Happy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is.
When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Now? Never.
10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.
There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.
Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!"
Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam.
For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.
Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi? I don't use Pinterest, and never really encounter it on a daily basis, but some of my friends really like the site. Tbf, they might use stackoverflow more, but seeing Hacker News on the top 5 doesn't seem to reflect the average web user's usage...
I used pinterest and still hate(d) when it popped up on search.
Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center
Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.
I only recently discovered pinterest as a useful site, but only because a friend convinced me to create an account. It only becomes usable with an account and it even makes fun, but most people are probably like I was and don’t want to create an account and are annoyed of pinterest hijacking the „save image“ function, redirecting you when you don’t have an account and nagging you with a login wall. It really only becomes great if you give in (only took me 5 years or so).
There was a time where Google image search was dominated by Pinterest results but clinking through never took you to the photo. And most of the photos were rehosting of the original so you wouldn't get that either.
I wonder if it is also biased in the sense that it's only certain people who customise these things. And that it's only the most common ones. You would never see my favourite car forum listed here, but bumping it in search results is where I see value with the feature.
Of course they are biased. Just look at how NYTimes is both blocked and upvoted on Kagi. Some people like a source and others don’t, it’s that simple really.
It's telling that the top sites on that list accurately map to companies that have been the most "successful" at blitzing the incentive structures of the current internet economics model.
I don't understand why people hate Pinterest in image search results. If the image is relevant to my search then I don't care who's hosting it. Can somebody explain to me what the problem is here? https://0x0.st/HO57.webm
(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)
I don't like pinterest because the images have no metadata. If I see something I'm interested in--like a piece of furniture--I have no way of knowing how to get more info on it.
Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.
I wouldn't say that's the problem I've observed. around 2015 or so I remember consistent useful Quora answers from Quora. it was Yahoo answers but better because people could justify with qualifications. I actually had an account briefly
then I'm not exactly sure when, but definitely by 2018, every answer I ever see on Google is either incorrect, answering the wrong question, or in broken English. commonly all three at once
I don't recall ever seeing a product placement, although admittedly I stopped clicking a long time ago
my educated guess is that due to some likely seo-related concern they deleted/archived/unlisted their old good quality answers in favour of newer more seo-friendly answers
it may not even be their fault, it's possible that Google's algorithm just doesn't drag up older answers from their website, but given my experience with the decision-making in the brief time I was a user there (e.g. removing the ability to add a description to questions) I suspect not
if this was the main cause, the expected result would be lots of highly-upvoted bad answers, as opposed to lots of scarcely-upvoted bad answers that somehow rank highly in Google searches
Quora has plenty of potential for making consistent profit without whoring itself out, but consistent profit isn't enough in the post-Freedman world that we live in
I had to quit doing so, because I discovered that it didn't just exclude listed domains, but performed a totally different search. Locations or local results were largely missing, when I excluded some domains.
That's curious, please expand on this. Do you really mean it performed a search for different thing? If so - have you figured how it differed?
Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?
When I search for “pizza hut”, I get: the info panel that shows Wikipedia intro and company social media profiles on the right, locations results and integrated map view as the second result. When I search for “pizza hut -site:pinterest.com”, I get none of those. In addition, results are listed in a different order.
Due to linkrot, a lot of images that stood on independent websites, are now only available on Pinterest, which scraped and cached them before the original site went dark. Clicking through to the original links these days often leads to 404s.
This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation.
I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.
Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.
At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.
Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.
Counterpoint: That feature has very little utility to all but a tiny fraction of users. Those users can readily find other means (e.g. extensions) to achieve the same thing. In the interest of simplicity, it was the right call to remove this. I imagine it was pitched for its ability to gather feedback on search quality, but the type of people using the feature aren't representative.
> when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy
OMG. Why doesn't Google filter out the likes of geeksforgeeks for instance? How is it possible that it always come before the genuine SO answer?
Even without offering the possibility to filter out a domain (which they had, and later removed), how does the ranking algorithm not see those horrible, zero value clones??
I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.
My theory is that google went from ads in search results to ads on visited pages. By buying doubleclick etc they are suddenly incentivised to drive traffic to ad-supported websites.
Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.
We could test this. Take a few hundred search queries, strip the pages that display Google ads, and see if the remainder of the search result is better or worse.
We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"
With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.
It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.
I don't doubt it, but obviously something's going wrong between the human-generated training data and the SERP, else why are we getting utter crap back?
(Or, as I said, it's our idea of what constitutes a good result that's wrong).
But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?
Aha. Couldn't help but scratch my own itch. I wonder if DDG has a deal with Google where they get a cut of the ad profit if they are mentioned as a `ref` in the doubleclick ad request.
:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1>m=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F
&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do?
&hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4
Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.
I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.
To reproduce:
1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website
2. click on the link
3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.
Most other search engines train with a target of google or with some form of reward which is bootstrapped on google rankings. It makes Bing results implicitly have the same behavior as Google. DDG and others just use BingAPI so googles incentives pass on through.
That doesnt make much sense to me. Google's interests are not microsoft's or DDG's interests and to hold up Google as some sort of ground truth in what the optimal search results for a given query are is, as proven by Kagi, highly deluded and also quite subjective.
If true however, it does go to show that Google is really a monopolist in the search space as well... and to substantiate this claim would go a long way into proving that.
Adblockers are not a defense against this, as those results are genuine search results.
I run uBlock origin (of course), am extremely aware that geeksforgeeks exist and is utter shit, and yet I get fooled now and again, which makes me very angry at that website, Google, myself, and the world in general...
If I ran a seal-clubbing business I'd have to club seals to make money.
The whole argument is that those sites don't exist to provide a good service yet sadly need to show ads to keep the lights on.
I’m just wondering to whom those ads get shown… not arguing that anyone should turn off their adblocker and keep them running
They are working hard to trick people into clicking on their links, but won’t most people who click those links be running an ad blocker? Are unsophisticated web users searching for questions answered on stack overflow?
This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again.
Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).
I never got why these even ever appear in Google search results (or any search results, really). It feels like it would be super trivial to identify sites that are scraped copies of other sites. Granted, without foreknowledge, the engine doesn't know which is the original. But at the very least this can be determined by a human once, and then the problem goes away forever for that particular site.
Funny that you mention this game. bg3.wiki, the community wiki had a lot of troubles with SEO. It got ignored or pushed down in the search results for a very long time, while the awful Fextralife wiki that includes a Twitch view botting iframe on every pages was always first.
At this point it's just safer to treat any content newer than about a year ago as highly suspect. Bots and fake content have been around for years, but things changed when ChatGPT and the copycats went live.
The blue ribbon chef was said to be the cream of the cream, so the restaurant owner was happy for him to have white card over the place. He arranged an outside the work of fatty liver, a main course of rooster of wine with eat all, and as the blow of mercy: burned cream; the full menu was a feat of strength! He made sure to wish the diners good appetite. However, when the owner visited from her foot on the ground she turned into a terrible child and demanded mouth amusers and crescents. She hated the decorative objects of art made of chewed paper.
(When we steal from French, we don't translate it to English, it becomes English).
It's googles fault. They are the ones who make this a viable business model. They pay the ads, and they pollute their search results with this garbage.
100% Google who are destroying this part of the internet.
How can the search engine not able to tell who the original is? Originals always exist earlier, not to mention SO.com domain rank is way higher than those spammed sites that existed for less years.
Is this after you've done a lot of blocking (or other customisation)? For me the top Kagi results are mostly similar to the Google ones, and when I scroll down a bit Kagi doesn't save me from articles with openings like
> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.
SO, MDM are the good results together with the blog Kagi gave in 5th place. In google you got the first two then a lot of spam and not the other good results.
That's still an example of better quality results that should be quantifiable, that's ranking. We have things like precision@n/NDCG@n/etc. where it should be straight forward to show a metric for some smaller n where Kagi beats Google since it doesn't show some set of irrelebant/low quality results interspersed.
I get those in Google as well. But tbh, I don't care. If I'm looking for "current time in JavaScript", I don't care if the answer comes from stackoverflow or any of it's clones. It's not like I want to interact with that site somehow. I just want answers. If I want interaction, I obviously go to stackoverflow directly.
It might matter that I'm using Ad-blockers, so maybe if I didn't, those sites would feed me obnoxious popups and malware, but as it stands, I don't see any difference...
I just did exactly this search on Google. The first result was this -[0] which is exactly spot on. Not sure if it is because I use Brave browser which also blocks ads on websites.
The result on Google is indeed correct, but I was posting a trivial example that was supposed to show the variety of answers/sources not the accuracy of the top one. For that, they're fairly similar, although Kagi seems to prefer the higher signal-to-crap ratio.
Wow. I just loaded it and then turned off the adblocker and reloaded it. It's like you need another search engine just to find the content in the page hidden amongst all those ads.
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
Yes people are. And it’s the least technically literate people with “outdated” machines and bad connections that slug through the web like this. They don’t know what to trust and often fall prey to deceptive tactics.
My goodness, I thought you were exaggerating. I've been using ad blockers for so long, I forgot the web had this many ads. Or has it just gotten worse over time?
Well, I still remember times when 50% of google results weren’t ads.
Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.
I wonder if adblockers have contributed to this. In theory we users can reward non-horrible advertisers by whitelisting their ads, but in practice we tend to block as much as possible. The remaining ad-viewing audience will be partly composed of people who are ethically opposed to adblocking or are held back by a lack of tech knowledge, but it will also be relatively insensitive to ads (both in the sense of being able to put up with a lot, and in the sense of requiring a lot to attract their attention).
How can you be ethically opposed to something that ruins your experience? It’s obviously their choice, I just can’t imaging browsing without adblock, I’m ethically opposed to the pages filled with crap I guess.
Those who go through the effort to make good web content, and who pay the costs for a web server deserve to be paid. So ethically I should not block ads.
I block them anyway because ads also have an ethical contract with me that they have broken. They need to not take up too many resources on my computer, not make noise when the website otherwise has no noise content, not install malware, and be for legitimate products not scams. Probably more as well, but the above are things I regularly caught ads doing before I got an ad blocker.
If Chrome, Edge, Safari all came with uBlock by default, what percentage do you think would be "ethically opposed" enough to disable the extension? How many would turn it right back on?
I think it depends on the site. I remember early 00s where many download sites would have ads with a download button, or pop-ups that blasted sound like YOU JUST WON. Now I think that sorta thing has been normalized to even non shady sites. My primary use of ad blocker is so that I don't get random autoplaying videos.
And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit.
Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.
But with an extension I can have a personal garbage block list or hide/collapse website preview without removing the result completely that works on other search engines
Btw, can you hide text preview on Kagi instead of removing the domain completely (in case you're not certain the website is garbage and sometimes want to check the results, but just want them less visible)?
Maybe for you that is better, but I want word negation to work, and "verbose" to actually require words I specify to be on the page. Word stemming would be good as an option.
Sure, I'd like Booleans to work again, and intitle:.
That said, Google could probably make an inferred search interpretation work well if they wanted to return results that were good for the user rather than return results that optimise their ad revenue.
Why stop there? The best mind-reading search engine is one that doesn't even let me type queries, it tells me what I need to know before I even know I need to know it. The fact that all search engines still have query fields tells me they all still suck at reading my mind.
- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.
- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.
- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.
- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.
I wasn't sure because this never bothered me so I did a little experiment by searching for
"does it warn about mispellings"
(Note the intentional misspelling above.)
And here is the result:
We haven’t found anything.
There are no results that match all your keywords exactly.
Check your spelling, try different keywords, or try without quotes:
does it warn about mispellings
Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.
When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
Thanks for checking! This result is too verbose (first two sentences mean the same, but also aren't needed since you already see no results), and then instead of the "check your spelling" it should just, you know, check my spelling :) and show an active link to the quoted query with typos corrected
And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok
Quotes are supposed to be for verbatim searches, so having the search engine "fix spelling" (in quotes because a lot of the time it's not a misspelling, just a specialized term or something like that) in them is kinda counterproductive and it's incredibly annoying when Google does that.
If you get zero results, you'd probably see the mistake prettty fast, right?
I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.
And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine
The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI
> The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning
If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.
If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
Interesting to see reddit on the block list, I have issues with the way they’ve been operating but I do often find myself explicitly adding site:reddit.com to google searches, since it seems like one of few places online where there is still non-sponsored conversation about diverse topics. RIP old-school forums.
I'm doing the same thing, but specifically for reviews/recommendations. I can't remember the last time I had even an inkling of trust for a review published on a website. Reddit is basically the only source I have for potentially trustworthy opinions about products
IMO, this is no longer the case. Basically any new thread is getting astroturfed by marketing teams, and it seems like Reddit started doing SEO to promote newer threads, so the days of reliable reddit reviews seem to be over
Subreddits that are about buying things (/r/buyitforlife, /r/frugalmalefashion) are done. Same with any askreddit thread that's like "What's a product for under $x that changed your life" or something like that.
I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.
Definitely true. Marketing teams at multiple roles paid third parties to advertise on Reddit. Even tongue in cheek comments about incidents are marketing.
If you're not logged in to Reddit (and Facebook, etc), you often don't get the content that shows in the snippet of the SERP. Google don't always have a cached page now.
Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam).
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
They have. It's a lot better now than when they started out. They have incrementally been improving it. The reason why it gets pushed down is because a lot of people have a natural distate for the ads and the fact that it's a content farm. But if you have good ad blocking I don't see the harm in using it as long as you understand what it is.
They went from being bad compared to everything else to now feeling good compared to everything else.
Basically they stayed static and the rest of the internet worsened around them and our perspectives are now skewed.
What used to feel like a spammy content farm is actually not that bad now that we have seen real spammy content farms, like the SO clones that just take SO posts, rip out important css elements so it is harder to read, and slap as many ads as the ad networks allow them around it and then throw up exit intent banners and crypto-mining javascript.
