* Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant.
* DDG solves a lot of privacy issues, but the search quality is strictly worse than Google. I know people who use it preferentially, and I respect that, but personally Google search is already so bad than opting for something even worse is hard for me to accept. And I think almost every DDG user is familiar with having to fall back to Google to get a result.
* Kagi solves the privacy issues and the search quality is excellent - certainly better than Google is today, and subjectively, feels as good at least as good as Google was at its heyday. And notably I have never needed to fall back to Google; it's just a strict upgrade. I absolutely feel it's worth the cost.
I can't really predict if it will stay good; some of the decline in Google is no doubt just because they're the most popular SEO target, so it's possible if Kagi becomes wildly popular it'll be a victim of it's own success. And of course, Kagi's goals and principles may change with time, etc.
But as of today, if you think you might get some value from really good search, and Kagi isn't wildly out of your price range, give it a shot.
Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.
With a VPN you're hoping there's no logs at all, and it's pretty easy for a VPN vendor - entirely by accident - to keep some logs around. And then a search warrant lands, they look around, find the logs, and the promise is broken. And it's entirely possible for that to happen by accident. So if I pay for a commercial VPN that claims they don't keep logs, I'm gambling on their honesty and competency.
With a search engine you're hoping they don't bias search results to favour advertisers, sell your search results to advertisers, etc. And that's not something you can really do by accident. If Kagi is being honest, then they're not accepting money to modify search results, nor are they logging my searches, or building up a profile of my searches, or modifying seearch results based on that profile, etc. Even if it turned out Kagi goofed and really were logging all my searches and tying them to my payment account (maybe, eg, for perfectly innnocent reasons, like solving a bug), that doesn't actually change their value proposition to me all. They're either super evil and lying about everything they're doing, or they're fine, even if it turns out they're cutting a couple of corners.
Kagi is putting themselves in a position which is inherently easier to trust than a VPN vendor (or early Google), due to the nature of the business model.
> Wouldn’t Kagi have to comply with a search warrant?
You can't find what isn't there. And there is not logging requirement in America. So put simply, no. If you searched for something sinister, and the U.S. government inquired, Kargi would--if they aren't lying--pose no risk to you.
If your concern goes beyond that, you're beyond bilateral trust. The concept of a search engine is beyond you.
With both you’re hoping there are no logs. It’s odd you used a different scenario where search intentionally makes the call to save searches linked to you and sell to ad companies, instead of sticking with the same scenario used for the vpn. You don’t want the search engine to log your searches linked to your ip or a user id that ties back to your billing info.
Then there’s a non-zero chance that either the VPN or the search or both are actually honeypots which not only log everything, but have a whole monitoring and alerting machine setup.
You’re more trusting than I. I assume the VPNs are no where near anonymous. I assume paid search is no more private than any other search. I assume the government doesn’t get or need warrants to know what we do online (do you think Prism just went away or hasn’t been replaced with a superior iteration?)
If anything paid search is more privacy invading than free ones. With free ones when logged out they know your IP which could serve any number of people so it wouldn’t be shocking that the searches being look into came from someone else on your connection and not you (tor relies on this), whereas with paid search you must be signed in to use, with an email address tied to you and a cc tied to you, all plausible deniability goes out the window.
Unless they MITM you and whatever app you’re using doesn’t do cert pinning, or they don’t have a legit root cert that they can sign completely valid certs with
To MITM me they'd need the intermediate or root certs of whatever I am connecting to? I don't see how even pinning the cert would help if the chain is invalid to begin with.
Yes sorry there was a typo in my earlier comment, but that’s what I was saying. If they have a stolen root cert, or are given one, they could produce 100% valid certs and youd never be able to tell they were doing it. I find it hard to believe the root certs of the internet have been kept safe all these years from the intelligence branches of these governments that are at cyber war all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised to one day learn root certificates were willingly given to intelligence branches for “national security” or whatever
How would I know? There’s always a VPN new kid on the block everyone shills for. Used to be that ProtonVPN was our savior now it’s nobody even knows it exists.
Point is unless you control every hop in the chain you can’t know it’s safe
This is one of my biggest loves of Kagi. I have all pintrest domain's blocked and it's great. And it's really easy to add a block too so when I get a result for a website that is useless or I don't like on to the blocklist it goes!
If they could group ecommerce sites in the same way they group listicles, that would be damn handy. (Just identifying sites with payment forms would go along way). It's not that I don't want ecommerce sites, it's just that sometimes I'm in research mode and sometimes I'm in shopping mode.
There were studies where it took as little as 10 searches to find out your exact identity. If you pay per month, month's worth of searches is more than enough to de-anonymize you. Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.
That's surprising given how I assume the pareto principle applies to search terms.
>Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.
I guess if you're really hardcore and are willing to trigger a transaction per search.
But in reality it doesn't work becsuse there's a small transaction fee for every charge. So it's really hard to charge below a dollar without major penalties. You can get around that with a token system, but we go right back to square one. I guess that's one problem crypto mitigates.
AFAIK the personalized results are not based on your search history, rather a personalized list of blocked, lowered, raised, or pinned domains. I think some people share their lists, not unlike PiHole.
Heya, I work at Kagi. This is correct, we do not personalize searches other than by respecting the user's customizations (eg. domain preferences, lenses, etc...) which are all entirely user-controlled.
Looks like this could change in the future, quoting from my Kagi settings screen:
> Save My Search History
> Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.
