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers
Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.
I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.
I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.
Something tells me that Gruber has been betrayed by supposedly "premium" subscription services in the past.
My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?
GP literally said in their first sentence that results quality wasn't improved with Kagi.
I have had a similar experience. After using Kagi, I don't really get why someone would pay for what they are offering today.
I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.
Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.
I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.
I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.
I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.
I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.
https://kagi.com/changelog
Not only that, but they also have an issue tracker/FR page [1] and a Discord server [2]. It feels way more human and less corporate than Google.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/ [2] https://kagi.com/discord
I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow.
What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.
I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable
Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad. Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.
For german it works fine, how is duckduckgo doing with catalan?
I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly. My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.
Me too, actually. I'm starting to think this "buy Kagi!" movement is being pushed by people who didn't even know they could change their default search provider.
Nope, they've solved that:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Session links are what you’re looking for. Privacy Pass doesn’t work if you clear cookies, and in fact will lock you out of Privacy Pass for a month if you clear cookies maybe four times. Ask me how I found out.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....
Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least:
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time
I read through the whole opinion piece.
Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.
My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill. So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it. It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.
FYI, I think the $10 plan that's now "basic AI" used to just be the unlimited search plan and they just recently added a limited capacity of the AI stuff to it.
I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!
I find it a little surprising that the blog famously censored by HN is still able to land on the first page of HN
The countdown has begun. Get your comments in now!
I see Gruber on here fairly frequently. Enough to say that articles from his blog are not a rarity
Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.
Not one click but by no means a byzantine process
This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
Yes, use ecosia.
Orion (made by Kagi) is a WebKit-based browser that eliminates the need for an extension.
> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
No, it's "hard", because it requires an extension to monitor all requests to a different search enging and hijack those to perform a redirect.
This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.
I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
I've also found that the extension configuration isn't very durable. I wound up having to re-do the arcane setup process semi-annually on each device or my searches would 403. Eventually just gave up. Brave search seems to work just as well.
How Apple haven't already lost a massive anti-trust case is beyond me.
> I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work
There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.
Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
I installed Kagi for Search not even a week ago, so I guess the new app is just too advanced for someone like me.
I think there might be more to it. While it might just be me, I think Kagi could use some improvement here. I've been using Kagi with Safari on Mac for about a year, and never got the search extension to work consistently. It would sometimes give me Google, and sometimes Kagi. And sometimes it would give me one site then switch to the other after a several second delay.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
Hmm, fair enough. Do you think there is something Kagi could do to make this easier?
I don't know the details well enough to pinpoint the problem, but the fact that StopTheMadness is able to redirect consistently and the Kagi extension wasn't makes me think there is something they could fix to make it work better.
If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.
It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.
Yeah, this is tedious.
In comments on Mastodon he also finds a way to twist this into an anti-EU rant: https://mastodon.social/@gruber/114418346006131728
How so?
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
No, thanks, I'll stick to qwant: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...
Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
It's the same as when Russians are asked about the invasion, "I'm not political."
It's worse. Random Russians interviewed on a Moscow street would risk going to jail if they spoke their mind.
Kagi on the other hand is "apolitical" because it is good for business.
When I tried Qwant a few weeks ago, its search results were even worse than Google. So, Kagi it still is.
Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? It seems weird to me.
Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
> Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
It’s not funding, it’s paying for a service.
Funding does not imply a lack of receiving something in return, only a flow of money. It can be both
They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.
They pay for search results to search providers because Kagi doesn't have an index of their own.
In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.
I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I guess I'm a power user, I'm at > Total searches this period 1,216 > Assistant interactions this period 92
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
> no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark)
TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.
Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.
https://kagi.com/assistant
Additional details on the blog post about it.
https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all
> https://kagi.com/assistant
Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does
This is one of my favourite features. The UX is so god damn simple that it makes switching to an AI response so ridiculously trivial, I love it.
!code will get you into the proper code assistant.
I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.
For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)
Edit: I got this working.
What do you mean by custom assistants because you can make your !<word> assistants with your own prompt and the model of your choice.
Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?
No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!
From https://kagi.com/assistant you can also click on the down "Model Dropdown Chooser" and there is an entry to make your own assistants.
The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same.
There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.
If you only use it occasionally, you can pay for the 300 searches a month plan and they won't bill you until you exceed that amount
If anything your description could be justification for some people to pay for it.