Now just a normal content farm feels like a breath of fresh air when we deal with those garbage sites as alternatives.
Way back when they first started, they used to have content that was outright blatantly wrong and dangerous if followed. It's definitely much better in that respect now.
This is correct. They haven't been treading water. They have consciously tried hard to edit out the flagrantly incorrect content that used to be on the site.
I agree with you about w3schools; they've improved a lot since they first started out, and cleaned up a lot of problems. I think it's just fine to use for that purpose. A lot of technologists look down their noses at w3schools and vilify them just because they consider it a content farm.
In theory it does, but pretty much nobody uses it in this manner except for W3C, so that is the association for most people who recognize it in the first place.
I'm ... surprised and have mixed emotions that though msn.com is listed, no Yahoo domains make any of the blocked / raised / lowered / pinned lists. I'm reading that as a sign of total irrelevance.
I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow.
I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.
You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc
> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?
Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.
Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.
So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.
Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)
When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.
I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.
Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”
Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.
It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.
I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.
If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.
The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.
But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
Look at the numbers of the people playing lotto/scratch-offs. Look at where they are being sold. These are targeted at a specific group of people. You can try to whitewash it all you want, but it only makes you look naive. Especially that last sentence of yours. I'm really struggling to not get banned for commenting to this, but I'd suggest taking some rose tinted glasses off and taking a real look at this issue.
Not only have I never heard that definition used, I don't see how that definition makes any sense in context. The older, more commonly used meaning is clearly the one being used here.
Well that is why I asked. I have heard whitewashing used quite a few times in this way, though usually in the context of film or TV. I very well could have just missed it in the moment.
Again, this is why I asked how it was the race-based version of whitewashing rather than immediately going into a debate. I wanted to clarify my understanding and see if I missed anything before jumping down someone's throat, would have been nice to get the same courtesy here.
The poor people who buy a $5 ice-cream sundae every day are the ones addicted to food ... people are not making a freely reasoned choice to spend money gambling, poor people are in a vulnerable position and lottery runners exploit that with heavy advertising to ensure people are hooked on the idea they can improve things by spending money on what seems like hope.
> But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?
A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?
I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct.
Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).
So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.
You can buy a lottery ticket for every single big jackpot for a year and lose less than your average options trader. The value is the feeling you get that you and your family might not have to work for the rest of your lives. That feeling is clearly and obviously worth a dollar a day.
At least with sports betting skill can make money. Just betting on the first place team to win over the last place team for example, it won't always win, but typically will. Of course bookies know this and so the payoff isn't enough to make a living on (if you can figure out the exception and bet only on the last place teams that win you can live well). Statistics are generally well studied in sports, but if you study how a team is coached you can find cases where they have a better than statistical chance to win a game they are expected to lose. Most people betting sports either always bet for their team, or bet on statistics, so if you can exploit something else.
I can see a potential problem here in that a sizeable win from a random bet is likely to encourage some people to keep making these bets in future, with inevitable consequences.
Even those who don’t think ads affect them are mistaken. And if you extirpate ads completely from your life the tax is your time and effort to do so. That’s one of the most toxic mantras, it even seems purposefully misguiding.
I mostly agree, but I've been blocking ads however ways I can for years now, and I'd say a few minutes of setup has saved me HOURS of dealing with ads at this point.
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
I know this is late but I did a PiHole for years as well. But then I needed another solution for being out of the house, and my housemate later complained they wanted to see Facebook ads…
And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).
It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.
I wish I'd been able to get the pihole to work as easily as it sounded. It looked cool. But it was incompatible with the router from the ISP I had at the time, and rather than also buy and setup a new router, I just packed it away. Now I have a new ISP with a different router, and I'm sure it's incompatible too.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like.
It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.
Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.
That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!
It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.
> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.
Yet.
Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.
When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.
I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.
Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.
In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.
The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.
Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.
(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)
Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.
Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:
> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account
The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.
My biggest question - and the one that will drive me to subscribe right now is how "harmful" "misinformation" and "malinformation" is treated today, and how it will be in the future.
I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.
A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.
If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.
Or covid vaccines.
Or anything.
If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.
Yandex is pretty great for that. It's trash. Everything it spits out is trash. But sometimes you're looking for trash. If you're looking for some old offensive meme or whatever you can pretty easily find it in Yandex Image Search, for example.
I'm also curious about this, but if the claim that it's mostly a proxy for Google with some way to rerank results is true, then it wouldn't solve that problem.
“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.
Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?
No it's the actual word. "google it" allows for a liaison between the two words because "google" technically ends with an l sound (a consanant) and "it" begins with with a vowel - "googlit". It's also a soft sorta rolling consanant, which helps. In the case of "kagi it", "kagi" ends in an I and "it" begins in an I. That means you have to make a hard stop between the two words and pronounce clearly to differentiate between one I and the other otherwise you lose the words entirely. The two words fail to flow into each other in any way, making them feel less like a pair. Phrases that are easy and satisfying to say in the sense that they are actually just easy to get your mouth around are more likely to catch on. This is definitely something they should consider more carefully.
One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.
What happened to simply using the verb “search”? Or phrases like “look it up”? It shouldn’t really matter (typical conversation) which search engine a person is using.
I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.
SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services
The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.
I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website).
Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features.
I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue.
There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.
One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried.
Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.
The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google.
I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.
I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.
I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.
Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit.
And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.
The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.
Google's been losing in blind comparisons for over a decade (experiments:
- Both have google branding -> competitor wins
- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins
- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins
Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.
Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.
Bing beats Google for certain queries - most notably when I invoke the AI chat.
And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.
Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.
Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.
Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.
The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.
I switched to Ecoasia when BG3 released and a search for “BG3 wiki” didn’t turn up the actual wiki site on Google. Maybe it’s because it’s on a .wiki subdomain (I’m only 90% sure that’s what it’s at since I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s on some “odd” subdomain), but Google returned a plethora of useless wiki sites that were frankly so terrible it hurt. I believe the Duck had largely the same issue, but Ecoasia didn’t.
Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.
When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched)
When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.
hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas
I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective.
I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.
Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.
> But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google.
Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.
Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is.
It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.
I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.
I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.
That's awesome that it's so flexible. Can you search using symbols? Like if I'm trying to search "what is %" will it bring back results regarding the percentage sign, or results that start with the words "what is"?
That's my major problem with google. Sometimes I need to search info on a symbol, and I don't know what it's called yet, so I have to perform another search, just to perform the one I actually care about.
It looks like the like the blog post linked to by Features links to plain search page URLs, which only work for logged-in users. I used the Share feature to get a sharable link. I guess that page needs to be updated.
God trying to look up what some string of characters in a random programming language is feels like a Sisyphean task in Google. Try getting Google to understand what a typed hole in Haskell is without knowing it's called a typed hole
I've sometimes found that including quotes around the symbol gives me more relevant results since Google should interpret that as "find results that contain this exact string". However I just tried it with your % example and the results were unchanged, I have found this to work myself in other instances so perhaps it's a mixed bag
I've been using Kagi for about a year now as well and have been very happy. I find that I still go back to Google when I am ready to purchase a product or find a local service. In this case, I find that I'm generally happy with the people who are paying money for search placement (either directly to Google or for hardcore SEO) and find I can get less "fly-by-night" type companies that way.
that's funny as the fly-by-night companies in my experience are the ones spending all of their efforts to win the SEO to get those clicks where the established companies can be found by less sleazy methods
> 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable.
This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.
Some platforms actually do account for this by having special "developing countries" discounts, or some other euphemism like that. IIRC Gumroad is one that supports this.
Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.
I think most people have a negative kneejerk reaction to asymmetrical pricing when they're the ones paying more. Generally for most things, the cost of delivering a product or service doesn't vary too much based on factors like local living wages, so at the end of the day, you're paying more margin than some other people are. In some cases, maybe your group is flat-out subsidizing other groups.
It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary.
Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
Some people will even go out of their way to abuse a pricing scheme to get things for far cheaper. See cdkeys selling Xbox live cards from Argentina, for example
By this logic they should increase their prices to $1,000,000/mo. They are not a charity, right? Why would they sell it for a measly $10?
The point is, pricing is adjusted to maximise profitability. If lowering the price for a specific market increases your profitability, you would go for it. There is a sweet spot, but it is not the same for every customer. You need segmentation to fully utilise the potential.
Keep in mind that executing the searches has a cost for Kagi.
I remember I could see my usage which was about 700 searches per month and which costed ~8$ I think. My subscription was 10$ so 2$ would go to pay their devs and to R&D. So they can't really go lower then 10$ for specific markets.
I search a lot for programming topics and when I get frustrated I switch to Google and get literally the same results. I’d say it’s pretty good for web search and keeps up to date.
The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
Mainly tech/programming stuff for which Kagi is outstanding. Lately I've searched a lot about a city (restaurants, places to visit, events, ...) I moved in and it works for that too.
One of Kagi's core principles seems to be that they don't try to guess what you want. Their "Personalized Results" settings just ask you to tell them which domains you like and which you're tired of seeing. It makes sense that they'd ask you for your locale rather than guessing it from your IP or asking for location access.
As someone who's sick and tired of the way Google tries and fails to guess what I want—to the point of now ignoring me when I try to tell it what I want with search operators—I appreciate this philosophy!
> When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Same. I still do attempt a Google fallback if I don't easily find what I want on Kagi, but every single time, the Google results aren't what I'm looking for either.
Yes, its results are far better than Google’s. Google results are full of SEO spam, marketing pages, etc. Kagi tends to surface official documentation, blog posts, online discussion/Q&A. Overall, it does a very good job highlighting “real” content rather than “artificial” content. Plus, you can personalize it by boosting/downranking/blocking sites, creating regex rewrite rules on URLs, etc.
- it combines the top 10 this or that list into listicles that are aggregated into their own section and I find to often be full of spam
- it lets you block or deprioritize any site you want like quora, medium, Forbes, that often give me useless or incorrect info or are just their to boost so
- it lets you prioritize sites you like in the search ranking
- it doesn’t have blocked or censored keywords
- it lets you specify by date or time quickly and easily which I find to be beneficial and google seems to hide it constantly move around in news
It’s weaker for like looking up a phone number or hours for a local eatery, but in general I like it better.
In my experience it's far, far better than google search. The ability to boost some domains and block others is invaluable.
But also, because you're the customer not the product, you don't have to contend with Google's ad-driven search results and their privacy violating bs. Totally worth the money.
(Kagi user since the beta, paying user since they started offering subscriptions.)
Three years ago, I migrated from Gmail to FastMail because I was afraid of losing access to my digital life on Google's whim.
Two years ago, I found out that my favorite Youtube creators were all on Nebula.
One year ago, I switched my phone to LineageOS to get security updates a little longer.
A month ago, I installed OpenStreetMaps because Google Maps got really bad at showing points-of-interest.
And today, Kagi removed the only obstacle that kept me on Google Search. I'm looking forward to building my filter list.
After accidentally de-googlifying myself, I might ditch Windows next. It feels really nice using products that respect me, as opposed to services that are actively hostile because of advertisers.
You know you're only getting half the security updates though, yea? The Android ones you're getting, but anything in the baseband/modem/low-level hardware you're not.
Don't get me wrong, I think Lineage is great and I use it too, but I think too many people are fooling themselves on how much extra security they're getting using it.
LineageOS will be using the exact same baseband that came with Android 9 on hardware they're deploying Android 12 to, if the phone's actual support stopped at 9. Yes with the new "Play System Updates" there's better security coverage, but it's still a gap compared to supported hardware.
I had to read your comment extra carefully to realize that you weren't saying LineageOS is _behind_ on updates for the baseband/etc., but rather that it only extends availability of Android updates, not baseband updates, due to the baseband being proprietary and updates no longer being released by the OEM.
In other words, LineageOS provides the latest Android and baseband updates available; it's just that for the baseband, "latest" can be a lot older than for Android, if your phone hardware is no longer supported by the OEM.
If you get a Pixel phone and put GrapheneOS on it, you're actually ahead on OS updates compared to vanilla AOSP. For example, the webp vulnerability was backported 4 days ago, while regular Android users will have to wait until October to get a fix for this vulnerability.
(Of course, the thing about the baseband still remains, but Google now offers 5 years of security updates, which are immediately ported by GrapheneOS.)
I'm wary of telemetry, but willing to accept it. It's the lack of respect that gets to me. "Yes/Maybe Later"? Showing me a fake Windows update screen once a month to try to get me to use an online account and switch to Edge? Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name? Pre-installing games with advertisement and microtransactions?
It's a commercial operating system, for Christ's sake, stop pushing sleazy features. They are quickly burning through all the trust acquired over decades.
My favorite was when they wanted everyone to switch over from Internet Explorer to Edge (this was before support was dropped), so attempting to search "Internet Explorer" in the start menu caused it to override it with Edge instead.
This of course was quite annoying because we still had many applications at the time that (unfortunately) required Internet Explorer.
It was even more annoying because when attempting to get to "Internet Options" or "File Explorer", it automatically replaced those with Edge, which is not at all helpful.
This effort was also completely undone by the fact that if you misspelled Internet Explorer it would still come right up as the first option.
I'm still upset that they've removed most Control Panel results from the start menu search as well, because after all these years the Settings app is still incomplete.
> My favorite was when they wanted everyone to switch over from Internet Explorer to Edge (this was before support was dropped), so attempting to search "Internet Explorer" in the start menu caused it to override it with Edge instead.
Was this before or after they actually removed iexplore.exe?
This was at least several months before, maybe more.
I'm not actually sure they even fully removed it. It seems pretty impossible to open, but as one of our users showed me if they open one of our HTA files and clicked a link in it, Internet Explorer happily opens up despite even being blocked with Group Policy.
>Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name? Pre-installing games with advertisement and microtransactions?