Seriously, on its face it's worse than google privacy wise because of the payment thing. Accept cash payment as some email providers and VPNs or stop telling people to trust you. And claiming Bitcoin changes anything privacy wise for the layman just blares red flags all over the place.
I love Kagi, too. I’ve mostly switched over. The one main thing I still find myself using Google for though is sports scores. That’s one thing I wish Kagi had. I love just searching “bears” or “colts” on Google on a NFL game day and immediately getting the live score at the top of the results. Kagi doesn’t have that feature yet, and I hope they add it.
I honestly hope that they don’t. You’ll never cover all sports and you’ll never have global coverage, all while sucking up a ton of developer resources. Focus on search.
But I used DDG for a few years prior and rarely ever used Google. I think DDGs results are subjective in that for some people they are better or as good than Google's.
I'm not sure when you tried DDG, but until relatively recently I found it had equal to or better results than Google for most things. I did have to sometimes fall back to Google, but it was only for certain classes of search. There was a time when there were fewer and fewer times I had to fall back to Google and fewer and fewer successes when I did.
It's unlikely they can make a profit doing that. Servers, devs, etc cost money. This way they keep the audience smaller and can make money as well. It's a business, so you do what you gotta do.
I think the main point was that any price barrier over 0 dollars limits your audience, regardless of profitability. That literal pay wall simply makes people start to question. Especially if a "free" alternative exists and they don't care about the pitch (in this case, privacy or less low quality results in search).
That's arguably a good thing since a premium model mitigates the temptation of ad or data selling based approaches. But the fact is many don't care nor mind those as long as they aren't extremely intrusive. Even if they are (full page banner ad with small x), they may tolerate it anyway.
By that logic, life itself can never be popular. Everyone in the world makes/has access to a non-zero amount of money, and where it goes is our collective human decision for how the world should operate. You're spending money right now, because of your opportunity cost!
Kagi v Google, in terms of "How do you operate as an organization wrt the world?"?
Kagi wins hands-down. I couldn't care less about the privacy angle, the QUALITY is amazing. It's like traveling back to 2008, and for $10/mo that's a sweet deal.
I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."
In my experience outside the niche of tech related content Kagi performed significantly worse than Google. Especially for content that was region specific and not just text natch based, like "children clothing stores in Boston"
I came in with basically the exact same complaint. A lot of gushing over Kagi in this thread but it is far from perfect. I would argue location aware searches like your example aren’t in the “good enough” territory either. They are just outright bad. Even DuckDuckGo is pretty usable in comparison.
I will say I have otherwise been using it as my daily search driver and as long as it’s not location aware it works great, oftentimes better than Google.
On the other hand, Google is easy to beat in contexts where it has become unbearably terrible over the last few years.
The other day I pointlessly attempted to craft queries (in Dutch) where "second hand" didn't mean "cars". It hilariously dropped surrounding words and tried to hard sell me a used car.
The engine didn't do a lot of miles, it was only used by an old lady on Saturday to do shopping.
This was my experience as well and was the reason why I ultimately quit Kagi (I was on the $10/mo plan). Google is still tops at searching for "non-tech life stuff", much of which is location-dependent.
Towards I end, I found myself comparing Kagi searches against Google because I didn't believe that the results I was getting from Kagi were the best I could get.
I'll try Kagi again once they figure out location-based searching while upholding privacy.
That's interesting. What are your use cases for location dependent searches? I rarely do them, but normally they'll be something like 'coffee' or 'Officeworks'. Without thinking conciously though, I open Google Maps for these querie (and did before I used Kagi).
Kagi doesn't need to win, and they know that. Kagi just has to focus on serving a tiny percentage of Google power users in order to be profitable and induce Google search to compete.
I wish Neeva knew that too but ah well. I feel like a lot of people on here share the mindset that unless Google can be demolished, there’s no point in being a competitor…which is, a dumb take IMHO.
Common mentality even outside of tech. Guess those people forgot the days of indie labels or mom and pop shop. Can't really blame them given that being the intent for decsdes.
For Google, it very roughly makes about $25 per year per user in 2019. But it has an estimated 4 billion users. If you can take even 1% of 1% of these users, thats still 400k users. So you're still bringing on $10m a year if you keep the same price.
Now of course Kagi is nowhere near that 400k figure, but also charges more. So you see how it can add up.
And if they stay private they can make a tidy profit without the pressure of "growth tech stock" shadowing their existence. I suspect they have an exit plan to get bought off by google if they grow enough though. Imagine "Google Search Platinum Edition"
> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter.
This is a widely held misconception, but there's no legal requirement to maximize profits. They're required to act in the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, but this is very broad and includes more than just wringing out every source of profit.
I'm a recent Kagi convert, and I'd say that Google's search product declining in usefulness is eventually going to impact its profitability.
For c-suite their comp is mostly awarded by the board which is controlled by largest shareholders. So therefore they are highly incentivized to make them happy which is usually achieved by stonk going up and to the right. For middle managers it’s more complex and is usually divorced from the stock price (and often reality too)
Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. The simple truth is that unless they make themselves explicitly liable to users if they are ever caught doing this, that the irresistable urge to monetize user data will tempt even the most well-meaning firm into sin. The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. IANAL but I believe this can be done if ownership agrees to voluntarily enter into something like a fiduciary arrangement with their users. This means writing a EULA that does not minimize the firm's risk, but instead increases it in specific, meaningful ways. Increasing client risk is something attorneys are absolutely allergic to, and will argue up and down about why the client shouldn't do it. I would say that, if the customers know and care about such a step, it could be a valuable PR and marketing move that demonstrates REAL integrity.