I personally would pay even if the results were _slightly_ worse. But for me they are as good or better than Google.
I also use a lot the assistant, so I'm happy customer so far.
Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
What does Kagi assistant (every plan has sub SOTA a few days back) lack compared to Perplexity?
have you considered proton for emails?
Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.
It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.
I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.
But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.
I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.
[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.
I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?
I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects
Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search
Very likely due to the cost of the maps api.
Recently converted 2 coworkers to Kagi, their minds we're blown when I was sharing screen and had no ads and relevant search results.
I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock).
Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.
Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.
The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|
I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.
What tools do you use for command line searching?
Currently, the script looks like this
"0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.
0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.
yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.
This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.
Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.
1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.
2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.
Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.
Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead.
Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.
Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?
Seems to be unburied!
I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either.
That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)
Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
Kagi also lets you make custom bangs - I've got Google on !f and !h in addition to !g (sorry Flickr and Haskell users) to deal with typos.
99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm. It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.
The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice.
I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.
I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan.
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.
I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.
Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.
For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?
I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases.
I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)
What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.
To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity).
If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.
Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...
If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.
That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).
Thanks for taking the time to explain; what you say makes a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to give Kagi a try.
If you believe ChatGPT is good for such usage, no. But personally I think it sucks at that and have no idea how anyone can stand it.
Just try it, it's free to try.
how do you tolerate the sheer latency of running the "vast majority" of your web searches through an llm
How many searches previously to find the right question to ask x search time = total_search_time
# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops
For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.
The LLM can read through the results quicker than you can and provide the information you were looking for.
Well, it provides something at any rate. Whether or not it's the information you were looking for is very much a matter of luck.
I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service
I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).
I'd not heard of controld before. I was going to ask what's the benefit over pihole but I think they've got it covered at https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/
> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.
I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.
I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)
Imagine a product so bad they have to dole out gift cards to make people use it. Are you saying you can use google through bing and get paid??
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY
Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.
It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.
I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.
Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results.
Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi
Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?
DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
Thanks.
Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.
The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.
Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.
All Google alternatives are very insufficient if you're searching in a different language than English. Except for Kagi.
with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.
Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.
With DDG I kept looking for better results, which I typically found, not so with Kagi.
25$ a month user here and quite happy with just how quiet results are, equally so with the Assistant output when I've used it.
I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
I like it, but that still leaves metadata like the fact that I have an account at all. With the low user numbers of Kagi any privacy guarantee by them is an illusion. Since Kagi is operating out of a country without any privacy laws that could protect me, I will not use their services.
That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.
I tried Kagi and Brave. I get similar results on both but Brave is cheaper and AI answers.
did this guy sell his apple stock and joined early on kagi private equity?
I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing.
Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).
Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:
- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia
and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
does kagi censor offensive results?
Kagi rules for search, and they also have the best AI front end in my opinion.
I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page.
But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.
I have at least one kagi 3 month trial link. If anyone wants it, reply below :)
That would be very kind, if you still have it available. I have been on the fence - skeptical as is my nature, but I wonder if I am in the wrong here :)
Curious, but how do you get 3 month trial invites?
I would love to try it out, if the link is still available :)
Yes please
For those who tried both: Kagi or Perplexity?
I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...
Based on this alone, Kagi.
<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>
kagi has a free trial (100 searches) so you can just answer this very personal question for yourself.
No
Just go for metaGer instead. Non-profit and based in Germany.
I wish there was a discounted plan that didn't include "AI" - if the search is good, that's all I'm looking for in a search engine.
Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.
I have been using it for a few years now and can't live without it. They really nailed it.
another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.
searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.
The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.
Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.
Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
There's also uBlacklist for blocking domains from search engines, a miracle extension.
I use Kagi for all my Swedish searches, it works better than Google every time I compare.
I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site.
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
Perhaps you are lucky to stick to happy paths or are not particularly discerning. It's real. https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-wors...
Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
I am a real person, and sponsored links will often span the entire results page with relevant links being 4th-6th.
LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
https://i.imgur.com/RxSYGIe.png
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools 2. Mozilla's documentation 3. The Cambridge dictionary 4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology 5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
I feel exactly the same way! It makes me wonder what the hell I look for on the internet vs the users complaining about the search results!
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Kagi is founded and based in California by a guy from Yugoslavia. It’s not Russian.
> A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result.
Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)
Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result
Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?