I'm always surprised when I see things like this on HN. Also complaints about it auto-rebooting to install updates, requiring an MSN account, etc.
I turn all that stuff off when I first install it, so I see none of those problems. I just kind of assume any tech-savvy person or power-user would also do so.
And we might think the defaults suck. Rightfully, they would for us. But for granny or a gen-Z kid with no computer knowledge? Somebody who isn't going to know to make backups, run scheduled updates, or know the difference between local search and internet search? Those defaults probably make sense.
For me, it works great because I turn that stuff off and I know how to manage a computer. For people who don't, it also probably mostly works great, because they don't have to know how to do that.
Seems like there's just this one odd slice of people caught in the middle who know enough to get irritated by the defaults, but not enough to configure their system the way they want it. If you're in that group, then you're tech-savvy enough to look up how to change the settings to make it work the way you want. I encourage you to do so and make those changes to save yourself some stress and irritation.
Some things can only be disabled on Windows Enterprise, not on Home or even Pro. For example for some aspects you need Group Policy, which isn't available in Home.
The defaults might make sense from a usability perspective, but are predatory and plainly spy on the user, with the majority of users not even aware of it.
This resonates with me. Whenever I use a windows machine, it really doesn't feel like I am in control and treated as a adult. Adding to the list, click-baity AI-aggregated sex&crime news delivered to you by default. It offends me.
While your list of changes is impressive, I noticed it took you years. So maybe you're a little like me: I find change hard, a cognitive burden that needs a good-enough reason above a certain pain threshold.
I was lucky enough to have been forced to work with Linux in Uni, and when I first set it up myself (trying out two or three distros because I actually managed to bork the first installation somehow), it was in an environment that embraced discovery and I wasn't on my own. Now at work, it's an uphill battle you don't use Windows. Confidence is a must.
I've been getting dialog boxes for default applications a lot lately. Ie, I've associated, say, .png with an image viewer (which is not MS), but lately when opening a .png I'd get the "what application do you want to open with?"-box, with a "Windows suggested"-app as the number two choice. That's disrespecting the choice I've made. Then, this goes for basically all non-MS default apps I've associated with.
The only thing I will credit Win8 for is that it felt really good on a Surface--Win10 was actually a step back on that platform. Which is natural, because 8 was clearly designed for the Surface to the exclusion of everything else, and they rightfully had to walk it back because the choices they made were ridiculous on the majority of Windows machines.
Even as recently as 2021, I still kept around a Windows partition for the occasional game that wouldn't run on Proton. I was still able to play the majority of what I wanted, but brand new titles often required patches after release, or some games would crash on occasion.
Now? I haven't even thought about compatibility in months. I don't even look at the user tweaks anymore, when it used to be a constant factor. Granted, I don't play multiplayer games with anticheat, which last I heard was still a lingering issue. Your mileage may vary, but I completely removed my Windows partition a while ago, and haven't even thought about since.
The Steam Deck is Linux and runs a large majority of games. You can do it on your laptop with Proton. It's amazing. Even weird stuff like Mass Effect Remastered (which requires EA Play client) works on Linux now.
Unfortunately 'the majority of games' wont include whatever fotm rando game my friends are inviting me to this time. If gaming was strictly a solo activity for me I would have gotten rid of windows a long time ago.
Almost all the games I play are these random multiplayer games with friends. In my experience, proton is only a blocker around 5% of the time. I still have a windows partition for those times (and I always laugh when I boot it and am "welcomed" by their "Let's take a moment to configure windows" garbage).
Just saying, if you have the HDD space, I'd say give dual booting a shot. you'll probably be surprised how usable Linux is for gaming these days.
I've moved 95% of my gaming to Linux entirely, after the steam deck convinced me it had gotten this good, and I barely miss Windows. Occasionally I'll still boot over to Windows for something like iRacing or to just experience some of the better graphics features, but honestly I find I don't really miss them and the Linux gaming experience these days is pretty seamless, even with my wacky setup of i3 and nvidia.
You'd be surprised how many games run perfectly well on Linux. Unless you're playing something with ridiculous anticheat like Valorant it will most likely run fine.
That was my position 5 years ago. For the last 3ish years I've been gaming on Linux with very few issues.
I'll be the first to say it's not perfect, but it's 100x better than it was 5 years ago. I'd say at least 70% of steam games just work when you hit play, 25% require a bit of configuring to get working, and only around 5% refuse to work at all.
I actually bought my first Windows machine since 2005 a couple of weeks ago. It’s been surprisingly better than I expected although it took a bit to work through some WSL quirks with SSH.
I haven’t gotten a machine with a proper graphics card in years and I wanted one to experiment with LLMs locally, so I got a gaming PC setup.
I regularly game with Steam and Lutris on Fedora and it's really good - I wouldn't say perfect but the only problems I've had have been with one or two much older titles. No way I'm going back to Windows.
Dosbox + Steam with Proton is the best PC gaming I've ever encountered.
There's a tiny gap in the early windows 9x days that I've been thinking of filling by upgrading my Dosbox Win 3.11 to Win 98. Overall though, it runs a greater percentage of dos/windows games than any dos/windows machine I've ever had access to.
(I'm considering moving to FreeBSD though. Dosbox runs fine, and Steam + Proton sort of works there, apparently. Checking it out in more depth soon.)
>It feels really nice using products that respect me, as opposed to services that are actively hostile because of advertisers.
Hot take, but IMO Windows has far more respect for the user than Linux does.
Everything is far more QA'd (and designed to be QA-able) and at least tries to minimise user frustration. There are exceptions to this, like "suggestions" in the Start menu, but outside of this it's designed in a user-first way.
(Desktop) Linux, on the other hand, seems to be more of an intellectual experiment designed to please the people who are writing it rather than a consumer-focused product. Performing basic tasks are unnecessarily complex, entire design paradigms are thrown out on a whim and compatibility issues continually arise because there's no single dominant standard.
I agree with most everything else you’ve said, but I feel like I’m using a different windows than everyone else when they talk about “forced reboots”. This never happens to me! I’ve seen prompts, but they were always able to be delayed. Is it something that only kicks in if you go ages without manually rebooting?
At a certain point though, I’d say forcing users to install critical security updates is the user-centered option.
I've been using Windows 10 for the past year and a 4 months now, after some 10 years 100% on Linux. I had to disable a weird setting which would forcefully update and reboot the computer when it considered to be "Not Active". I believe it was called "Active Hours" and by default had no way to turn off: you had to choose some hours of the day when you're supposedly not using it. Lost some work like this and had to do some tinkering, not sure if register or otherwise. Or maybe I just disabled automatic updates I guess.
So, in conclusion, no, an OS taking control off my hands forcefully is not user-centered, no matter how much in programming circles updates are seen as "crucial". Nothing is more crucial than the computer being predictable to its owner.
People forget the security hell that preceded Microsoft's obsession with updates. You get half the internet's bandwidth used by a worm or you get forced updates. I haven't seen anyone propose a viable compromise.
Obviously auto security updates, and make the other updates optional. Microsoft does not bundle the security and "feature"/telemetry updates for your benefit.
I can't use Group Policy because when I upgraded from Windows 8, it upgraded to Home edition
it's Home edition because that's what came with the laptop's Windows 8, it was never an issue on Windows 8 because you could disable stuff on Windows 8 without using Group Policy
This Windows computer doesn't force reboots (though it does nag me), it hasn't tried to trick me to upgrade to 11, it isn't sending telemetry to MS, it has never forced me to sign up for a non-local account.
I think it does force security updates on me, which I think is clearly pro-user, though arguably not respectful.
I also decided to use Edge to access my job's shitty Outlook stuff, and every ten minutes Edge tries to trick me into doing something, including but not restricted to making itself the default (you can pry my Firefox from my cold dead...). Until I decided to try Edge, it has not ever done anything to try to get me to use Edge.
That said, I'm not agreeing with GP that Windows "has more respect for the user than Linux does", that just seems confused to me. But I also think that I read a lot of criticism of Windows that seems laughable.
Previously when I installed Windows, I had the option to create a local account. I had to click on a few misdirections but I was able to do it.
Recently though, I had to reinstall Windows to do something, and I could not find a way to create a local account at all. AFAIK they removed the option now, or made it much harder to find.
Well, maybe I'm wrong about that. It's a standard build of Home, with an hour or two invested in config maybe a decade ago when I installed it (back when it was 7, or something, before 10 existed). I spent a little time on Wireshark seeing what it was doing, but not much time, and that was a long time ago. So maybe I'm wrong. :thinking:
Ah, yeah, that’s true, but the point is that you should be respected by default (even if they just asked yes or no). It’s on by default, turns back on almost every update, and some level is on at all times (mandatory).
And yet, my software from 20 years still works on Windows.
On Linux, I have to spend days to months figuring out how to port code to the latest snowflake distro flavor dependency. And that's something that takes an software skilled individual, imagine how disrespected your average user is in this process.
> (Desktop) Linux, on the other hand, seems to be more of an intellectual experiment designed to please the people who are writing it rather than a consumer-focused product
Honestly can't tell if you're joking, but I guess yes. Linux is the most stable OS I've ever used. There's a reason most mission critical and online services that require constant uptime run almost exclusively on Linux.
Windows used to have a nice GUI attached to a mostly unstable system. That was 20 years ago. Now Windows feels like a predatory product that's borderline unusable.
> There's a reason most mission critical and online services that require constant uptime run almost exclusively on Linux.
That argument only applies to servers. Places where you don't need to wrangle x11, the audio stack, gpu drivers for less common cards, conflicting gtk and qt versions for different apps you might use on a whim, hidpi support in old apps, theming issues... I've no idea how many of these are still a plague these days, but they certainly have been for long.
Servers are way more predictable linux configurations.
For desktop, win32 is as solid as it gets (too bad it's shipped within a desktop filled with increasingly many dark patterns).
ymmv and this evidence is anecdotal of course, but our team has used linux on framework laptops now for more than a year and we experience way, way less issues than on windows.
I can't remember the last time I had a problem with linux as a desktop, everything just works. Of course, framework makes sure it does, just like every other manufacturer of laptops does with windows.
EDIT: multi-monitor support, bluetooth headset, printing, various audio devices, etc: this is all just plug and play in my experience, feels much smoother than on windows.
Audio has come a long way, pipewire just works in my experience. And Wayland is in daily driver territory, so X11 is only needed if you have some specific requirements. Steamdeck/proton has massively improved gaming.
That’s not to say it’s not still Linux, there will be some tinkering. But compared to a decade ago there’s way less banging my head against the wall.
If you’re already competent in administration Linux you might find it’s time to revisit the desktop.
> Linux is the most stable OS I've ever used. There's a reason most mission critical and online services that require constant uptime run almost exclusively on Linux.
You’re talking about servers, while the comment you’re responding to is about desktop usage.
> Hot take, but IMO Windows has far more respect for the user than Linux does.
You need to be more specific about what desktop Linux flavours aren't holding up in your eyes because window managers like XFCE and Cinnamon are bulletproof as far as I'm concerned and I've never had issues with them. Especially XFCE.
> there's no single dominant standard.
This is a common criticism and I totally get you here. Not knowing what's going to work for you is annoying and truthfully, no one really wants to shop around for window managers and the only reason I know what's good in the first place is because I spent weeks in my youth test driving everything available, something I no longer have the energy for.
Maybe 5-10 years ago, but today’s Linux desktop has evolved to be much more user friendly and stable. Applications have a standard containerized format (Flatpak), the most popular distributions ship a software store to update your apps and system with one click, and the stability of things has improved to a point where (in my experience) things almost never break unless you’re running the absolute bleeding-edge latest-gen hardware. I would highly recommend giving it a shot if you haven’t at least tried it as a daily driver before. (To get started, just look up a tutorial for how to dual-boot with Windows or play around with it in a Virtual Machine)
There's more ads on a clean install of Windows than most streets of New York City. Why does a professional OS come with Candy Crush installed by default?
> Everything is far more QA'd (and designed to be QA-able) and at least tries to minimise user frustration. There are exceptions to this, like "suggestions" in the Start menu, but outside of this it's designed in a user-first way.
I feel like windows is deliberate about being user hostile. Just because they're very slick about being user hostile doesn't make it any different.
Linux feels like someone with my best interests at heart made a good attempt and half succeeded.
Your take on desktop Linux is quite accurate, but Windows feels less QA'd than Linux to me nowadays. Windows will give me a popup begging for a reboot, then when I reboot it asks for another reboot. For months there was a bug where the settings window would become tiny and resizing didn't work. The Microsoft Teams "get started" window takes on the order of 30 seconds to close - that is I click the X button, no immediate reaction, and then it closes half a minute later.
Your perception of desktop linux and its creators sounds like it is based on a cursory trial from at least ten years ago, frankly it sounds quite disrespectful to the makers.
I couldn't disable the anti-virus in Windows 10 that kept checking my hard drive (yes, my laptop is so old it has a hard drive) and making it slow down
then I just downloaded a program that let me disable it, and I also disabled the firewall
but without the firewall service, I can't get updates (why is that service a pre-requisite for updates?), and I forgot how to re-enable it because I don't remember what program I used to disable it since it's some hack anyway
so now my Windows partition is not really usable, and I'm typing this on Linux where I can just change stuff without breaking everything
Windows has never respected users. Not in version 3.0, and not today in 11. Millennium Edition and Vista were particularly egregious, and 11 took it to a brave new world.
There is no such thing as a single Linux experience, each distribution targets different personas and goals.
If you want a curated Linux desktop experience, then try Elementary OS. It is very aligned to a Mac experience.
Eh, honestly with GNOME ymmv. Many API breakages, most recently with extensions in version 45. It's also not very light. GNOME's UX is also quite opinionated but some people like that.