As it is, we only believe that "users paying for services" will protect against data exfiltration because of very naive reasoning, or, perhaps more accurately, praying.
> The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm.
Since the userbase consists largely of people who pay them to not act like google, at least for now, it likely would be an existential threat to the firm. They couldn't get much worse in that regard than big free services, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the interim, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and paying out of pocket for a really good service. The results are consistently more useful than Google's and the tooling is much much better. So if they are invasively tracking me and selling my data, you can definitely say "i told you so" but maybe we should call off the firing squad until the verdict has been reached. We currently don't have a trial, charges, a crime, evidence, or even empirically-informed suspicion.
Well the other risk you have trusting all your personal data to some organization is the longevity of said organization. Your data may be protected as long as their business model aligns with that but it's never guaranteed to stay that way.
One of the best historic examples is MySpace. MySpace started out fine and slowly as it declined and eventually dwindled to nothing, it started selling off massive amounts of previous user data. With no future or user base to speak of, there was a lot more potential benefit selling the data than the cost of protecting/holding it.
At their worst, they're not any worse than my alternatives. DDG is a modicum better than Google for privacy, but using it makes me want to punch the internet in the face.
I work at Kagi. This is a very reasonable fear to have. We do actually not store the data, but of course you'd need to take me at my word for this.
That said, if we did lie or change that, we'd be in immediate breach of our privacy policy (https://kagi.com/privacy), and as a result be a very easy target for a lawsuit. Given that we're intentionally not VC backed, between the horrible press this would be and the actual costs of fighting such a lawsuit, I expect not much would be left of Kagi afterwards. We are liable to users, in a pretty existential way.
Having read your privacy agreement, I don't see where the threat is existential if you are in breach. I think that the knowledge of engineers of the judicial system, both criminal and civil, is very naive. You can sue anyone over anything at any time - you don't need valid grounds. It also doesn't mean that if you win it matters.
Your privacy policy has lots of feel-good language that actually doesn't mean anything - along the lines of the classic "We value your privacy" statement that firms often make. When you analyze it, you find it means nothing. There are no actionable clauses. For example, if you are in breach of "Anonymous logs are aggregated with GCP's logging tools, retained for 30 days." what are the enumerated damages? A counter-party would have to prove show BOTH that you are in breach AND then real damages , which is difficult in this case, and entirely misses the point. E.g. if you sell 1M user data records for $.001 each, and a user has on average 10 records on them, the real damages are $.01, but your firm made $100k on the transaction. I don't see a limit to class action (or forced arbitration) so that's good; but good luck building out that class - especially since you'll resist sharing user data with the class action plaintiff, using the same privacy policy as a shield!
(This is the other trick of privacy agreements, apart from not actually saying anything: the stuff that is measurable is unenforceable).
It's time that the public stop seeing moonbeams and rainbows in these matters. Do you think that a lender will be satisfied with a debtor statement "I value paying back my debts, and will never be late!"? If not, then why are we mollified by similar statements by software firms made to us? What is measurable has no teeth; what has teeth is not measurable.
If you think we should word the privacy policy differently, please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org with the specifics - we have changed it in the past through exactly this process. It has been written by engineers, mostly for engineers at the beginning. I'm sure we can improve the wording to make it more binding, we're not trying to squirrel away from it. If you have enough legal knowledge to harden it, we'd welcome the contribution :)
>please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org
To do so requires a kagi user account, which I don't have and don't want. It also requires knowing your issue organizational schema to find privacy policy related "bugs" and "features". If you are serious about taking feedback, consider taking the content of this thread to BE that feedback, and do the work of adding it into your bug tracker yourself, with links back to this thread.
And also, I am not a lawyer, and neither are you, so I'd consider hiring one to revise the policy with an eye toward increasing your liability for the right reasons.
It's happened too many times in general by other companies, or Kagi?
All things said, I think Kagi really as the incentives aligned. I'm not a fan of Kagi but I believe the "business is sound" :) Sure, I also believe there's no need for such a business (an extension or whatever would suffice), but that doesn't really matter here nor there.
> Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report.
Who would they sell the data to? Google? Ohhhh noooooo...
More seriously, as long as it's paired with a "But their search results are still better than Google's trashfire", I'm not sure it would matter. Their tagline is "Fast, accurate, and ad-free", not "Fast, accurate, ad-free, and private."
"We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy."
That's me. I do love that Kagi is probably much more private than other engines, but the real draw for me was that it's a search engine that actually works well. Bottom line, that's what I'm paying for.
If Kagi became a bad actor with my data, that would just make them like the majority of other search engines, so big picture, I'd not be any worse off. And I'd still have access to a search engine that lets me find what I'm looking for without a lot of struggle.
I should probably add in that kagi has some secret modes.
If you precede the search query with
`!expert` you get an LLM search response.
If you precede it with `!code` you get a GPT-4-ish tuned response. It’s… really good. And since you can do it from a browser bar if you make it your default browser, I find myself reaching for !expert at least 50% as often as ChatGPT these days. Also, it’s extremely good with citations. The !expert mode seems pretty darn up to date, no knowledge cutoff issues. I have no idea if it is search, doing a vector lookup, or they just bake the model every night. Totally magical.
Also, I’m following the LLM stuff pretty closely these days — their universal summarized and their search LLM — no one else is doing that right now. It’s genuinely amazing.
