I switched to the Kagi paid search 2 months ago and I'm very happy with it. Of course, Google is free, but "search" is a product that is critical to my job and I use it countless times per day. As such it felt reasonable to me to pay for a better search experience. That's in line with me spending extra for my computer, monitor, keyboard, etc. Because they're my tools of trade and I use them 8+ hours a day. I can recommend giving Kagi a try if you're in a similar position as me.
This might come off weird but I can't help but comment on how markety/"I need to justify myself" your comment looked to me at first.
You started off very normal "I switched ... and i'm very happy with it." But then there's almost an entire paragraph of "yes it makes sense, yes I made the right decision, it's just like spending on other things, etc..", up until the very end where you come back to "give it a try if you are in a similar position".
Not trying to offend or anything and happy that it works out well for you! Just struck me weird when I first read it.
When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.
I also pay for Kagi. I'm not sure it is justified - it's not that cheap. They're pretty open about their costs though, and I think that demonstrates how much advertising is paying for other services. So I'm happy to pay for now just because I really dislike adverts.
The price for Kagi is not really in the class of "luxury" at $10 per month. It's peanuts really. In exchange you have the best search engine in the world.
If you could upgrade an economy flight ticket to first class for $10, that would be a bargain. If you could buy the best bottle of wine in the world for just $10 more than your average bottle of wine, that would be a bargain. Kagi is the best search engine in the world, that's why I pay for it.
Luxury is a loaded term, I probably should have used something less vague. The examples you gave are still luxuries even if they're only $10 more than the basic version - the cheaper plane ticket still gets you there, the cheaper wine... I'm not really into wine, expensive wine doesn't taste especially different to me... still gets you drunk?
Google still returns search results. You have to crawl through ads or search in different ways, but your result is still going to be in there. So if Kagi is a price and has extra comfort, it's a luxury.
These are not in the same realm. An extra $10 on a $500 or $1500 ticket that you ride maybe once a year is not the same as going from $0 to $10 every single month.
It's $10 more per month for the best service of its kind in the world. On top of that a useful service that can save you time. What other services that are the best in the world can you get for $10 per month?
If two restaurants were side by side, one handing out average meals for free and the other selling the best food in the world for $10, which one would you go to?
Best food in the world? 3 star Michelin? Ok, I'll pay the $10. But if it's only a little better, probably the free one. And if I'm going to be doing this every day.. I'd probably still do the free one most of the time.
I'll argue that Kagi is the best search engine in the world. If there's any better out there, I'll switch to that. For $10 per month it's a bargain. But "free" does things with people's reasoning. As you admit, you'd choose free over the best food in the world most of the time, even if the best food was dirt cheap. I'd choose the best food in the world over free every time, if it was that cheap.
> When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.
That is a gross assumption about the GPs personality. I've bought luxury items before I'd happily publicly badmouth, and others that I'd happily publicly sing the praises of.
I agree with this. The only real advantage to Kagi over just using Google + Adblock for me is an easy way to just completely block certain sites from ever appearing in searches. It's probably not worth $10 a month but I pay for it because SEO spam sites bother me on a personal level.
I don't know how true this is, but I really like the concept of a customer-driven search engine versus an ad-driven one. The incentives are better aligned, and it frees Kagi up to really try to kick ass at search instead of kicking ass at ad revenue. I'm enjoying the features they've been adding, and an looking forward to more.
Besides, what else was I going to do with that YouTube Premium money? ;)
Every Kagi post is filled with comments like these and I've been wondering for a while whether it's organic or not. I'm inclined to think it's organic but the early adopters of Kagi are the type of people to write comments that sound like astroturfing, mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service. Or to put it another way: I'd place more trust in a review from someone who received a lifetime of free Kagi access than I would in one from somebody who just started paying for it.
Or they just provide a really good service in the environment of ad-driven internet crap. I'm paying for it for the same reason as I pay for zerotier and give bcachefs donations - voting with my wallet for my environment to be a bit more like I wish it looked. And I'm happy to tell people about those things as long as they are better than alternatives.