I just use gnome, I am sure other desktop environments suit others better. But I know gnome just works. Windows and MacOS have the same issues you pointed out with gnome though.
With popOS maybe, but I would never hand Ubuntu Desktop to a non-dev. I can't remember the last time where it properly installed (including getting NVIDIA drivers working) without using the terminal.
What's amazing here is how google did this essentially to themselves by degrading their own products to the point that existing users started to look at alternatives.
I'm such a huge fan of Nebula. All my favorite creators are on there. You do have less content to watch, but I find most of it to be at a pretty good quality.
The creator that convinced me to come over was Jacob Geller. His video essays were amazing, and I wanted to find a way to support him.
I would love to use Nebula but it seems to lean quite politically in one direction (as I suspect from a Canadian platform) which seems like something I don't want to support with my dollars. At least on YouTube I can find a diverse range of opinions
I don't have a Nebula account, but I checked their feed a while ago and they seem to have a variety of opinions, at least for videos about
politics/economics. I found both socialist channels (eg. "Second Thought") and liberal/pro-market channels (eg. "PolyMatter"). I'm not sure if they have any right-wing/republican channels though, so if that's what you want, perhaps it is not for you
I would like to de-google but rely on Google Voice which is tied to all my US financial accounts. Very concerned one day they're going to kill the service, and it is somewhat neutered as financial institutions are refusing to communicate with Google Voice numbers (had to cancel my Ally account since it wouldn't do two step to a Google Voice number).
Search is fine for my uses. It doesn't have the facial recognition to quickly search for all photos of a person but it looks to be tagging things in an accepta le manner and I've found the things I've been looking for.
I used their free trial - 1Gb of storage available for a year iirc - to try out a few things but then ran in parallel for a while and now have stopped syncing my new photos to Google. Good luck with whatever you decide!
Ente have 'ML Search (beta)' option, I have just spotted on their desktop app:
'This will enable on-device machine learning and face search which will start analyzing your uploaded photos locally.
For the first run after login or enabling this feature, it will download all images on local device to analyze them. So please only enable this if you are ok with bandwidth and local processing of all images in your photo library.
If this is the first time you're enabling this, we'll also ask your permission to process face data.'
I looked through the standard 'alternative to Google photos' top 10 lists that get updated occasionally and none of them offered a similar enough experience to make me look deeper.
I saw ente on a Reddit post somewhere. I like it's a mostly paid product with what seems to be a sustainable free/trial tier which is unlikely to drive them out of business. I like the e2ee, and their clients being opensource and they provide an easy way to keep an offline mirror (through the desktop client). It ticks my boxes.
Ah, sorry, I meant an app that uses OSM as data source (OrganicMaps in my case). For some reason I thought I had an "official" app the OSM project, otherwise I wouldn't be so casual with the name.
And a shout-out to StreetComplete, that gamifies contributing to OSM.
I almost never comment here on HN (or anywhere actually), but I feel the need to express how happy I am that I found (lost in a comment a few days ago) this service.
For the past three or so years I have tried half a dozen times to leave Google Search. Tried DDG, Brave Search and some others I can't remember now. But the "poor" quality of results had me going to Google for half of my searches, and after a while, just Google again, for convenience.
Now, I'm at 44/100 trial searches and I already know I'm going to pay for this. It's like using Google on 2008 plus without ads. It just work wonders, and I haven't even started to play with the filter to raise/lower certain domains, which I think it's a fantastic tool to have.
I think that the problem is that a lot of vendors grossly overestimate their value - like NYTimes with their subscription. I am totally willing to pay for what they earn from me from ads and 10c on top of that monthly. But they want order of magnitude more.
I hear you, but it's also really hard from the service provider's perspective because - for many people at least - the allotment of searches starts to become a hinderance on using it.
By making it feel a finite resource, some percentage of the users will start to ration their use of your service and/or do some deliberation before using it ("I kinda want to look that up, but I don't know if I want to spend one of my searches"), and introducing that kind of usage friction can even lead to a subtle resentment of your service.
Yeah, exactly. I looked at Kagi last week (first time I had heard of it), when the $10/month plan was "only" 1,000 searches a month and "unlimited" was $25. While I think that I'll probably stay well within 1,000 searches, I'm also not sure, and it's just not something I want to have to worry about (it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it, but still...)
One of the reasons I decided to skip Kagi for now.
I literally looked at Kagi like a week or two ago from a link here. I really liked it, and I've really been hating Google search more and more each day. But I concluded that 1000 searches felt too limiting, and $25 felt too expensive, so I passed hoping a price change would come at some point in the future.
And voila! Just signed up for $10 unlimited. Probably won't even use 1000/month, but psychologically it just feels so much better.
Same here. Looked at Kagi a while back, thought about paying for it, but 1000 searches per month was way too little, especially considering what actually eats into your quota: load more results? another search. Looking for an image, so you search and then switch to Images? two searches. etc.
But as soon as "unlimited" became something I could reasonably buy, I was in :D
Yes, I'll probably check it out and at least consider paying for it, depending on how much I like it (well, once I have a job and some disposable income...) $25/month seemed too much regardless; I don't know the economics behind it but that it's now adjusted to $10/month seems I was right.
I am not the gp but yes. I had the same concern last time I evaluated Kagi and now I expect to become a paying customer this weekend when I have some time to do all my reading and reconfigure my main devices.
“grand parent” - it’s a way to reference the comment as opposed to user in a thread.
“OP” aka “Original Poster” is usually the first in a thread.
“PSA” aka “Please See Attached” references a link or attachment to the original post, and is used in the title of the first post, i.e, please look at this webpage I’ve linked to and let’s discuss it.
“TFA” aka “The Featured Article” is often used in the discussions and is the same object as the original poster referenced via PSA
> it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it
That's a bit misleading. If the search engine really is that good, you should use it more, and then all of a sudden you'll hit the cap. I probably don't search that much now but that's because it's not worth the trouble.
And I don’t want to think about how much I search.
Comically, the biggest problem I have with signing up since $10 isn’t that much is that I don’t want to have to log into kagi to prove my account. I search on my phone, work computers, random terminals, etc etc. Having to userid and password to all these places disrupts my current UX of 1) open browser, 2) type search (maybe go to ddg.com first).
Changing to 1) open browser, 2) log into kagi, 3) search increases my time by 100x
I usually use the same browser, but I use incognito or fresh browsers at least once or twice a day.
They have a solution for that, a session link. They pass a token through a query parameter that validates to your account. You set that as the default search engine for each browser, no need to repeatedly sign in.
> If the search engine really is that good, you should use it more
In practice the opposite happens. Because Kagi is presumeably so good, people use it less, because they find stuff faster. Something that would require 2-3 searches on Google is just one search on Kagi.
Well you should worry! I've heard that when people pass their search limit, the Kagi team shows up with big pick-up trucks to their front yard and start screaming insults, waking neighbours.
But seriously, I've seen this comment so many times now, that I'm curious: What is it that you worry about exactly?
I didn't post that comment, but I'd suggest it's not necessarily a rational worry at all. It's just human nature that if you tell somebody that something can run out, then some part of their brain will worry about it running out. :)
You can set notifications and hard limits. I had this reservation and 6 weeks in have gone to the $10 plan and have other family members liking not, so will likely upsize again.
Amazon doesn’t make me subscribe and I can buy 100 hours and use them over 10 years for all they care. I’ve had monthly bills that are a penny from glacier.
I don’t think this pricing is because it’s hard on Kagi. I think it’s a dark pattern that once people subscribe they just autopay forever. My dad subscribed to dial up aol until last year. He hasn’t had a phone line for 15 years.
You think kagi is going to not charge people if they do zero searches?
They’ve already made it a finite resource by charging $5/month for 300 searches. I’m already rationing. They’re just saying it’s $5 if you do 1 or 300. There’s already friction. But friction to dark pattern you into paying more.
I mean it’s their prerogative and they can charge whatever they want.
I just don’t want another monthly fee. I’d rather just pay once and be done. Sell search tokens or something.
Oh, I'm not defending their approach per se - I don't want another subscription at that price point either - I'm just saying that it's not as simple as it appears on the surface because the alternate approach has a direct impact on the behavior of a good chunk of the user base, in a way that's not really good for the business or the users.
I'd argue that in many cases - including this one - the issue with subscriptions is simply that they are overpriced from the customer's perspective. Reasons for this could be greed, a desire to get to a self-sufficient revenue point too early, worrying about the handful of users that will abuse any sort of unlimited plan. From the customer's perspective, if the cost-vs-benefits don't feel right, then they'll complain about a subscription, but it's not /really/ the main problem in most cases.
The most "fair" plan for e.g. Netflix would be if I paid for each thing I watch, but that is effectively a "tax" on usage and negatively affects my usage patterns (from both my perspective and theirs). For example, I'd be super hesitant to browse and try out stuff I might not like. On the flip side, Netflix has now passed 15USD/mo and while it's not a huge chunk of change, I don't feel like I get 15 dollars of value out of it, so I'm thinking of cancelling. If the subscription was an absurdly low 1USD/mo, I wouldn't care about the subscription at all.
Kagi's situation is unfortunate for them because they are trying to get people to pay for something that we normally think of as free, so they probably need to lower the price point, at least for now.
> Amazon doesn’t make me subscribe and I can buy 100 hours and use them over 10 years for all they care
Well, sure, getting a customer's money up front for something intangible that they may never use and whose cost to you trends towards zero anyway is something they're happy to sell you. :)
A simple paygo model with monthly caps at the same prices as the current tiers could work.
If I search five times a month, charge me $0.05 a search. If I search 2000 times, charge me $10. If I search 2001 times, just charge me ten dollars.
Still no need to think about it, no need to lock into a subscription, but you also don’t have to worry about blowing your credit card up if you have a research paper due or something.
Of course, no one does this because you’re right, it’s purely a dark pattern.
>By making it feel a finite resource, some percentage of the users will start to ration their use of your service and/or do some deliberation before using it
Exactly to a T how I feel about Khanmigo. I pay for it because I love the idea of a maths tutor in my pocket that wont make me feel stupid, even if by accident, for forgetting something simple.
But there's a "battery" that resets every day and it just makes me anxious. I'd easily pay 50-100$/m instead of 10/m I already pay if I could get unlimited access but there's just no option for that.
If anyone has any recommendations for something like Khanmigo with unlimited access please please let me know. I'd pay so much for a good personal private tutor in my pocket. For maths if that helps.
This is exactly what I did and I am so happy they switched to unlimited. I have historically done things like using my search as a calculator or searching for websites are commonly visit instead of using them as a bookmark. When I would forget to add g! at the end, I feel a pang of anxiety because I knew that I just wasted another one of my kagai searches.
I suggest that it might be different: a lot of kagi users - of which I am one - complain about feeling internal pressure to optimize their number of searches, which leads to higher mental cost. The unlimited model is nicely brainless, which I mean in a good way: you just use it however you want, and as long as you're getting>= $10 of value from it, you keep doing so, instead of having this per-operation mental calculus of "should I preface this with !g to save a search?"
I have this same unavoidable urge to optimize with other limited plans, such as cell phone plans (for voice , before everyone went unlimited anyway) and have found I'm much happier with an unlimited plan. It costs more and I value the saved mental energy more than the trivial amount of money.
Back when Netflix/Prime were the king of paid premium (ad free) streaming essentially being the only players, there were definite months where I barely watched any content and I was a pure source of subsidy for all the other viewers. There are other times, where I swear they (Netflix) start throttling my use to sub-VHS quality. Macroblocking the size of your fist that looks like a 320x240 image scaled to the size of my TV.
Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates.
I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier.
Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the aliens final attack. How do I get out of town?
>Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates.
If you look at a car as an investment, "you're holding it wrong" is the best I can come up with as to how I feel about it. To me, a car is just a really specialized tool. I don't expect my wrenches and socket sets to appreciate in value the longer I hold them. Cars are made by the thousands every day/week/month/year. We don't expect our mobile devices/laptops/desktops to appreciate either. This whole depreciating argument confuses me. Maybe some people just have a hard time equating something with that kind of price tag as simply a tool?
There are very few cars that are investment worthy, and if that's the kind of car you're after, then so be it. But to the 99.99999% of people looking for a car, it is simply something to serve a purpose.
Similar use case that actually happens: hurricanes. Entire large cities evacuate. The Miami and Houston metro areas are both over 5 million in population.
Forecasts give days of notice, so I guess an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service could have a million extra cars drives themselves in overnight. But refueling them would be a challenge. It's already a challenge for normal cars today (without using more fuel by rearranging fleets of cars between cities).
Also, sometimes they change traffic flow for evacuations, like contraflow lane reversal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal) or using the shoulders as extra lanes. I wonder how well autonomous vehicle software handles that.
You can live without a car. You can't live without food.
You can take raw food goods. Prepare it. And charge more than the cost of the goods. Restaurants do it all the time. Or even if you prepare it for yourself, you saved money.
Only if you're wasteful does food depreciate, but I'd argue that's not the correct word. Food is consumed after you buy it. It was used precisely for what it was intended. That's not depreciation, but I'm guessing you know this and trying to be cute?
My car that I bought was used precisely for what it was intended. And it depreciates through its life until it is no longer useful and its value is zero.
We buy lots of depreciating assets because we need them. That’s not bad, necessarily. But don’t buy a car as an investment.
I brought up food because it’s a depreciating asset. You buy it, you eat it, its value depreciated to zero. It’s not cute, just pointing out that “don’t buy depreciating assets isn’t a very useful life choice.”
Yes. But cars are expensive *and* for the most part they are unutilized. When you're slepping...the car sits. When you're working...the car sits.
An given society that's based on personal transportation (e.g., USA) at any given moment has a significant amount of resources sitting around doing nothing. In a world now based on not-so-infinite resources less cars (via, car on demand) is more than just a biz model. It's good for the world we live in.