"We are rolling Kagi Assistant beta for all our current Ultimate plan members (new Ultimate plan users will be onboarded daily). Assistant includes four dynamic AI modes - Research, Code, Chat, and Custom - powered by cutting-edge language models like GPT-4 and Claude-2 (on the Ultimate plan), all in one package. Stay tuned, as we plan to make the Assistant available to all members in the coming weeks." [1]
You can also modify the bangs to your liking. I never use podcasts, and so having !p bound to podcast search was useless to me. Opened up the lenses config, and set the programming lens to !p.
Sounded cool, but seems like it’s (!expert) a closed beta. I just get redirected to expert.nl, maybe requires the ultimate plan? The docs are pretty unclear.
Agreed -- been using Kagi since April 2022, and never looked back.
Tried to convert my wife to use it, but she's too used to Google (and the integration with Maps, local recommendations for cafés and restaurants, etc) that don't work as well in Kagi (yet). But for day to day, proper searching, it's 100% better.
And I can't stress enough how liberating it is to see the top results of the search are actually most likely the most relevant results (and not "they paid more"). Yesterday I had to set up a clean Windows laptop, and had to use Edge to install Chrome (or Firefox) and 1password: it's just pure lying to users: https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/21... (that top banner with download 1password doesn't actually do anything, the next results, made to look like a real result with the sublinks etc is all lastpass cheating and paying to be in front of 1psw).
> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter.
The enduring (and incorrect) myth of how fiduciary responsibility works.
Short term value isn’t the only thing that matters. As CEO, you could say, “Increasing ad-revenue at the expense of everything else will increase profits, but I believe it would be bad for the long term health of the company.”
The shareholders might not like it, and the board might fire you, but if you’ve acted in good faith you haven’t violated fiduciary responsibility.
So, one meta-layer of discussion up: do we think the recent surge of Kagi discussion on HN is indicative of a real wave?
Or is “picking a different search engine” gonna be something only 1% of users ever do again?
I honestly think that even if Kagi does remain pretty niche (<1% of internet searches, for a ballpark), that’s great if it can really serve that niche (so far… mostly HN-user-types, I would bet).
But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model. So godspeed Kagi, I guess.
Personally I'm optimistic that they'll actually grow fairly substantially from here. The search experience is far better than Google, especially for power users.
Main weakness is location based searches and quick answers being time lagged or lacking detail IMO. It seems to me only a matter of time until they close any gaps though.
> But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model.
I don't think that seems hard at all, really. Companies do it all the time. What it makes hard is becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) everyone's goal.
I mean, when people are writing unpaid ads for a service just because it's so much better... maybe you should try it. (Fastmail too, the other "pay for quality" product often brought up here.)
As far as promoting stuff and watering stuff infrequently goes, I use an app on my phone called "Planta" to remind me to water my cactus (and other plants). It's one of the few apps whose notifications I don't disable.
I really wanted to like Kagi, and admittedly my experimentation did not last long, but contrary to the experience of other commenters, I found Kagi search results to be significantly worse than Google. Maybe it was just the specific subjects I was searching. The final straw for me was when I searched for air quality in my city, and the Kagi results were a total joke, mostly irrelevant.
I would have been happy to pay if the results were good, but unfortunately I was disappointed by them.
I will say in earlier tests I found location-specific queries sort of lacking on Kagi, but I feel like they've improved it. You absolutely do have to be explicit about your location though, because it isn't run by the company tracking your phone.
I switched to Kagi earlier this year and I have found its search to be vastly better than Google's in almost every case. The only time I finding myself use Google over Kagi is for searching for local business numbers or Google Maps.
If you are on the fence on paying for a search engine give it a shot for a month and you might be as surprised as to how good Kagi is as I was.
I think Kagi search quality has a coding bias. Searches related to physics,hardware,math are basically identical to google or noticeably worse.
My coding related searches are usually much better with much less SEO spam than google. This might be a function of just how much larger the market for coding related content is online.
I work at Kagi. I think this is partly a function of who our early user base was, and the tons of feedback they gave which helped improve our search. Because we don't keep the data, we can't do a lot of the ML-powered search improvements that eg. Google could over all search domains.
The good news is as the community expand, so will the feedback, and we'll be able to improve overall. The even better (and quite surprising) news is that we could be better than eg. Google on any topic at all, which tells me that the ML magic is not actually magic, and we will be able to outperform them in other domains as the community grows, the feedback increases, and our code becomes better.
Been using Duck Duck Go for maybe three or so years now? It's very rare I fallback to google other then for google maps (!gm). I do make heavy use of ChatGPT and Bard though.
I wish there was more example results then just "best headphones", "steve jobs", and "python exceptions". I'm interested, but not interested enough to sign up. Maybe its just me, but all the marketing and comments are why to switch away from google search.. which I already did.
There is a docs page[1] on Kagi vs. DuckDuckGo but it doesn't really have any compelling reason to use Kagi from that. I'd love to see concrete examples of how Kagi has better results then DDG.
If you could provide screen shots or a writeup of HOW they are better that would be helpful. Kogi fans just seems to say its better without really any examples. Not saying its not better, but no one has really shown how it is better.
Search isn’t really something I can show you one result to say it’s better.
I just use it for a week and feel the difference.
Magi has a free trial of 100 searches. Sign up and try it. I did, and when I ran out of my 100 searches, I went and got my credit card and paid $5/month.
When I tried DDG, I ended up back at Google within a week.
I can’t actually explain how it’s better, other than to encourage you to try it and see for yourself. If you run out of searches and don’t feel it’s better, then you can go back to DDG
> When I tried DDG, I ended up back at Google within a week.