I've been paying for about a year. Every time I'm reminded how much I'm paying, I think it sounds like too much. But every time I sit at a new computer or accidentally use the default Google search on my phone's home screen, I think, "Crap, this is terrible. I'm glad I am paying for Kagi."
> mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service
I find this take quite odd. If you're paying for a service you're unhappy with, you stop. What's the element that's holding users in a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario?
Also started using it a few months ago, and it’s so good that I forget it’s there most of the time. It’s fast, accurate, clutter free, and gets out of your way. More than happy to pay for this experience, because I want it to stick around forever.
kagi is the first search engine i dont regularely fall back to google when i get bad search results. because googles good results are usually none the better. In google i get more results however most of the added results are spam or duplicates.
For me, the ability to create custom bangs is worth it alone. I probably have close to a hundred bangs now and even created a bang to edit my bangs. I’m sure there are extensions that can replicate this behaviour but Kagi works on any device without any prior setup. My ‘site:reddit.com’ (!r) bang has to be my favourite, although I have found myself needing it less with Kagi since I’m already able to preference Reddit in search results.
I've tried Kagi, didn't find it better than Google. YMMV. You can try it yourself, free for 100 searches on their site.
I felt the things that might be nice about Kagi, e.g. personalized rankings, were solved simply by using Google or Bing and scoping to that site, and bookmarking the sites I frequent. A good example of this for me is MDN web docs. another example of I'd say few people, even on here know that google has Programmable Search Engines. Once you understand how to use them you'll realize you can recreate most of the nice stuff that Kagi has for free. here's one I just made for hacker news and techcrunch (https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=13608d055ebfc44ab#gsc.tab=0&gs...). You can even exclude sites like Pinterest.
in any case it's nice to have options, though. it's probably worth the money, but I'm very particular about spending money when there are free alternatives and don't really care about Google and Microsoft tracking me with Google and Bing respectively since I consider them decent stewards of my data.
If you care about your absolute privacy and willing to pay it's worth a look.
I've been using Kagi for about 18 months. I find the overall experience to be significantly better than Google. My browser reverted to Google once for some reason a few months ago. I didn't realize it and looked past the page header to the results and had a pretty negative visceral reaction. "What is all this trash, why is the whole page full of ads, why do these results suck...", then I looked up and saw I was in Google. It made me think that a lot of users who are happy with Google are like the frog being boiled by turning up the heat 1 degree at a time. I think I'd sooner cancel all my steaming services before I'd cancel Kagi.
So far I haven't really felt the need to jump over to Google, or other search engines for anything. When I used DuckDuckGo in the past I constantly had to use !g when I couldn't find something via DDG. That has never been an issue with Kagi; I think I tried it once and Google didn't have the answer either. I've also had several situations where people came to me for help after they were coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find a solution with Kagi... of course, there could be other factors at play here, like the search query used or simply recognizing the answer when I see it.
For me, Kagi is a better product with better privacy, which is a win-win.
I think it's great that Kagi works better for you. it's good to have options, but I also used it for a long while from late 2021.
I encourage people to use it and form their own opinion.
personally I think most people who like Kagi just don't like having ads, and for them I'd tell them to just use Google and uBlock Origin to remove ads and various elements they dislike and save their 10 bucks a month and apply it to Youtube Premium, whose ads are more annoying to avoid.
For me it has nothing to do with the ads since I just use just unblock anyway. The main reason I switched to kagi was:
- SEO Spam has reached intolerable levels in Google search results for me and I can't stop them with ublock. Each and every time I'm tricked into clicking these is a waste of my time.
- Even when the domain isn't outright spam, it's rare I get the highest quality domain at the top of my Google search results anymore. For example if I'm searching for something webdev related then MDN should be the obvious first choice yet I still get W3C schools at the top of my results with mediocre quality. I tried using extensions to block domains from my Google results but they usually result in the page loading weirdly and it feels like a crappy workaround. Not to mention, what if I want W3C when there is no results from MDN? Ultimately what I really want is to adjust the rank/weight of the domain to be lower than MDN rather than outright blocking it. This is something that Kagi actually allows me to do.