Most of the depreciation comes from wear and tear of using it. If you let it sit for an inordinate amount of time that will have a significant impact, otherwise your car isn't going bad when you sleep at night.
Not really. Another issue I have with ownership (or leasing) is usage. While I'm sleeping...the car sits. I'm at work...the car sits. In fact, a whole lot of resources and effort goes into something that spends most of its life under utilized.
Car on demand would mean less cars per person. Perhaps the UAW sees this coming?
True, but there's also the reality that maintenance costs increase over time for software projects as upstream vendors change their pricing models and codebases grow in size and complexity. I can see why a product like Kagi wants to keep their traffic tied to recurring revenue instead of selling a bunch of credits upfront.
People would need to buy more credits. I’m not asking for an eternal membership where I pay once and am done.
There would be many customers buying on different schedules and that would aggregate into a predictable cash flow.
This is a solved problem as companies have sold software for 50 years.
Subscriptions are more profitable, that’s why companies do it. Not because there’s any realistic business reason (other than wanting more money for less work).
The incentive for the company is also different depending if they sell subscriptions or credits/usage. Kagi doesn't have competition in the paid search so space so they shouldn't need to go the subscription route yet as a differentiator.
Using dark patterns like subscriptions at this point seems to me that kagi doesn't trust their product or its users.
I think the point is having stable recurring revenue. Giving you unlimited usage means on average you'll be paying more than you use, but, unless you're seriously abusing it, you can technically cost them more than you pay.
Just like you can go to the gym every day - if everyone with the membership did that they would not be able to function. But it doesn't mean you can't.
Unlimited isn’t real, especially for something like search where it’s not like I need unlimited searches.
The best gyms are pay per session. Gyms are also special because people who buy memberships and never use them subsidize real gym goers who would have to pay more for 20 sessions per month.
The best gyms aren’t pay per session in my experience - and I’ve been to a lot of gyms around the world.
Sure, most gyms let you buy a day pass but compared to the monthly membership it’s very expensive.
My current gym is £40 a month which gives you access to every gym in the country as well) or £10 for a day pass just for that single gym for that single day.
The fanciest gym I’ve ever been to was the equivalent of £30 for a day pass and like £300 for a monthly membership.
Also you example of gyms being special isn’t specific to gyms, that’s also how insurance works, spread the cost out over a lot of people and everyone pays less.
I agree Unlimited PTO is a con though, just give everyone an allocation and let them choose how much they use (most will use the maximum)
Fair enough. Sell in bulk but have some minimum credits per month requirement. More or less, use'em or lose'em. Not super painful, they are paying customers :) But enough to keep it fair to the vendor. This way there's a path to paying for those who don't want or need a monthly unlimited subscription.
I really liked the suggestion from somewhere else on this topic of paying a set fee for an amount of credits to be charged against. When the balance gets low, allow them to re-up. Of course, there shouldn't be some BS type of expiration date like food products or airline miles. Pay as you go type of plans. In that way, you are paying for exactly what you use, and not just donating each month like it's a charity.
In this case expiring is not the same as airline miles. The product doesn't run itself. If you only want to use your credits on the odd numbers months and you expect it to be there and ready, well it still has to be there and maintained on the even numbered months.
I guess you can bake that into the credits price. But if you say, purchased 100 credits today and don't use it for a year...well, who is paying for that year? Adding a small monthly fee, oddly enough, keeps the customer engaged.
Their api is slightly different. That is an api into their own index, but their search results are a combination of those results as well as a bunch of outside search results from places like google etc.
Subscription based services are horrible user experience and it's a show of bad faith from the vendor, IMHO. You want me to be locked into your service, wen lwell, then I don't trust you or your product.
This whole post feels dirty, how it's a direct link to a blog post that just reads like a press release, and there's a ton of sus responses promoting it in this thread.
Tin foil hat, are we having a reddit bot moment on HN?
Depends on the nature of the service - for dns, vpn and so on - thing you only really need one of - once chosen it makes sense - nextdns is 1$/month, backblaze 10 and i feel fine for subscribing. And not locked in in any way. I don't really need second one of any of those.
It doesn't make sense when your consumption is spread between many vendors - like news sites or streaming services or substacks. There should be option - done one time to someone on substack. There are authors I would like to send some money, but they just don't create enough value.
search engines and gpt chat bots are something in the middle - you usually have 1 + 1/2 backup. Goodle, then bing (google filter way too much some stuff), then yandex (since there torrents are not nuked). In this spot subscribing for each is too much money, but just limiting for one has real quality of life costs. Kagi seems to be somewhere here. I wish them luck - search space begs for disruption, but my hunch is that 10$/month is on the high side. On the other hand having those kind of people is valuable. A search engine for the rich will have easier time pitching value adding service.
This was a comment about their financials last year. This isn't a high profit business making hand over fist and exploiting users.
I'm happy to pay monthly to get a service I see as valuable, especially if it ensures that this service is sustainable long-term and doesn't disappear because of money.
That was basically their previous model. As a software developer I blew threw several hundred queries per day ... $10 for unlimited searches is the point I was waiting for to make the change.
It's not what you're asking for, but FYI, you can sign up for a month or a year and immediately cancel your subscription very easily on the Kagi site. You'll still have access until the end of the subscription period.
I don’t even make 10,000 searches in a year. I just did a search of my browser history: 8881 visits to DDG in the past 12 months, including many duplicates where I hit the back button to click a different link on the same SERP.
How much do you think it would be reasonable for them to charge for 10,000 searches? I assume this fee is supposed to sustain the company and fund all development and growth with a 100% ad-free business model, forever!
GP already said $5 per 300 searches. 10,000 would be $166.67 at that rate.
Given that they allow unlimited for $10 per month, that would mean it's the equivalent revenue of 16.67 months, which seems pretty comparable to your numbers.
Glad they found a way to to walk back the limited search count (especially when so many things you wouldn't think counted did). Might have to re-enable my account now.
I think Kagi sounds interesting but the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types. E.g. I am interested but can't be bothered to pursue it as it seems like an unnecessary additional SAS model cost to my monthly budget.
How does search quality really change my life?
Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.
A lot. I make dozens and dozens of searches on an average day.
I'm also somewhat cheap when it comes to subscriptions.
Throwing $10/mo. for something I can get "for free" is not a light choice. But...
1) I don't like Google's philosophy, I don't like being the product, I like being a customer
2) Google Search results have gradually gotten worse, mostly because of SEO spam
3) I don't really trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage, their model is essentially also advertising
I still use Google Search / Maps when I want to buy something, i.e., when I want ads.
I prefer to not go to the mall for recreation or work either.
> the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types
There are lucrative bundling opportunities.
I am waiting fora corporate product; it's notable that Google Workspace still subjects you to ads in search. That's not only a data leak. It's also a constant attention tax on your knowledge workers.
You might want the blog to prominently link back to https://kagi.com. "Home" took me to https://blog.kagi.com, I tried clicking on the pricing table image, etc. but nothing got me to the actual product.
I had to manually enter https://kagi.com to see the product behind the blog.
There are tons of information workers who are dependent on search in their work – or if they're not, could work much better with good quality search.
The examples are really too many to list, but it really depends on the person. When it comes to not spending a dollar, people will create the most incredible and reality-defying reasons. So I'd expect 99% of Google users to keep using Google, or maybe even stop using web search when Google becomes completely unusable. Then they'll say "I have no need to search for things anyway".
Right, but then it doesn’t make sense for me as one of those information workers to pay for it. It’s not clear that I can get $120/year of value out of it.
Why isn't it clear? You can try it for free, or even pay for just a month in order to see if the quality is good enough. Then you know for sure if it's worth the price or if it isn't.
Because unless my salary increases by more than $120 as a direct result of using Kagi, it’s not a good use of my money. It’s the same reason I don’t pay for nicer chairs in my office.
If a better search engine makes employees more productive, the target customer is the business, not the employee.
I'd wager Kagi has a lot of benefit in learning and finding solutions to issues where you don't know the correct terminology AND in tech where a lot of non-tech content is available (f.e. analytics)
With chairs it's also less of a benefit in regards to productivity but health and comfort. I'm also still rocking a 150€ chair from IKEA, totally viable and comfortable, but I do see the benefit in a chair that has a lot of configuration options because I am slightly too large for mine. Still means one needs to know how to configure it properly (which is 90% of the health change)
Hard to quantify comfortability since it really indirectly affects mentality.
Then again, I'm not really using search a lot when working so Kagi is obviously also nothing for me
How much time do you waste wading through bad search results?
Would you pay $10/mo to fix that problem?
For me, the answer has been yes. I don't think that is true of everyone (but maybe some people can live in the free plan limits!)
I started with the free plan, made it my default search engine and then tried to measure how often I felt like I had "lost something" once my free tier was up. And yeah, having to go back to Google or DuckDuckGo felt like I lost a really good tool and was using a mediocre replacement.
I pay $5/mo. for 30GB at FastMail, and $10/mo. for Kagi Search.
I switched away from Gmail years ago; the risk of getting locked out of my digital identity with no recourse is worth more than $5/mo. Not having my electronics receipts, plane tickets and newsletters datamined for an improved ad experience is just a perk.
Ask this to someone who remembers when Google first appeared.
I am not a Kagi user, but am seriously considering it after a number of months having to dig through at least 8 results of paywalled or possibly AI-generated pages for almost every Google query; seriously, I just did a search for 'python concatenate list' on google and it was worse than I expected - the official docs weren't even on the first two pages and even the helpful Stack Overflow answers were the 5th result down - give it a go, the results are trash.
I google things at least 20 times a day, and probably so do you. I would pay for something that can cut out the bollocks - if Kagi can follow through, they'll have a customer.
Yep, I think I’m going to try Kagi. I am so, so tired and exhausted of every search result on Google being “the top X in ${this_month_of_this_year}” with a list of Amazon affiliate links. I append Reddit to the searches for products now, but notice on higher margin items you can click into Reddit user history of people giving their “opinion” and see that every post they make is about that particular product.
Just tried that same query without the quote marks on Kagi.
The first result is an info box from Stack Overflow showing use of the + operator to join two lists (with a link to source).
Then 4 more relevant SO posts (which are more nuanced and specific than the generic query, like concatenating into a single string, or concatenating without creating a copy.
Then a small inset box as a "blast from the past" with 4 older blog posts, at least 2 of which look pretty relevant here just from the title.
Then 5 more SO posts (again more nuanced and specific variants of the underlying question), and a digital ocean post on 6 ways to concatenate a list in Python.
Search quality improves my life. Like actually I'm a happier searcher since Kagi and I search more frequently because I have increased confidence that I'll get meaningful results. I don't grumble like I used to every time I had to wade through a pool of SEO shit spam. But that's just me.
Hmm most of the things I used search for are now covered by ChatGPT (for which I use the api which costs cents).
I don't think web search is still important enough for me to pay for. A year ago it would have been. I originally signed up with kagi but I wasn't too impressed and then they came with the limited plans and that was it. Not sure if I'll go back now.
And yeah like the article says it was priced for "silicon valley bros". Even $10 is a lot on a Spanish salary still. But it's doable and 300 for $5 is a decent deal IMO. I wouldn't do that many.
Not the op but I use chatblade[0] on the cli, chatgpt-next-web[1] as webgui and quivr[2] for multimodal stuff files/images/audio/video. atm everything goes over a azure openai endpoint but would love to infere an llm locally.
At work we're always told to use the Azure one because our CIO is elbow deep in Microsoft's ass.
But I wonder.. one funny thing is that everyone at Microsoft is referring to OpenAI as an 'acquisition' whereas as far as I know they only have a <50% interest?
If it's useful, I recently open-sourced a simple GPT-4 TUI [1], which I use many times a day. And since this is a Kagi post, I might as well plug my (extremely simple) Kagi CLI [2], which uses their FastGPT API under the hood.
I use the ChatGPT bot for matrix mainly. I've tried some other frontends that are more like ChatGPT web but I keep going back to matrix because it's just so handy. I have all my other chats in there too, through bridges.
I use the OpenAI playground because I'm paranoid that third party frontends will steal my API keys and I don't have enough time to audit the code or set up firewall rules.
Much better imo and much cheaper unless you do 200 chats per day or something :P
Why is it better? More integration capabilities. You're not limited to the webpage and app, you can use it anywhere you want. Not constantly kicking me out to log in again every few days (their web does this). The ability to select the model and temperature (a measure of how creative the LLM is). Also the default model seems to be much more recent.
And the price. If you use it sparingly you might be paying as little as 20 cents a month instead of 20 dollars. Not exaggerating but it depends on the size of questions and responses. But really to make it cost as much as that 20$ per month with the API you really have to go hell for leather with it.
If you're even a moderate user of chatGPT, the equivalent cost of using the smallest GPT4 model would run you a hell of a lot more. Let's actually run the numbers.
The cost of the GPT-4 API is ballpark around $0.05 / 1000 tokens. If you want to include a rolling context window, you will easily hit 1000+ tokens if not a huge amount more.
ChatGPT pro gives you 50 GPT-4 queries every three hours. If you're using it all day you might average about 100 daily queries. Using a dedicated GPT4 API would run you approximately five dollars a day for the same thing - that's $150 a month as opposed to flat cost of $20.
How hard is it to hit 100 queries in a day? Pretty damn easy when you realize that most queries aren't usually standalone - instead they involve a back and forth approach which necessitates a rolling context window and you explore the problem space.
When a query (plus back and forth) might cost as much as $0.25, paying for GPT-4 via the API would only net you a whopping 80-100 queries per month before you exceeded the cost of a pro subscription.
The API certainly has its advantages over the web based ChatGPT, but price is definitely not one of them.