I think actually you might have explained it. It's for people who don't want to use Google, but who didn't like DDG.
This is why I ask for more examples to be provided from Kagi because they claim DDG isn't good, just good enough, where as I've been quite happy with DDG results for years now.
You don't have to end up back to Google, there is, for example, Startpage, with the same privacy claims as DDG, but backed up by Goggle, instead of Bing.
The article addresses a huge aspect: It's customizable. I frequently know I'm looking for say, a learn.microsoft.com page. So if I boost that domain, and one of the results is on that site, it moves towards the top of the page. My results are explicitly better for me because I am able to tell the search engine what I want to see.
Sure, but that's time consuming and often too specific: Kagi lets me push sites I trust results from higher without limiting the search to a specific single site. It also explicitly looks to rank blogs by individuals higher than corporate websites, so it's more likely to surface that niche how-to by someone else who has been there.
Sure, but what's more helpful than that is being able to blacklist sites from the results and being able to say that certain sites should be given greater weight, which Kagi allows.
I haven’t opened Google in a few years but I’ll try to remember to compare some results and provide you screenshots tomorrow or this weekend. I’m surprised others haven’t already done this!
> I haven’t opened Google in a few years but I’ll try to remember to compare some results and provide you screenshots tomorrow or this weekend. I’m surprised others haven’t already done this!
I've seen a lot of people give concrete examples on how Kagi is worse in different situations, but yeah no real good solid examples of how its better. If you're doing a compare, please compare with DuckDuckGo as well. That is the one I use and am most interested in. Thank you!
As a specific example, when searching something about the web, I want to see MDN in the first place. Kagi seems to be the only search engine which can do that.
I found the quality of DDG searches really quite poor - worse than Google even. Not so much sponsored content but it’s like it lacked understanding of the context of what I was searching for which is something I find Kagi does well.
I also can’t understand the issues with DDG. There were some issues, but they were rare. And at least for Germany, local search was also good. Used it for several years as main driver, with !g being a rather rare escape hatch.
With Kagi, I simply get slightly less spam, and slightly more relevant results (than either with DDG or Google). With every search. And even when I get a bad result, it’s one click to downrank or even block that domain.
I've switched over to Kagi as it was announced myself.
However lately, I've found that it started sucking a lot more when it comes to localised search. I am actually not seeing the value and quality I've seen early on, and will likely stop paying for it as I increasingly do have to fall back to Google.
I work at Kagi. We don't have KPIs that track search quality in that way (we don't have any frontend tracking at all, so we can't know if you click any of the results), and we haven't touched much the sources of data we're using over the last few months. We've also had conflicting reports about this problem, so I'm wondering if it's not variable quality over time and place of our upstreams that's a problem.
That said, we're aware that it's currently something we have to improve, "!g best cafe" is not where we want to be. We're working on it, but if you have specific examples/suggestions, please do submit them to kagifeedback.org so we can track them.
> For example, setting Kagi as your default desktop search for Chromium, Firefox, or Safari browsers requires a browser extension and post-installation settings changes.
Can’t speak for the mac-only browser, but for the two general browsers, it’s only a post-installation setting, the extension is if you don’t want to change the setting manually (including the private browsing session URL setting) and get some extra features.
This is such an easy monthly sub for me. Given the importance of search to our daily lives and work, having your search engine provider re-rank results to optimise their own ad revenue at the cost of your own time and attention is insane. In retrospect.
Just to chime in and add another datapoint, I switched to Kagi and expected that I'd eventually go back to Google (like I had when I switched to DDG), but the results are just as good or better and I'm happy to pay to not have ads or tracking.
Is Kagi really that good or is their Astroturfing game just next level?
I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it - and we're still talking about a $10/month search engine. Something that has been historically free at all times.
I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :)
In fact, we even axed our referral bonus program a couple months back to ensure that no third party had anything to gain in promoting Kagi. Recently, that included saying "no" to an independent journalist who explicitly asked for referral bonus for their readers. All you see is organic.
Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!
I'm a paying customer since June 2022, and I was wondering if I was the only one using its most powerful feature: domains personalizations. I guess not: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2
When you start searching a lot for professional reasons (e.g. rust the language vs rust the game), Kagi's value is a no-brainer.
Kagi basically just uses google search api, then does some filtering/reranking on top. (They claim to have their own index, but I've never seen it used. I've had better results using Yandex for things that i know exist but google refuses to show). I bet a large part of the perceived quality boost is just from filtering the spammy so-clones, and downranking clickbait sites. But if you're frequently searching for things that google refuses to show (either due to bias, or because they just dropped it from their index) then Kagi won't help much, just use Yandex instead.
I had similar thoughts about a year ago. My experience is that the results are that good, though sometimes there are changes under the hood which lead to poor or limited results- it is a beta project, after all. I used the free trial, following which I stayed on the monthly sub before paying a lump sum of $100 for the next 10 months. I've enjoyed my correspondence with the CEO as well. YMMV
Have been using Kagi for around a month and a half now and have been loving it. The results do feel better compared to Bing, but hard to describe how exactly, they just do.
I use Kagi (along with DuckDuckGo) and I really appreciate the quality of their search results, but if you care about privacy do not use their Safari extension.
In addition to this, since all the search attempts are being redirected to Kagi, you can’t use any other search engine unless you deactivate the extension and this prevents you from trying the same query on different engines.
