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.
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.