Fair enough, but I generally use GPT-3 (3.5). Because I didn't really see much benefit from GPT-4 when I had the subscription. I really didn't find it a whole lot better. The one thing I did use was the bing web lookup but they disabled that, that's when I cancelled my subscription.
I really hate the web interface also. It's constantly kicking me out, so I have to log back in and rewrite my query. And it keeps switching back to GPT-3 which is one of the reasons I ended up using that. Using it with my own tooling is just so much better.
And I don't really use it that much. I just don't have a lot that I need it for yet. I definitely don't even get to the 100 a month :)
Also I don't use it as hard every day. On the weekend I don't tend to even touch it. But you're right, your mileage may vary wildly here.
Good point though I should revisit GPT-4 again. See if it's improved.
Thanks for this insight! Based on this, I am better off with the ChatGPT monthly subscription. I tend to use it a lot with a lot of back and forth. I regularly hit the 50 GPT-4 queries.
I don't even bother using GPT-3.. it's not good enough for my use.
I've thought about it several times, enough that I did track my searches for a week. Between work, hobbies, and just life I searched (overwhelmingly DDG and Bing) over a thousand times in a week. (A evening of prep for my tabletop RPG racked up over a hundred all by itself.)
I've bailed on Google - wading though the flood of SEO'd garbage just stopped being worth it. Bing and DDG have been mostly working, but I definitely feel like they're missing something. $10 a month is definitely worth it to try it out, and if it works for me, worth it to keep paying. I'd been hesitating because worrying about my search count seemed like a substantial negative for me.
I really enjoy Kagi's caching image search; it often lets me avoid visiting websites when I'm just looking for graphics. Going on Kagi and reading summaries and viewing cached material gives me the "I don't feel like going out" vibe, but on the Internet. One step closer to offline.
Be sure to look into the results customization options. You may not need them, but they can also make the engine feel so much more tuned to your needs.
Kagi seems great and I’m more than willing to pay, but then my searches get literally attached to my credit card. At least Google can pretend it doesn’t know me directly..
It’s not that I am involved in shady business, but I do look up strange things from time to time.
How do others feel about this?
(I feel like there is a need for a private, maybe even local, search?)
Kagi recently added support for paying with crypto. Create an account with single-use email address, pay with unKYCed crypto and search only while on VPN, if you really need to search anonymously.
Also while searching close one eye and hang upside down from a pull-up bar, to ensure you're making web searching as uncomfortable and focus-sapping as possible.
I mean anyone can write anything into a privacy policy and who will enforce they are sticking to them really?
Usually we only see what actually happens in the background when there is a breach.
For financial systems we have regular audits so rules like PCI DSS are enforced, but do we have these for search systems?
Not so plain. We do not (log AND associate), or we do not log AND we don’t associate? Am I supposed to believe that if their backend crashes after a user query, that can’t tell what has been queried?
And here lies the problem - there’s a difference between “we have no process that associates queries and users” and “the system is specifically designed to make this association impossible”.
IANAL nor close to it but is there any legal requirement in the US to keep logs avoid user activity besides access logs? I'd be surprised that the US federal law forces you to keep a full activity log so that they can take a look later for some reason.
Does it matter if it's a law? One day a national security letter from some three letter agency shows up at your doorstep, requiring you to keep logs (or let their engineer install a room 641A), and forbidding you from saying you do.
Yes, spot on. Accepting that it is ok to have a gatekeeper that monitors and monetizes what the digital planet is searching was a monumental wrong turn.
There needs to be a healthy decentralized, open source approach to search. If people can hope to train and infer with LLM's locally why not the relatively "low IQ" search index that doesnt even violate copyright? The two are increasingly facets of the same thing.
Btw you should try recoll for local search.
Open source business models are not the easiest but a team could easily fund things with corporate oriented customizations.
Maybe Kagi itself should try this path.
In any case the next phase of AI enabled computing will require some bold thinking and acting, but above all, having a moral compass.
You can block domains you don't want to see results from. With that feature I'm not sure it even needs to deliver better results than Google to be compelling.
I think using Kagi was the first time I've ever encountered an "instant switch" moment for a product I've been using for over a decade. I never realized just how much useless SEO garbage was being flung in my face using Google until I used Kagi. Of course there's the measurable added productivity of finding what I need faster, but it's also a qualitative difference in that I don't kind myself glossing over half the page avoiding ads and useless links.
Good to see DuckDuckGo's Bang syntax [1] has become commonplace with alt search engines. Following convention, Kagi lets you append !g to divert the search on Google. A simple escape hatch like that is worthwhile as Google is often superior for local-area searches, in my experience.
I've dabbled with a multitude of search engines recently and that is one thing badly missing from Bing.
Not disagreeing with your main point but some anecdata on local searches: for me, Google likes to show me the other, larger city by the same name several hundred miles away. If I use Google Maps it likes to teleport as well. Sometimes even serving results for unrelated businesses, like one time I was searching for a photo developer and it recommended a B rate fast food chain.
Kagi has done a much better job of respecting where I live, though it has had a few minor misses that Google produced (maybe after wading through some crap).
By “local”, I’m mainly concerned with the country rather than city level. I’m not US based and most search engines have that bias.
For example, searches about news, public holidays, or certain statistics should default to the user’s home country (however that is determined, which is admittedly a whole other can of worms that even Google doesn’t always handle well).
It's rather unfortunate that this unergonomic convention of requiring shifted far away 1 key spread , this should be customizeable to some better ,comma prefix or something
Also, for the single-key abbrevs I'd not use any prefix at all just like I have in my browsers "g something" googles "something", it's close to never when I need to search for a single letter (and in those cases I'd just add a space before " g" to let it parse as a literal)
These ! prefixes are nice "visually", but the ergonomics haven't been thought through
Basically, customization is the solution to such design mistakes, but lack of customizatin is another design mistake :(
Kagi seems cool, but I haven't felt that google search is so bad that I'd pay ~120/year for search. I think Google's also heard the discontent around search results lately and has been trying to improve - eg. I get relevant Reddit results now without needing to specify that into my query. I personally haven't found cases where the results are so bad I would rather start paying, but would be interested to hear specific examples to open my eyes if people have them.
The thing is you ARE paying for search but do not know how much, because you will never know where a targeted ad nudged you to pay a little markup for something that you bought.
I prefer to pay for the services that I use with money rather than with my personal data, which may be used against mine or my fellow citizen‘s interest.
Based on your searches, the sites that you visit, the videos that you watch Google or the likes create a profile that they then offers to companies to target you with ads. The effect may be subtle, but ads work, and companies hand millions to show them.
I've been a Kagi customer since the beta, I'm still happy to pay for the privacy and for certain UX improvements they have, for instance being able to give higher or lower weight to different websites in search results. I do not think the quality of their search is any better than DDG or Google. If I am being honest, it's actually worse for a lot of things, if you don't factor in that you can block bad websites without a plugin.
Even paying for Kagi, I still go back to Google for any really open-ended searches where the search engine's ML can actually be helpful. For known-item searches ("fandango showtimes Seattle"), or simple searches ("pumpkin bread recipe") which are fully 90%+ of what I search for, Kagi is just fine, and they aren't after my identity (just my money).
Sure. Sadly, my google search history is turned off, so I don't have a list of my recent searches there.
One that I remember from a couple months ago was that I was trying to recall the name of an exercise they used to do (and may still) in design schools. In the exercise, students are given a problem and a short period of time to work on it, everybody working at the same time. At the end, they get together and critique each other's solutions.
My search terms in both Google and Kagi would have been something like "design exercise with simultaneous work and followup review".
If I run that search now, Kagi gives me articles about psychological studies that combine exercise with learning to test whether you retain more information. It interprets "exercise" as being physical exercise, which is the wrong sense of the word in this case. I think it interprets "design" as being the design of the study, which is also the wrong domain. It does give some articles about graphic design a little way down the page.
With the same terms, Google at least gives me articles about design related activities involving teams. At a glance (and in my memory of the original experiment) none of the articles give me the word I was looking for, but at least it knows the domain I'm searching in.
I remember this example because this was the first time I successfully used ChatGPT to ask about something, and it actually gave me the perfect response, with no fuss, and completely blew all the other systems out of the water. I gave it a natural language version of the same search as above, and it instantly told me the answer ("charrette") along with an accurate description.
So, maybe a bad example, because neither search engine was correct. But, Google definitely got me closer, and I suppose that if I did not have a very specific word in mind, it might have helped me by giving me examples of similar things. Kagi, frustratingly, seemed to have zero idea what I was asking about, and I could not even get it in the ballpark. I wish I could remember (or conjure up) a better example, but that's all I've got at the moment!
I like the statement they made on their jobs page:
Core Front-end Team
Passion for creating delightful and swift user interfaces.
Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and _an understanding that JavaScript can be used sparingly to enhance, not create, product experiences._
Ability to prototype rapidly.
Fun fact: At Kagi, we prioritize speed, to the point where *all functionalities of Kagi Search (except Stripe checkout and Maps) work perfectly without JavaScript*. We see JavaScript as a tool to enhance the UX, not create it.
It should work without JS. It even works in eww (in Emacs). Looking at the source of the page, there's a redirect (meta http-equiv="refresh") wrapped in a <noscript>-tag to the same URL but with "/html" before the path.[1]. It seems the browser you tried doesn't handle that.
> Fun fact: At Kagi, we prioritize speed, to the point where all functionalities of Kagi Search (except Stripe checkout and Maps) work perfectly without JavaScript. We see JavaScript as a tool to enhance the UX, not create it.
This doesn’t matter to me at all. When will people quit trying to hold the web back for their own self served interests?
If supporting Kagi means supporting this idea that javascript should die, I doubt I’ll sign up.
Where in that quote does it say that "Javascript should die"?
They're just talking about using progressive enhancement, which is a common recommendation for making web applications faster, more reliable, more accessible and less fragile.
If you think not making the entire UI and replicating browser functionality with custom JS code is "holding the web back", sorry to inform you but you might be holding the web back.
It doesn't really matter whether a site uses JavaScript or not, but empirically, sites that insist on being almost all HTML and CSS work infinitely better — faster, smoother, adhering to standard idioms — than sites that rely heavily on JS. There are some exceptions to this, of course, but by and large it's a pretty good heuristic.
Hyperbole much? Nowhere does it say JavaScript should “die”.
Today’s web is overflowing with unnecessary complication from trying to fit absolutely every type of content through a React shaped hole. It leads to a worse experience for everyone except the developer making the site, who gets to marvel at how fast they’re shipping new features.
If the future of the web is a trend towards more and more overcomplicated, buggy JS garbage, I’m quite happy to hold it back.
If you think my opinion wasn’t born out of experience with the supposed future of the web, but rather some unjustified bias against the language or something, I dunno what to tell you.
I'm not sure what other impositions you've had to deal with that made this a hot button issue, but Kagi said nothing about getting rid of JS here. They even call out two use cases where they depend on JS for core features, what makes you think they want to remove JS support all together?
In my opinion, in not using JavaScript they are missing out on a really nice DX. This is the kind of app that could be highly optimized _despite_ using React or something similar. Knee-capping your hiring to Make A Point (tm) is silly.
I have yet to see a website that felt better to use after switching to React or similar. To me it always feels like a straight downgrade in UX. A site that felt nice and snappy suddenly becomes heavy and sluggish.
Their previous pricing really puzzled me. If you're charging that much, the only people that benefit enough to pay have big search needs, but Kagi said "we don't want your business". Who wants to monitor how many searches they've made so they don't run out before the end of the month. Or what if your kid sits down at your computer and does 25 searches for their homework.
I think their previous pricing was very much a short term reaction to Bing massively changing their pricing model for search crawl index access.
When the prices hiked with very short notice, they were potentially going to lose money on every search, until they figured out their next move. I believe at the time they said they wanted to bring unlimited back when they could make it work financially. And it's nice to see a company do what they say on that front, for a change :)
As another commenter said, it's unusual to see a company reduce prices as it becomes successful, but I think that will help to deliver even more user growth by reducing the friction to adoption, and also showing that they're true to their word even when it comes to reducing pricing.
Kagi is basically now my daily use search engine apart from Startpage.
The bangs feature, where you can use a quick command to search popular sites like Wikipedia, reddit, Youtube, etc is great, and doesn't count towards your search limit.
And I'm really looking forward to using the Universal Summarizer feature which is included with these new $10 rate.
For Danish searches, simple queries get confused with Norwegian/Swedish results.
Admittedly, I haven't said anywhere that I prefer Danish results when the query is the same in two languages. My operating system and browser are not configured to reveal my nationality. The only way Kagi would know is if they factored in my IP address. Which I can deduce that they don't. I prefer it that way.
I'm currently running the free trial for Kagi and the few non-English searches I've tried have been fine. That being said, I would say they've mostly been pretty simple things to look up since I'm trying to get a feel for how well the engine suits me. If you're interested you could also try the free trial, you don't need a credit card or anything for the trial.
The last thing I've still been using Google for was looking up which Dutch retailers sold the product I was looking for. But now I see that was unnecessary.
This is great - I have been a happy subscriber for almost a year I think.
My biggest complaint with Kagi is not their fault - it's the inability to set custom search engines on Safari (and no, I'm not interested in installing a custom browser extension).
If you're on Mac or iOS (which you will be if you use Safari), the team from Kagi also develop Orion. It's a browser, heavily focused on keeping to WebKit principles, and obviously supports custom Search engines by default.
It's not a 100% clone of Safari, but it's now matured far beyond a "scratching their own itch" project to enable custom search engines - it gives you the performance and power efficiency of safari, with the option to run most Firefox or Chrome extensions (by implementing the extension APIs in WebKit).