P.S: as far as I understand, they don’t have much freedom with the implementation and everything would be much easier if Safari allowed to customise the search engines, but I’m not sure this limitation is being properly communicated to the users (unless I missed some warning during extension installation)
Something like Kagi is going to have to make its case strongly before making $120/year sound appealing.
Google's only advantage over other search engines is its ability to search forums more deeply. The build-in feature of diving into reddit, stack overflow, etc is often useful. After a few test searches, Kagi is adept at this as well.
Other free search alternatives that I've been happy with include: Ecosia, Quant, or even startpage.
I almost bought Kagi. Initially I wanted Universal Summarizer. Then I realized I could install Edge browser (which is essentially Google-free Chrome) and the integrated, free GPT-4 would summarize for me. And I still haven’t had an “ah ha” moment comparing Kagi’s search results. I’m happy to keep trying for free next month, or whenever my free trial searches reset, until I’m sold on the value.
I’m so desperate for an alternative to google that a post like this, combined with what I’ve heard about kagi in the past is enough to make me give it an honest try.
I’ve grown such a disdain for google, far cry from when I stood in the long lines to buy the first android phone.
I’m starting to feel the same way about Apple, in fact, I think if it weren’t for messages I’d actually be willing to try something else.
Maybe this was tweaked to be catchy for developers but I don't think is the right thing to see as the second entry.
If you search for exceptions you want to learn how they work, that is what 99% of the people would need. An entry like this is dangerous for instance if you are just someone trying to learn about them.
IMO this is a red flag about the quality for a search engine. Maybe they are just targeting seasoned tech people who would see this content interesting. But definitely not a search engine for the masses.
What I love about Kagi is that I never find myself needing Google.
Years ago when I tried out DDG, I found myself appending !g to every query, and I thought that Google Search would always have a place in my life, but Kagi results are _so_ good.
So, once YouTube has a viable replacement I might be able to delete my Google account.
This reminded me about my own free Kagi account. Searched for `emperor bed` and the article on my personal site about building my own emperor bed appeared as the 4th entry vs somewhere around the tenth on Google. I'll give it a shot as my default search shortcut for awhile.
I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search).
This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available.
It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.
At the risk of sounding like a kagi marketer/shill/peddler/whatever, if it helps at all, it's actually not just search. Sort of.
Kagi is slowly rolling out some AI-backed features, and will probably work in other areas too. Two of the flagship AI bits right now are Quick Answer and the Universal Summariser.
Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary.
The other tool takes an article and summarises it. I used this on some blog posts of my own and it actually pretty much regurgitated my own thought process. I haven't used it for much else right now, but it's neat. It also has a beta chat feature which allows you to ask questions about an article, although I tried this with a Guardian article and it didn't pick out small details when asked.
And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. So far. I don't know if I'll renew or switch to annual but so far so good, honestly.
> Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary.
Oh yes, I've experienced a similar problem with ChatGPT. I asked it to look up a certain fact and provide references, and the ones it did provide ended up being quasi URLs which didn't actually work.
Perhaps they were from the old (2018, was it?) dataset and got replaced, not sure. I eventually gave up and used Google Scholar, though :-)
> It also has a beta chat feature
This seems interesting, though I'm secretly (or not so, now it's on here) hoping it's not another lazy ChatGPT integration (i.e. Discord, Snapchat, Bing Chat, etc.); ChatGPT seems to be the new Stories: everyone adds it, they're virtually the same, and they still somehow come in in varying degrees of usefulness (e.g. for some arbitrary reason, Snapchat's one can't output JSON...).
> And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google.
This is intriguing -- may I ask in what way it's better? Are there any anecdotes you could share?
To be frank, I've heard a lot of "Google is dead" talk on here, though if it's that bad surely people would have switched away? Market inertia and vendor lock-in are solid counteraguments, though.
I personally use DuckDuckGo, and find that acceptable; it does fall down in a few cases, where I have to rephrase my query to get something useful out of it. It's surprisingly good, though...
Maybe Kagi is worth a shot, but I still do find the pricing tiers quite unforgiving. Take the "Starter" plan, for instance: that's 300 searches; for me, that would roughly equate to 10 instances of research on really niche topics; that's not even counting the searches I do for things like Stack Exchange, or general engineering advice / questions.
According to DuckDuckGo[0] (which Kagi quotes in their informational), the "average person" makes one search a day -- that doesn't sound right at all.
> Oh yes, I've experienced a similar problem with ChatGPT. I asked it to look up a certain fact and provide references, and the ones it did provide ended up being quasi URLs which didn't actually work.
To be clear, the references Quick Answer provides are legitimate, since they are taken from the search results. The results for my name provide a reference to my namesake's obituary and also to my public profile on the institution website. ie "[ToasterOS] died in 2013[1] and he currently works as a [Job Title][2]". It's just a pretty unique situation where a full name search returns an obit AND a living person's profile on the same website. ChatGPT will indeed create completely bogus references when asked, but this isn't that.
> This seems interesting, though I'm secretly (or not so, now it's on here) hoping it's not another lazy ChatGPT integration
I believe it's GPT but it is their own implementation of FastGPT instead of an API thing.
> This is intriguing -- may I ask in what way it's better? Are there any anecdotes you could share?
I search a LOT. In fact the billing page says I've made 540 searches since September 24th; maybe that's higher than most or significantly lower, I don't know. I find search is my main entrypoint into the web; I rarely use bookmarks or anything, and I'll often search things that I want updates on.