- Kagi's interface is actually designed to help me improve my search results. I can pin a domain, subtly change it's ranking or just block it entirely. It actually feels like I'm the user and not the product, which is a refreshing experience. I'd much rather spend money on this than give $14/month to Google to watch YouTube of all things. YouTube's primary revenue stream is from advertising so even if I give YouTube money, new features are still going to be optimized for improved ad revenue over user experience.
- Even without tweaking, the results from Kagi are simply better than Google now, no contest. (but maybe not as good
as Google was in 2014 before it started to degrade, a sad thought)
It's true I don't like ads. I want to support business models that aren't ad driven. If Kagi, or others, can show web services can exist without being full of ads, tracking, and other privacy nightmares, I think that is good for the industry and gives us a fighting chance at seeing more services adopt those models. I've been very unhappy seeing nearly every company on the internet think the only possible business model is to collect data and sell ads.
I pay for YouTube Premium as well for the same reason. While I'm sure they still track the hell out of me, because it's Google, I still want to support a business model that isn't based on ads.
I just cancelled my Amazon Prime membership after probably 15 years when I got the email about them charging an extra monthly charge (on top of the Prime membership cost) to keep Prime Videos ad free next year. I don't want a company to nickel and dime me when I'm already a paying customer. I only watch Amazon Prime a couple times per year (it's not great to begin with), so it wasn't worth paying monthly to be ad free, but they lost me as a Prime member over it, and I'm sure my overall order volume at Amazon will drop accordingly.
I try to vote with my wallet where I can. Using services from a company with a business model I don't agree with, while using an ad-blocker, doesn't cast the same vote, and instead signs me up to be part of a cat and mouse game.
I pay for Kagi, but it’s not because I disapprove of the tracking of other search engines, although that’s a part of it. It’s because Google is an advertising company. They have mismatched incentives to my own values. I want high quality and unmolested search results. Google is always going to be in conflict with that and it’s going to be a balancing act. Kagi isn’t hampered by that conflict.
e.g. quotes "", do not do what you think in Google. You need to explicitly go to Advanced Search and use "This exact word or phrase".
I almost never do searches without site scopes. reddit is a frequent one, as well as foxnews, nyt, washingtonpost, etc. IMO searching without site scopes is just shooting in the dark. You should think about the top 3 sites that probably are good for what you're looking for and restrict to those. Kagi can help with this sort of thing, but I pretty much have it memorized so there's not much value for me.
> e.g. quotes "", do not do what you think in Google
So they changed this behavior without telling anyone then? Because before Google search quality went down the drain, quotes meant to search for an exact phrase. If they changed that without any notice, and users continue to perform searches with quotes expecting the legacy behavior, and Google doesn’t bother to even catch that potential confusion and direct them to the new convoluted advanced search flow, then that’s horrible UX. What a horrible loss of ingrained functionality, and a horrible loss of a shorthand for advanced users.
yes, at some point it was changed. I disagree with the move, but understand why it was made.
the quotes have been made to be more like approximately, than exact. where the words mentioned will appear together in the order specified, but can have certain differences in punctuation.
> Searching without site scopes is just shooting in the dark. You should think about the top 3 sites that probably are good for what you're looking for and restrict to those.
Knowing the top 3 sources for my search queries seems like the job of the search engine rather than the user. Kagi doesn't need me to restrict my search scope to the top 3 sources that I choose in order get good results.
Doesn’t the amount of ads inserted in Google results annoys you and interferes with how many legitimate results you can scan at once to find a good one?
no, sometimes the ads are helpful for me, but I'm not really against ads. I prefer for there to be ads so (small) companies can try to convince me to buy their stuff (the alternative for me is basically just defaulting to the big co's with their marketing budget).
an example of this was that I was looking to buy some Airpod Max's and noticed Sony has XM5's that are superior and cheaper so I bought those instead.
Interesting. I would consider Sony a big company not a small one.
I do think ads can be helpful, I am not against they existing. But I think Google exagerates in how many ads they display on search results.
I am curious, how many ads as top results before showing any actual results is the threshold for you personally to be bothered by them? 3, 6,12?