The iOS version isn't quite as mature as the Mac version (which is definitely usable as your main browser), but it's getting there.
if you don't want to install a browser extension then safari having customizable search engines wouldn't help you anyways. you would need to login to the account which is additionally functionality that wouldn't be provided without the extensioj
At $10 to essentially have a month-long evaluation of an unhindered product... that is a steal. Time to see how Kagi performs for me! I didn't give it a try in the past because I end up doing a lot of searching during the day and Google/DDG are starting to get repetitive and annoying with their results.
I like the "Blast from the Past" unit in search results. Real sick of Google's neurotic obsession with recency as a stand-in for relevance to the point that you can tell a lot of spammy sites just fake ${CURRENT_YEAR}.
I'm currently paying for Kagi. It's nice. But, so far I feel like it may only be like 2% better than Google, probably not enough to keep me long term.
A lot of times the results are better on Kagi than Google, but not by much. It makes sense they're similar since Kagi uses Google's index (among others).
True, but a bit of a moot point if both search engines will indiscriminately route you to those websites anyways. It's not like I'm opting-out of that issue by using DuckDuckGo right now.
Yeah, I'm strictly talking about search results. That's the main thing I care about. No ads is nice, but if I can't find information I need then that's not very useful to me.
Being able to block domains (without an extension) makes Kagi at least 30% better on its own. Maybe more. It's absolutely a killer feature and one that Google themselves used to have.
With that in mind I wonder if Kagi would be worth having ads for a free version but be super clear what the ads are based on. E.g purely based on 1) search KW and 2) IP location of the search. Nothing more and nothing additional stored.
I wonder if privacy minded people would be happy with that as it's very limited data in today's ad world, a massive improvement on anything else, plus you can turn if off if you want to pay.
I also suspect it would be ~80% as good for advertisers as so much of the rich segmenting advertisers like to pitch has limited to zero effect and KW/location are the big 2 variables.
I don't understand why Kagi needs to be mass market. Why not just be the search engine for people willing to pay for better search? Does Ferrari feel the need to enter the economical midsize sedan market?
Advertising is a lot of work, and introduces a lot of tension into the business model. Spotify premium showed me "promoted content" last week (but they promise it's not an ad). They also accept payola for placement in discover weekly playlists, which means their features are useless to me. There's no reason to encourage Kagi to go down that route. They have a good business model that they and their customers are happy with.
1) To make the business viable and profitable. I searched a bit more and saw a post where the founder said they do expect to be profitable with 50,000 users. That still seems a tight budget if people are paying $10/20 amounts. Also I believe Kagi use google results currently so there has to be a big risk google limit what they can do if they ever become a threat of a business or generally remain beholdent to their main competitors via access and pricing rather than have independent infrastructure.
2) I would love to see a real challenger to Google. A paid model will not likely be that.
I completely understand the responses and there is also value in staying ad free, but there is also value in doing ads a better way rather than all or nothing and hopefully not going down the supply slope type arguments by setting clear and transparent rules at the beginning so that tension doesn't exist or is limited.
> I would love to see a real challenger to Google. A paid model will not likely be that.
How could a challanger to Google use the same business model that Google has? That is certainly destined to have the same end game/degradation as Google has.
It goes against their core principle though, of ensuring that their users are their customers, not the product.
If advertisers become their customers, then the incentives might start to break just a little at a time. As long as you’re the (only) one paying them, you’re the customer. It’s a big part of why I trust them so much.
Not every start up has to grow to a bazillion dollars, you know. There is a space for companies that are only worth a "few" dozen million dollars targeting a rich and sizeable niche of power users.
They can't really do that. Their prices are based on what it costs them to use all of the required APIs (Google, Bing, etc.) If they make a cheaper plan, they will quickly lose money on it.
- Amazon Prime is $1.50/month ($0.75 if you are <25)
- Spotify premium is $1.44/month
- Netflix (1080p, no-ads, 2 devices) is $6/month
$5 is decent home-cooked lunch for eight days in India.
Maybe Kagi's target customer base isn't India, and that's okay. But to do business in India, a company has to do, what I call- "India pricing". Maybe there are better terms for it.
you just listed a bunch of corporations that subsidise the lower subscription cost by monetizing people's data which kagi promises not to do. not only that you listed a bunch of billion and trillion dollar corporations that have money to burn and operate at much higher economy of scale. surely you don't expect a boutique small company of a few people to be able to match that
> But to do business in India, a company has to do, what I call- "India pricing".
Perhaps the nature of the cost structure allows other services to do so, but one search costs the same whether done from a beach in Goa or in San Francisco.
One of the reasons this is not possible are payment processing fees.
Here is Stripe (used by Kagi):
2.9% + 30¢
per successful card charge
+ 0.5% for manually entered cards
+ 1.5% for international cards
+ 1% if currency conversion is required
So if you pay $1, Kagi gets something like $0.65, meaning it just lost 35% on the payment processing fee. There is no way this can be profitable to serve the service.
freeCodeCamp uses UPI for donations, and it is free (so far), and you can pay YouTubers through Super Thanks via UPI. Homegrown solutions like PayU and Razorpay are solid, too.
I have previously donated to fCC and sent Super Thanks via UPI. It's seamless experience.
Now the question is whether it will be worth it to Kagi to maintain all these- I think- yes! Once these are set-up, these are low maintenance and you don't need to babysit it. Setting these up, catching up with local tax laws sound like a big barrier, but it really isn't.
Call me tight-fisted or naive or whatever but I don't see $10/month as a remotely attractive price point and I don't see how they can justify it, especially when their results are still powered at least in part by external indexers.
$10/month can get you terabytes of media on streaming platforms.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what your time is worth to you. I do about 1500 searches per month and paying 10€ per month for those searches to actually be relevant makes it a no brainer.
You're not paying for terabytes of media. You are paying for time and a reduced cognitive load.
I think it's a fair price if you live in the US. I'd pay it, except I don't live in the US and our currency isn't great at the moment, and I don't exactly get overpaid at my job, and the cost of everything is rising, so I personally can't afford it ATM. But it seems reasonable to me.
Honestly, I think you're part of the tight-fisted minority.
For the average person, there's no real difference between $2/mo and $10/mo.
They're both in that "more expensive than free, but not expensive enough to think about" category.
Assuming you've already paid $10 for your terabytes of streaming and that wasn't the last dollar you owned, how does paying for a completely different thing relate to your media streaming?
I can buy potatoes that last me for a week for the same price as for what I'd pay to just get a coffee, but if I've already bought my potatoes and have money to spare, why couldn't I buy also the coffee?
Instant upgrade from the $5/mo plan to this. My biggest complaint about Kagi was that (artificial) ceiling looming over my head at 500 searches per month. Now, I can finally switch my work computer over to using Kagi and have zero worry.
Nothing to complain about here, just overall very pleased.
Kagi says that it does not link private information and searches. I'm really struggling to see how that's possible when you need to log in to search. Magic?
The anonymous payment options are cumbersome. Why not do something like Mullvad with scratch-off vouchers sold on Amazon?
It’s still a hard sell. Netflix was running at 8.99 back in the day, I pay $5 for Spotify and Hulu combo as a student. These companies pay royalties, have to secure licenses, have the equipment to feed multimedia to me, apps, Netflix even makes shows now, etc.
If they want to get to the average user they’ll need to figure out either a student discount, a combo with another service, light ads like Hulu or optimize their costs.
I agree. I like kagi, I like it better than Google. But it's not _that_ much better. Certainly not $10 a month better.
For comparison, I pay $3/month for mightytext. Which is a tool for Android that lets me send/view/search text messages on my phone from any browser. I'd pay $10/month for it, but kagi doesn't give me nearly that much value
I'm very glad that my value scale doesnt concern itself with the difference between $3 and $10, I can't imagine going through day to day like that with that level of granularity. That is literally less than the price of a single pizza. A single potato at the store is probably $3
EDIT: I just signed up for Kagi. Youre out of your mind if this isnt worth $10, holy crap this is awesome. The amount of configurations and settings is out of this world. Unless you use google 5 times per month this far exceeds its cost.
It's less about money and more about the mental energy required to distill such a granular view of money/value. $3 is basically the same as $10, or even $50. Even when I slept on the floor of an office building and made $10/hr I never thought like that. It is madness to me. Spend that energy thinking how to make $10 more, which is incredibly easy, far far easier than the mental energy micromanaging single dollars.
I have other ways to search anonymously. For 95% of my searches I'm happy to have my search history tracked, used to drive better results for me in the future and available for me to browse if I want to. As long as Kagi isn't selling my search history to another company, I actually prefer that they track my search history.
Note: currently Kagi doesn't track search history; I hope they find a way to enable it in the future.
Also happy Kagi customer. It is my default search and I get much less fluff in the results than I did with big G. So happy it respects search modifiers!
A lot of comments mention privacy. Could someone explain who can see my searches at Kagi? My experience working at startups is that companies are very lax with customer PII. With a product like this, I have to assume every engineer at Kagi can see every search I make.
As far as I can tell, the "privacy" here is based entirely on trust and on the promise that they don't log searches and other PII on the account that their business model doesn't need that information. Creating an account linked to payment details and your searches is otherwise a red flag.
Technically they are a for profit company, just like their competitors. They are based in the US, which is a bit hand wavy on privacy and user rights compared to e.g. the EU. And regardless of their intentions, they might transition to being a public company where the share holders run the show. In that case, all bets are off. Google started out with an intention of doing no evil. That didn't survive their IPO for very long and got replaced with sell the hell out of our user data any way we legally can and seek out the darkest areas of what is legally a bit grey. That's why they keep having to pay fines in the EU.
So, I would take these promises with a few grains of salt. For the purpose of improving their product they actually need to know how people are using it. So, they have to balance quality of their product with privacy. More privacy means their engineers are not getting all the information they need to do the best that they can. And they are competing with companies that are not holding back on that front. So, there's a bit of tension there.
Of course the fact that it's a paid product, allows them to make some stronger guarantees and build in business friendly wording into their terms of use beyond just promising that it's all fine. The flip side is that you have to sign in to use the product and prove that you paid for it. So, you can't use it anonymously.
IMHO, they should target the SAAS market and offer to make stronger guarantees to companies that are legitimately worried about their intellectual property leaking via search queries. Having people happily dump whatever in a Google query actually potentially gives Google a lot of insight into what these companies are doing. Including their direct competitors. And I'm sure they solemnly swear that they'd be doing no such thing but the temptation to tap into that is probably enormous for them. I can imagine a few companies that would pay a premium to cut off that particular flow of information. Those per seat deals that get sold by the dozens/hundreds are potentially worth a lot. B2C sales is a lot harder than B2B. And of course access to services like this is also a nice perk for employees.
Yes, Dutchman here. It seems to intuitively understand when you want local results vs. international. When it doesn't, you can easily toggle above the search results. I'm never looking back.
I was just evaluating Kagi earlier this week. Personally I'm still content with DuckDuckGo, but I'll have to keep this in mind. Especially if DDG keeps building silly things like yet another private browser.
Kagi is my default search engine and I'm happy with it except for one category of search: location-sensitive.
I live in San Francisco, and if I type "sf weather" into Google, I get a weather forecast for San Francisco. If I type "sf weather" into Kagi, I get a weather forecast for Santa Fe, which, while technically a valid result for those search terms, is useless to me. Similarly, it's easy to search for restaurants and get search results for other restaurants of the same name in different cities.
But most of my searches aren't location-sensitive, and Kagi does a great job the rest of the time.
Number one is pinning sites that have canonical information (like official documentation), raising sources which are consistently good and blocking sources that are consistently bad. With a day or two of tuning these you get better results than any other search engine.
How often do you use a general search engine and what are you searching for?
For me, if it is related to my job, I am usually going straight to the docs, language forums, and sometimes stack overflow. It's only if I am looking up a specific error that I do a general search (although that is getting harder and harder as more words are ignored).
Personally, I rarely search. Music related? Straight to Metal Archives. Tv/Movie related? straight to tmdb.org. General Reference? Wikipedia. Stats/Facts? WolframAlpha.
I'd say I use a general search engine only a few times a week total.
- dutch baby pancake
- dave hughes
- albert park sailing lessons
- <nameredacted> paediatrician
- LNC patient cables pinout
- 23FBQ connector masimo
- state’s powers australian constitution
- digital ID ACCC
- Woman dies due to bushfire smoke canberra
- <local council area> babytime library
- bellroy
- what does ammonia smell like
- herschel infrared heater home assistant
Not OC, but I burn through searches trying to chase down stacktrace errors. We're going through a big upgrade off of JDK8, so there's a lot of random queries.
I cannot comment on how good Kagi is - based on enthusiastic reviews here, I can only assume that its results are of phenomenal quality. Again, based on those view, one could easily imagine Kagi taking over the world. I glimpsed at their transparent stats and they are only at 8.8k paying users. This is not a bash or a critisism, but just sharing how things are different when observed from a HN lens.
How well does it work for non-English languages? I just tried it out for Swedish and had issues finding relevant results, especially searching for things like restaurants or hospitals.
In my experience from Denmark it is not great at the local results. However I don’t experience many problems with the Danish language. It is mostly stuff like if you search for some generic term that exists in both English and Danish. Then you might want the local one. This does not work very well.
But adding stuff like site:dk helps.
Been using Kagi for 2 months now and am pretty happy. Have been using the $10 plan even though I didn't cross the threshold as I think it's a good cause.
My two main complaints:
- It's not very good with conversions. Say searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work. Or the little widget with conversions that do work like '120cm in m' doesn't allow to change the input and change values on the fly.
- The image search is super slow for whatever reason. It takes about 5 seconds before images show when doing a search.
Interesting, '120mph in km/h' doesn't work on my end either. Though you are right. kmh is not a proper abbreviation but it doesn't bother any of the other search engines either.
Very exciting news. I’ve been trialing Kagi for a while now, and just signed up for this new unlimited plan without hesitation. Google’s results have been getting so awful and full of content farms lately, and it’s nice to be back in control of what sort of sites show up for different searches.