As a VERY silly example - I play Old School RuneScape (OSRS). OSRS has two Wikis - an official one, and a crappy one hosted on Fandom. Google tends to prioritise results from the Fandom wiki, which is full of inaccurate information as well as all the other warts Fandom has. Kagi immediately put the official Wiki ahead of that, and also gave me the option to completely remove the Fandom Wiki from future searches. I realise using a search engine as an entrypoint to a Wiki is quite silly, but Wiki searches tend to require exact terminology whereas a web search allows me to be more fuzzy. So, I'm generally finding I can search on Kagi for the functions of things in the game, and subsequently be lead to the correct Wiki article on the correct Wiki right away.
To be a little more real though - I am finding Kagi does an excellent job of cutting out dead internet cruft out of results. One of my favourite pieces of content on the web is a winemaking guide on creating 32-bit winebottles[0]. Spammy, automatically generated articles like this one don't appear in my results for things. I instead find that legitimate content is put ahead of it, and so I find I can trust the top results more. And, in cases where bad content is being prioritised - I can just block it.
I haven't got much use out of them yet but I also quite enjoy the Lenses feature, which allows me to hone in my search to a specific "part" of the web. I also have presences in two countries, and it's nice to be able to select which country I want my search to "take place in".
And then there is just... it's not Google. I hope it remains a decent company for a long time, because I really am happier knowing I'm paying for a service with currency instead of just...incidentally via my participation.
I'd argue web search is the most underappreciated types of sites. There are a lot of functions on the web I can work around, but a quality search engine's usefulness ranges from time-saver to "critically important tool to find obscure documentation that isn't easily found on a vendor's site".
They are aware that it's not within reach for everyone, and hopefully they'll be able to do something about it (likely with scale: more subscribers, means they can slowly lower the prices as they've done: https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes)
> I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search).
But it's web search that works well. My experience is that Google is awful, DDG is reasonable, and Kagi is good. Search is very important to me, and if I have to pay to be able to have a good search engine, I'm OK with that.
They’ve been pretty open about the pricing strategy on the blog. Earlier this year they said they were losing money on most accounts at $10/month. They’ve since changed the pricing tiers a few times, but it sounds like they’re in a better place now.
I'm on the Kagi trial, so far it's the only search engine I've used where I haven't felt the need to fallback to Google. I'll be upgrading to the unlimited tier as soon as I get through the trial.
Kagi seems cool to me and I appreciate what they’re doing but I’ve been using DDG for years now and find myself falling back to Google less and less. It has improved quite a bit for my personal use and I can’t imagine spending $100/year+ for search. I’d be game if it was a little less.
With all these comments about how Kagi is so much better than Google, I feel like I am living in a alternate world. My experience has been the exact opposite. I've been having to use !g so often on Kagi I turned it off as my default search engine. The thing is I really want to love Kagi, but can't. It just seems inferior in terms of parsing my search queries and returning relevant results.
Let me give an example. On Kagi, I searched up "Overcoming addiction to Reddit". On Kagi, most of the top results are actually just Reddit posts about drug addiction / addiction in general and not Reddit addiction [1]. If you scroll down, the is a result about internet addiction, but that isn't what I asked for either. Only once you get to the very bottom do you actually get links about Reddit addiction itself. Even then, there aren't that many.
If you do the same query on Google, I get much more results that are actually about Reddit addiction [2]. On top of that, the relevant results are way closer to the top than on Kagi. It even includes high quality links like a Hacker News post on Reddit addiction. I believe Kagi included the same link, but it was hidden all the way on the third page as opposed to being somewhat near the top on Google. Don't get me wrong, Google's results aren't perfect and it has a lot of irrelevant stuff show up in my query about Reddit addiction. But it's still better than Kagi.
My theory is that Kagi just saw the words "overcoming addiction" and "Reddit" and assumed I wanted to look for links about addiction in general on Reddit. Basically it's almost like it did "overcoming addiction site:reddit.com" for the top results. Albeit, after the top results it does show links from other sources. Meanwhile, it seems Google did a better job at parsing the query and realizing I was looking up a specific type of addiction, a Reddit addiction. Kagi did not do this.
My next problem with Kagi is just the lack of results in general. It seems Kagi likes to return a limited number of results per search. It seems it usually gives 20-30 results and sometimes gives more (~70 results) if you give it a very generic query. The problem with this is it makes Kagi terrible for research. In daily life, I never even read past the first few pages on Google. But when researching a niche topic for a paper, you sometimes need to go way past the first page to find what you're looking for. This might be because when doing research on something vague or niche it's hard to get accurate matches on the first page of search. As a result, having a large number of search result pages in general is useful for when this happens. But Kagi simply doesn't do this. It's limit on how many results it returns just kills the ability for you to actually go more in-depth without issuing a modified search query. I seriously doubt Kagi's index is literally so small it can only return around 70 something results at max, so I just have to think this is some self-imposed limitation which ultimately harms the search quality.
Another problem I have with Kagi are lenses. Lenses get hyped up by them, but in practice I found them utterly terrible. I searched up Lo Mein without lenses on and my first results were some pretty high quality recipes. I then turned on the recipe lens and the quality noticeably decreased. Instead of returning Lo Mein recipes from actual recipe sites, it instead returns a Reddit post that links to a gif of someone making Lo Mein. Issue is that gif is actually on gfycat which is shut down. So the top result is useless. The rest of the results aren't even Lo Mein recipes, but instead chicken recipes for instance. So in the process of trying to use lenses to increase my search quality, it actually made it worse.
