All Kagi services are operational since approximately two hour ago. There are no signs of further issue propagation.
The intermittent disruption of service lasted for seven and a half hours, our longest disruption to date.
We apologize for the inconvenience and we will do our best to make sure this does not happen again by reviewing all circumstances that lead to the incident.
Post-mortem coming in the release notes on Tuesday.
This is not the proper place to do it, but thanks for the great service. I've installed Kagi as the default search engine for my 70-year old mother who doesn't even speak English so she doesn't have to guess which results are ads.
I love kagi, so the fact that they're down sucks even harder. But they're honest and transparent about the situation.
Not that "increased level of errors" or "degraded experience" nonsense
I think people forget that Kagi etc compete with Google as it exists right now, which has been in "degraded experience" mode for at least two years now.
Seems pointed but maybe I'm taking you wrong as well. I'm curious why they choose to have the class of problem they're talking about. Maybe they just haven't tried such a solution and even if they have their reasoning for not using could be interesting to me. Is that problematic?
Maybe they realize that blocking ads punishes content creators and they are against that?
The reason we can have content that is not AI-generated junk is that someone somewhere pays for it. If everyone runs uBlock then ad revenue will go to near zero and the only content worth posting will also have to cost nearly nothing. We'll be swimming in nothing but AI-generated spam.
Both very possible reasons. At the same time they also pay for Kagi and don't (seem to?) intend to purposefully use Google directly so another possibility is they often have to use computers they don't control or regularly use but logging in to Kagi is friction and it won't have their usual extensions anyways - that's something I ran into using Kagi. Or perhaps even other reasons still. It's why I enjoy asking - you learn more than always assuming you know why with your personal biases.
Speaking of personal biases, I don't mind paying by any means... but that only works when it's an option. There is no way to pay Google to remove search ads (short of building and maintaining privately hosted front end for the API which does everything google.com and associated does) so I have a $99/y personal account and run uBlock Origin. On other things worth too small an amount to be worth the transaction cost or just plain not something you can pay for I leave the blocker on - if not enough of us are interested in paying to remove ads for it to be a worthwhile method then it's probably not going to result in the downfall of the service for those of us to block them. Similarly I pay for YouTube Premium but if I find myself on a computer I can't or shouldn't log into I don't mind utilizing an ad blocker. Heck, this has gotten to be such a complex topic I'm a paying user for YouTube and subscribe to a Patreon only to need an adblocker to skip the sponsored sections of the video! It can really get quite interesting how people consider these different nuances in different ways. Anything from just don't care about the effects to it being impossible to use any sort of ad blocker morally and everything in-between.
I also don't really mind AI generated stuff, it's no more always spam and junk than the human generated web - and it's not really free either, just cheaper. That's probably getting a little disconnected from search provider consumption though.
I find paying for a real search engine the only option now that there is one. Along with Orion being the only option for a zero telemetry browser makes it simple for me.
It’s a really nice internet these days but I can’t judge or compare the nuances since I never used gmail, chrome or Google
That's not the point of the comment, but is there anything wrong with it?
I have adblock (uBlock Origin) installed, and I don't remember the last time I saw ads on Google or almost any other website. It's a natural thing to relate to regardless of whether this person is using Kagi. In addition, it also blocks a ton of tracking scripts. I would have replied the same thing if there is not already a comment.
I've worked at a few companies who prohibited deployments or releases on Fridays or the days before holidays for just this reason. You need the team on the clock in the days following to cover you for those times when it all goes south.
Funny coincidence, my subscription ends today. I’m switching to self employment and won’t be able to afford the service for a while. I wish it were more affordable, because the freeing feeling of not having to rely on google is irreplaceable.
When I quit my job, I paused my Privacy card that was paying for Kagi—but before the renewal date, I realized it was totally worth 2 coffees/month and unpaused. I use it all the time.
Marginal coffees are very different quality and value across individuals making this a poor metric. For yourself, unless you are actually giving up those coffees (which I think is rare among the people who use this phrase) are you really sure that you value it at that rate?
Even as a business, a subscription would be weighed differently to coffee money - you can easily scale the coffees up and down based on how things are going, this is not true with subscriptions, which essentially increase your fixed costs.
Coffees come out of very different mental budget lines to search tools.
I love Kagi, used my free searches and customized the crap out of it. It would absolutely be worth the cost if I wasn't penny pinching because of cost of living increases and inflation.
I've been lately using FOSS metager.org as my main search engine and it has decent results. Often a lot better than google, especially with quoted words and 'site:' specifiers which it never ignores.
It also has domain blacklist similar to kagi.
This looks nice and the payment model is more convenient (on demand). Haven't heard of this before. From the first use, it looks like a search aggregator as it takes results from many engines. Each source engine costs differently.
I have been a paying Kagi customer for the past year and could not be happier. It is a small sliver of sanity showing what the internet could be without the cancer of ad driven anti patterns.
Glad to hear it was transient and Kagi is on top of fixing it. Apparently quite a few reading HN use Kagi. I've been happy with it so far and I'm glad that there's an actually usable and actually feature-superior alternative to Google.
resolved now. but the status page was excellent and was up-to-date immediately. It made me feel comfortable using an alternative for a bit while I waited for it to come back up
Single data point for consideration: For some reason, I'm not leaving.
It's tempting to speculate on the motivation for even posting, because they aren't gooogle or amazon, and it's utterly uninteresting for any smaller company to have incidents once in a while.
Maybe the point was to show how frank they are about stuff like this instead of trying to bs everyone?
I guess one thing I do find pretty interesting is how all the comments have been "whatever I love'em"
To be fair, downtime is often posted for services popular among HN readers, I don’t think there’s malicious intent, it’s merely the acknowledgment of an incident.
The fact that the headline is USUALLY “GitHub was down” says a lot more than the individual post in isolation!
All Kagi services are operational since approximately two hour ago. There are no signs of further issue propagation.
The intermittent disruption of service lasted for seven and a half hours, our longest disruption to date.
We apologize for the inconvenience and we will do our best to make sure this does not happen again by reviewing all circumstances that lead to the incident.
Post-mortem coming in the release notes on Tuesday.
Thank you for your patience and support.