Edit: To give my answer, for me, it’s 3. And Google these days often show 3 top ads before the results. I was ok with it when it was 1 or 2. Commonly seeing 3 ads and some rare times even 4 made me use Google much less.
the amount of ads are not really relevant, rather how relevant the ads are to what I'm searching for. I personally wouldn't mind of all of the results were ads as long as they were relevant.
sometimes some of the ads are very irrelevant, which is annoying for sure.
I don’t think it’s possible to have 12 relevant ads in a page. And even it was, I would definitely be pissed off if I saw 5+ relevant ads. Because they could be revelant, meaning they could be informing me of something I would like to buy at some point, but they would be distracting as hell.
I want to know, eg if it’s possible to repair a broken headphone cable by myself, not learning about repair shops or multiple interesting new headphones and cables that exist in the market.
About your last sentence, it is pretty clear to me that most of ads are irrelevant most times. So I think you are more annoyed than your nonchalant tone in these comments make it look like
That's surprising to me. I hate ads. If I see one poping I usually blacklist the product. When I want to buy something I do technical comparison and try to find genuine reviews.
that's a strange philosophy. pretty much every product has advertisements or at the very least marketing somewhere. it's simply a matter of whether you see it or not.
even this post for Kagi can be construed as an ad. it's not a bad thing - now people are aware of Kagi. that's good.
Yes, but my "poping" I mean something intrusive. Like someone slapping you. I'm ok with sponsoring, placing products in movie, having ads in my mail...
But, having ads being thrown at me when I work and search for something is really something I am against. The other thing I think is really bad, is using advanced psychology to lure customers, like many "free to play" games do.
companies have an avenue to express their values to customers via behavior. If a company is employing shady or manipulative advertising techniques in order to reach me then I make an effort to vote with my dollar in any way contrary to their continued existence.
ads aren't bad, weaponized psychology has the opportunity to be quite bad
You determined a product was superior to another via advertisements? Not using third party structurally unbiased reviews? Wow. Yes, that is squarely googles demographic.
no, I did not know about the XM5's to begin with. I only was introduced due to an ad, yes. I thought the latest were the XM4s at the time. The ad was a reminder if you will.
yes, if someone wants unlimited searches without ads they should consider Kagi. I am simply saying in my experience Google ads are not bad enough nor the results in Kagi superior enough to justify spending money.
that being said I believe most people do not know how to Google search properly. if you're just typing in random stuff and hoping for the best you're doing it wrong IMO.
Google ads consume everything above the fold, and are interleaved with the results in ways that are hard to observe. Given you already have to wade through SEO garbage, which is essentially third party ads, you’re having to go through pages of results with a sprinkle of non commercial results. Kagi still has as many SEO results, sadly, but the signal to noise is structurally higher.
I've been a Kagi user since the early days, and it is one of my must-haves. It's the only engine I've used that doesn't flood me with SEO trash, allows me to ban Pinterest forever, and has working exclusion operators.
I recently discovered, and confirmed from several different machines that it's not just my own account, that if I google 'channel', a perfectly standard English word, Google asks if I meant Chanel instead!
It is probably an extremely common mistake from people who are actually searching for Chanel. It's possible that people searching for the single word "channel" are more often actually searching for Chanel and being frustrated instead of actually searching for whatever is returned for Channel.
Not sure why I felt the need to play Devil's Advocate for Google of all things but there you are I guess.
If ten people search "channel" a day and a thousand search "Chanel," that makes sense. It still gave you results for "channel."
I dislike Google, but I bet more people find that "did you mean" helpful than annoying, mostly as I can't think of a reason to regularly search "channel."
Started using it two or so months ago after seeing a comment here on HN about search and decided to go ahead and pay for a sub.
Especially liking the ability to adjust rankings and remove low-quality sites from my searches entirely and up-rank those I want like Reddit or StackOverflow.
I tried DDG for awhile then quality seemed to tank for some reason. Went back to Google and wasn’t happy with that either leading me to often use more than one search engine in a given day.
Now, if only Apple would allow changing the default search engine on iOS..