Also, a tiny nit is that Kagi isn't as good at getting quick answers. If I look up a question on Google, it will usually display some quick summary at the top with the answer to the question. Kagi has quick answer too, but you have to manually click on it to get Kagi to generate the quick answer. I get they're a startup trying to save money, but this is just another reason for me to use Google over Kagi.
As a whole, I haven't found Kagi to be useful at all like many commenters claim it is. I really wanted Kagi to work out as again I love the idea of Kagi. But ultimately, I can't justify using it over Google because the quality has just been so much worse in my experience. Ultimately, I am paying money for Kagi, yet I am getting a lower quality product than Google which is free. At that point, it doesn't make sense for me to continue with Kagi.
Maybe my shit is all being MITM’d but Google, DDG, and Kagi all spit out the same useless results. Doesn’t matter what I search for, and I’m not searching for anything special, just everyday random things. Search has regressed to ask Jeeves days imo
Everyday random things. You’ll have to be my ISP, government, or browser if you want to collect specifics. Hit up Google they’ll sell it to you, just cut me a commission check will ya?
If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere. I use Kagi where Bing used to be, for technical reference lookups. It's excellent at putting API docs front-and-center, which means I can alt-tab back to my text editor that much faster. What I love about Kagi is how little of my time and attention the tool requires.
Also my own anecdata - the privacy concerns are a red herring, because the utility of knowing everything you've typed into your PC is diminished when ad surface area no longer exists. I like that Kagi has a privacy focus, but them losing it would not cause me to stop paying for the service as long as the quality was the same or better.
> If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere
Y'all have a hard on for knowing specifically what I'm searching for, for some reason, don't ya?
I've been a software engineer for over a decade. I'm self taught. I've worked at some of the largest websites in the world. I owe my entire career to my ability to search for shit I don't know and finding results that literally teach me how to program. In a way, I owe my entire career to Google's search results that used to be top notch. The point is, I know how search used to be, and I know now that it sucks complete ass for me. I know how to search for the proper keywords because I wouldn't have my career without it so you should trust me when I say it's not user error, it's the search results, and stop asking for specific search terms when I'm guaranteeing you 100% the issue is not me. If I sucked at searching I wouldn't be on this site typing this message right now, I'd still be working in a factory.
Right now I believe the cost is directly related to what it costs to run the number of queries offered in each plan. Charging less would have them running at a loss.
The problem was that Neeva sucked. I quit using it after it took me to an actual scam website to buy some product I wanted. What I learned from that was that aligned business model != good product.
I used it when it was free and while it was fine, I didn't feel enough of a difference to DuckDuckGo/Google for it to be worth it to switch permanently.
There are several ways to measure search results. Someone should make analysis of Google results.
I searched "Elon Musk" in kagi and Google. I see the results with more text on Kagi. It is more dense. Google shows me more of blank space.
The second thing is domain variety. "Elon Musk" on google shows twice wikipedia, twice CNBC, twice new york times, twice guardian. Mainstream domains are shown several times, with similar titles. Kagi joins groups that nicely.
I searched for "diablo 2 mods". I was expecting hobby pages, fan pages, with forums, mods, wallpapers, maps. It is all gone. Nobody hosts sites like that? The ones there were - are they gone? Has it all split into reddit, nexusmods, facebook groups? Can Google search facebook and reddit now easily? Why such groups are not showed on results, only r/diablo?
I feel that whenever I search something media outlets appear first. Even when searching for mods ign shows with some articles.
Is google a good tool for discovery, or just for searching a precise information like "how to solve this x compilation error"? Has Internet become a dull place because people are consoomers now, not creators? Or people are just focused on creating food images on an Instagram? There is no sense of wonder with results. Maybe my expectations are too high?
I was beginning to see way too much of these weird domain name mirrors of things in Google Search instead of the real things and I was reading Doctorow on Google's enshittification and I said "OK, enough of this".
I guess it's time to move Google Drive and Gmail as well. The latter is probably fastmail but where to put the Google Drive files? It's like 2TB.
As someone who also brought up the pricing situation[0], I also currently make use of a free search engine (DuckDuckGo). In these circumstances, it seems that socioeconomic disadvantage and privacy do not go hand-in-hand.
A superior solution that's 2/mo or 20/yr would be something I would go for, given my income. I would not expect anyone I know to go for a search engine that charges 10/mo.
Recently I discovered there's no more "Non-commercial" lens.
I'm still a happy Kagi user but I found that lens helpful for avoiding over-SEOd sites filled with affiliate links and was disappointed to see it gone.
* Google search was good, but has been steadily getting worse. Over the last 1-3 years it's become actively unplesant.
* DDG solves a lot of privacy issues, but the search quality is strictly worse than Google. I know people who use it preferentially, and I respect that, but personally Google search is already so bad than opting for something even worse is hard for me to accept. And I think almost every DDG user is familiar with having to fall back to Google to get a result.
* Kagi solves the privacy issues and the search quality is excellent - certainly better than Google is today, and subjectively, feels as good at least as good as Google was at its heyday. And notably I have never needed to fall back to Google; it's just a strict upgrade. I absolutely feel it's worth the cost.
I can't really predict if it will stay good; some of the decline in Google is no doubt just because they're the most popular SEO target, so it's possible if Kagi becomes wildly popular it'll be a victim of it's own success. And of course, Kagi's goals and principles may change with time, etc.
But as of today, if you think you might get some value from really good search, and Kagi isn't wildly out of your price range, give it a shot.