Their Orion web browser is pretty nice. I’ve run into a few minor quirks while evaluating it, then tried Firefox, then Safari again, but I keep getting pulled back to Orion.
I recently started paying for email service and it's been somewhat of a revelation to me. I started after getting sick of the constant attempts by the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al, trying to force more and more details from me.
The point I'm making is I can now see the benefit of not being the product. Why would I pay for search?
I've been using Kagi for a few months now. It's able to find things Google doesn't on regular basis and I think the results are better in general. For some things Google is still better but then you can easily use it as well using !g command which is very convenient.
Ability to blacklist or promote websites along with ability to use arrows to go through results are reasons good enough for me to switch even if the search results weren't better tbh.
The Kagi Safari extension for iOS is driving me crazy. Half the time it sends my searches to the default search engine. So annoying after paying for a year of Kagi.
I’ll make sure I’m using the 2.0 version. They released a separate app in the app store for 2.0 (for some reason) and increased the confusion by naming it the same as the previous version!
The last 1.x version specifically doesn't seem to do this on Google searches. In addition, the old version did not require you to change your default search engine to one you don't use. This is because they changed their framework:
> We've updated the Kagi Search for Safari extension to be cross-platform, using Safari Web Extensions instead of Safari App Extension framework. This will require you to grant access to the Extension on the search engine during your first run. See the instructions in the app for details
> - [Fixed] Redirects should not experience intermittent failures
> - [Changed] You can override which search engine redirects to Kagi manually. The first time you install/ upgrade to this version, the extension will attempt to detect your current Safari search engine
> - [Changed] You only need to provide extension access to urls on the search engine you are overriding.
This seems to fix a behavior in the earlier version of the extension that was on the App Store: searches on certain websites were automatically redirected to Kagi.
The published source on GitHub, from version 1.0.9, outlines she me of this behavior. In the last 1.0.10 release, all of the providers defined in the code *except for Google* (eg baidu, yandex, Bing) would have searches performed on their home page redirected to Kagi. I found this behavior rather mysterious and an impediment.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber but I find that I frequently have to switch to one of the competitors for a particular search. The problem is that when Kagi can't find a good match, it just says so and returns nothing. That's fine for some things, but other times I want any results, no matter how tenuously related, so that I can use their verbiage to iterate on my search to get some results. It's not a big problem since you can just prepend a `!g` etc,, but it makes a clean shift to Kagi a bit harder.
Last time I tried Kagi, the mobile Safari extension didn’t work well so I gave up. Hopefully this new one works better (shame Apple don’t just let you set any search engine!)
Also interested to see if Kagi feels as potentially necessary as it used to a year ago - I now tend to go to ChatGPT for searches which I expect to be full of spam on Google…
Anyone found a good alternative to the android google search widget using kagi? I kind of want to switch, but I want consistency across searches in different places, and I find that widget very good...
The free plan is not because of a company’s mission to provide their service for free. It is solely a marketing tactic to get your contact in exchange for letting you experiment with their product without paying money.
If they do not get your email they have a lower chance of turning you into a paying user, which is the sole purpose of the offer.
Even taking into account that some potential customers, like you, will be pissed and never sign up to even the free plan, I am pretty sure the metrics support their decision to keep asking for the email.
Of course I'll pay, but not with my identity attached.
I pay for Mullvad, and would pay for Kagi but only if I can not have my identity attached to their service and not have any emails associated with them.
But the complaint I was responding to was about the free plan requiring signing in, not about the identity being attached to your account.
A free plan just cannot work if anyone can mint new identities for free.
You paying for Mullvad doesn't seem very relevant to that complaint. They have no free plan. They also require creating an account and signing in to use their service at all.
Agreed. At least with Brave Search premium you don't need an account for the paid session. I wish Kagi did the same. Instead, it's a "Trust me bro" that they aren't logging search queries.
I'd like to mention that when you subscribe to Brave Search premium, it is completely decoupled from the searches you then make (no way for us to link your email to your searches) by relying on blinded tokens to prove that you are premium, but without the backend knowing which account (and using one new token per search in order to avoid being able to build search sessions).