I’m eager to see where Kagi goes from here. I’m skeptical that it’ll expand beyond people in the tech industry and their close relatives, but maybe that’s not a bad thing if it’s sustainable for them long term.
This is pretty cool. I tried Kagi once and liked it, but ran out of my monthly search allowance within a few days. Apparently I make 20x more searches than the average user... So even if I paid, I wouldn't have enough. And I don't like the idea that I'm paying for every web search. It'd add a weird friction that I think would inhibit my flow.
Admittedly $10 still seems kinda steep for something I get for free already. But maybe I should just try it out for a month and my mind might change.
> Admittedly $10 still seems kinda steep for something I get for free already.
And this is why surveillance capitalism is so effective.
If it helps, think about it in yearly terms. They offer a small discount for annual payments. Is $108 per year an amount you are really going to miss, for something that gives you daily (even hourly) value?
(I get that for many many many people in the world, $108 is a significant sum, even yearly, but I expect that most of us here are luck enough to not be in that boat.)
I read somewhere Google makes $350 per year off each user. Divided by 12 months that's a bit less than $30. In a way, you're paying $20 less than you would by using Google, while keeping your privacy etc. Seems great when you take into account the fact with Google you're the product.
The summarization feature has been an insane time saver for me.
On the cybersecurity front there are so many research articles, conference videos, and news articles just constantly flooding your feeds. There was an article on HN recently about the importance of "Critical Ignoring", to know what to ignore.
This has been a key tool in speeding that process up. Especially conference materials and news articles. They have such clickbait titles, it can be hard to determine what is legit and what is obvious. For news you can get a use the source as a fairly decent gauge on what the articles will be (quality wise). But for conference materials it is so hard. Summarization with the "Key Moments" lets you quickly determine if I should dig in more or not.
The Discuss option is super helpful on huge framework/audit documents to help you figure out is this the standard that requires xyz vs the other one. Once i know i'm in the right doc then i can zero in on what I was looking for.
Presenting Kagi as a tool for use in our larger Principal/Architect team next week.
Will be very interested in Enterprise/Corporate plans once they are a thing.
Another Kagi blog post (the small web one) convinced me to sign up and the limited number of searches for $10 was my main hesitation. I signed up anyways and haven't regretted it at all. It's a bummer Safari doesn't support custom search engines very well, but the Kagi extension works well enough.
This change will make a lot of other people like myself a lot more comfortable with signing up I bet.
Unlimited searches are great to see included by default. A big part of my search engine usage is as a glorified bookmark manager, where I know I want to go to a specific MDN page, but I don't want to open MDN and search for that page specifically. It always felt awkward going all-in on Kagi when I knew that most of my searches were served just as well by an ad-supported search engine.
I still think though that in many countries it's still high.
At least from my friend group, <5$/mo is the price where most would stop "thinking about it" and just subscribe to try the service after a friend recommendation. You would probably retain most users that would otherwise never have tried it in the first place. I rely on search for work daily, and I want to support non-ad-supported business, so I'm biased. If most users don't really reach the original 1000q/mo, then more regular "non-power" users could offset the cost. Or maybe that's already factored in the current pricing.
Either way, I did enjoy kagi quite a bit on the first beta, so I knew exactly what I was in for. But if I would have subscribed as a test with the 100 initial queries I don't think I would have got attached to it. It took me a while to trust the result and compare it with other search engines to get a feeling for the service.
I recall hearing that Google and Bing have a nearly insurmountable lead in terms of raw ability to index the web, and that all other "alternative" search engines are using Google and/or Bing under the hood. Is this the case for Kagi? Or is Kagi actually maintaining and drawing upon their own independent index?
Is there killer feature that Kagi has or is it just a marginal improvement over Google? I’ve tried a few of my last technical Google searches and got practically identical results. So I’m wondering if there’s more. Is there $120/yr worth of more here?
Also, if anyone finds it substantially better, could you give some example queries on which it does better?
Was an early adopter and also love it. Very high quality results. No bullshit Google ads. Extremely easy to use out of the box with no customisation and lots of advanced features.
Any chance of some bonuses for the early adopter people ? Totally get that you want to keep "Ultimate" it's own higher tier thing but maybe there's an in between ?
How many is unlimited? Presumably they don't get unlimited searches for $10 and, inevitably, someone will use more than they planned for. How much more than they expected is considered "fair use" or however they want to term it and why can't I know that before I sign up instead of guess I'm within what they are thinking?
Whatever the cap is, I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you or making you do a captcha for every search. Pretty much all search services have some cap, after which they will put up roadblocks to slow you down
When trying out Kagi (prior to unlimited searches) my monthly Google searches were significantly higher than the cap. While some definitely do get CAPTCHAs, I wasn't. Adjusting this to the new unlimited price and it would still seem to be negative profit for them, hence the question.
While I think your questions are definitely relevant, in practice, you search less than you think.
I consider myself as a heavy search engine user but, based on Kagi stats, I was surprised how much less I actually searched compared to my estimate. My actual range is about 500-800 queries a month when I originally estimated upwards 1500 queries a month.
I tried Kagi and ended up hitting limits. Unlimited sounds nice, especially since I don't need to worry about how I'm "running out of searchers" so to say, but only once I know how much it actually is instead of just assuming "well, most people don't search much".
For $10 their cost for someone constantly typing new searches is significantly negative. It's surprisingly expensive for them to do a search and doing 1 search every 30 seconds for 8 hours is ~3x more than the cap of their $5 tier. I'm not saying that's a reasonable usage case for me I'm just saying the limit on profitability occurs SIGNFICANTLY sooner than "as fast as you can type for a month".
This is timely, I signed up last month for the $10 plan and burned through the limit like halfway through the month without even turning it on at work.
When I'm writing code I tend to search a lot, and I'd resigned myself to not using kagi because I didn't really want to bump up to the $25 plan.
When I hit Advanced search, and then click Podcasts (or any) without a search query, it gives a "tab switch" like behaviour.
Given that behaviour,
When I enter a search term and hit enter
Then as a user, I expect the search term to search based on the category I'd selected.
What I get
Given I've selected podcasts without a search term entered
When I enter a search term and press "Search" button
Then I get sent to the generic search page for that search term, not the expected category I'd selected on the prior page.
> what specific features are in the mysterious Ultimate plan?
Ultimate used to be unlimited searches.
Now that the Professional plan is unlimited, this seems like a quick attempt to provide some value to those with Ultimate. My bet is that many will move to Professional, those who stay will mainly do it for the support, and the mystery is just a cherry on top. I'm guessing extended API and AI features are among the coming features.
I think $5-$10 is a good price point for just the privacy aspect. As far as search, it's about 90% kagi and 10% Google if I don't like the kagi results. Maps could use some work and I'm always jumping back into Google maps.
Keen to try it. I would worry that over time, poor people wouldn’t get access as they do with ad-supported services. Maybe search credit donations could be pooled somehow, so I could do $5 for me, $2.50 for students/emerging economies.
It still seems expensive for just a search engine. You can get a streaming subscription for that and that has actual content on it. You’re just listing other people’s content.
What are you offering me that is worth $10 more than just using DDG?
I‘m using Kagi for a month now and switched over all my devices to Kagi as a default search engine. I tried doing the same with DDG a while ago but it never really stuck, with Kagi I’m happy and was actually sad when I ran out of credits and had to use Google until I increased my quota. For the first time since I started using Google the search interface looked clunky and unfamiliar after getting used to Kagi for a month.
This couldn’t have come at a better time as I was a bit hesitant to add another subscription while still keeping in mind the additional searches I might have to pay on top. Signed up for a year!
This is great I just signed up! Been wanting to bail on free search for a while now, hoping paid search will prioritize users needs above all else. Crossing fingers they can go the distance, scale, and stick around a while.
I am so proud to be one of Kagi customer. Please check out my 3 favorite features of Kagi:
- Small web: a collection of human blogs that you can submit your own. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- Lens: customized search result https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
- Bang: very similar to DuckDuckGo bang.
I looked into Kagi a week or so ago from a different HN link and was turned off by the Apple-focus. I've had bad experiences in the past with early adopting and regretting it because I don't use Apple products. I understand they plan to support non Apple stuff but it's never clear if that support will be first-class and it often isn't. Considering that it's a Chromium wrapper, it seems odd that they took this route.
It's also not clear if there are device/location limits for an account. I use a lot of devices and travel quite a bit.
It sounds like you’re talking about Orion (the browser developed by Kagi) rather than the Kagi search engine, which is what this pricing update is about. The search engine is a normal website that’s not limited to any particular device or browser, and as far as I know has no location or device limits.
That’s just the browser though (Orion) — the main product, the search engine, has no Apple focus. I believe a significant part of why they built the browser is because Safari on iOS doesn’t have good support for third-party search engines. You shouldn’t have any such issue on Android.
The search limits are per account. As long as you’re signed in, you’ll be fine.
Edit: Also, the browser is WebKit, not Chromium. That’s why it’s Apple-only.
I'd love to see a upvote/downvote system per query/result, as another ranking metric. Especially if it can cluster recommendations by "users like me", similar to how Netflix recommendations used to work.
Maybe don't apply it to political searches, lol, but for everyday queries I'd find that really useful.
Does anyone outside the US have a great time with Kagi? I tried it for a few months but found it to be very US focused. Perhaps I just didn't spend enough time shaping my queries.
I don’t see an option to “try before I buy” (without setting up an account) but maybe it’s there? That’d be useful to win over users. Account set up is friction
Although tbh I'm not liking these results. One of the top results for Python Exceptions is "Python exceptions considered an anti-pattern" which is an opinoin boost rather than documentation.
At launch, if I remember correctly, Kagi relied on the Google Search API. The poor economics of that decision were a big part of why it was so expensive. Has that changed?
It seems a little weird that there would be searches where users fallback on a Google search, when Kagi fails... Shouldn't Kagi get those same results?
There's also some double standards at play. On every article on DuckDuckGo you'll have people comment: "It's just Bing". Well, if that's the case, then Kagi is just Google. Basically the two search engines do the same thing, but with different business models, and with different levels of success.
Personally I feel like Google and Bing are on par. Bing has improved a lot, and Google simply hasn't.
Would love some stats in the near future of whether Google et al. are using these lists (blocked, lowered, raised, pinned) to their advantage somehow. Having said that, they have the data themselves, they just choose not to use it because it’s not in their best interests.. https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1
I think you answered it yourself - other search engines know which clicks result in the longest dwell on page (as they run analytics and redirect search result clicks through their own referral page).
They could optimize their results for best results, but they don't want to, as that would reduce ad revenue.
While it sounds very conspiratorial, I don't think many teams in big ad/search companies are being measured by the lack of use of the product. For search, customer satisfaction is likely a first page answer resulting in no more searches on the topic (i.e. less use). For a company hosting ads in search results pages, that's a negative outcome. But it's what users want!
I believe if minds were put to it, and commercial drivers put aside, Google or bing or anyone else could very quickly deal with the scourge of poor results and SEO spam. But when you get revenue from search results page impressions, ad clicks, and impressions on the junk sites in listings, the incentives just don't align with the user.
Really bad timing for me. I just locked in a year of the Ultimate plan - three days ago!
I only did that for the unlimited searches!
I don't feel like I'm a heavy user, but after nearly 4 days of usage, seems like I typically do ~30 searches per day, but hit 60 searches on one of the days.
It's still early days, but I'm enjoying Kagi so far. I think the biggest problem I'm having is a sort of psychological block that when I run a search I expect to see Google.
Hey daveoc64. I work at Kagi. Really cool stuff is coming for Ultimate, and being a early Ultimate user you'll get it before the newer users. If that doesn't work for you (fair enough) and you switch to pro, we'll prorate all your credits. If that also doesn't work, contact support@kagi.com and we'll help.
Edit: also, looks like you have to be in the 'Team' plan for access. But who knows, if there is demand I'm sure they'd open this up, so maybe just ping them.
I seems I am a bit daft for not finding that; thank you.
Anyone knows why the API would be so much more expensive? With Google I can understand because with the API you miss a lot of the tracking, targeting and advertising, but if you don't have any of that, why would it cost so much more than normal searching?
I understand unlimited is off the table for an API, but 1000 for $25 is quite a bit.
I have FOMO-like feeling whenever I use a different search engine.
Specially in programming, when the right article or stack overflow can save you an afternoon, the “I wonder if I would get better results if I was using Google” feeling is hard to shake.
Too many decades, I guess. I’m rooting for something like Kagi, though. I’m glad to pay $10 for such an essencial tool. And I’ll eventually be over that hump if it proves to be as good or better consistently.
For this use-case I think you'll be pleasantly surprised - Kagi seems to be pretty good at prioritizing stack overflow and similar (but not the endless content clones), official documentation pages, and small, niche, focused tech blogs by someone who had the same error and wrote a post on their personal blog about it.
Kagi really is good. I blew through the 300-search plan in like 2 weeks, then upgraded to the $10/1000-search plan. I've been following them on discord. They've been pretty upfront about everything, and they meet their projects. So today I upgraded to the $25/mo Ultimate plan because I want them to succeed. DDG never did it, bing never did it, but I really think Kagi is a runner.
I’m very glad there’s a market for paid premium search engines and based on the comments here Kagi is doing fantastic.
However I experimented last week by running all my searches (work and personal) in DDG (my default) and then also in Kagi. And basically they either both had the best result first, or sometimes second or third. Definitely not a $10/month difference for me.
It's far less profitable than the advertising model. Unfortunately, most tech companies are VC-backed and optimize for profits.
It also introduces adoption friction for users who are used to things being "free" on the internet, which hurts the hypergrowth shareholders want to see.
I was just thinking about purchasing a subscription last month, glad to see the price has dropped, I will definitely be buying it now,, also seems like they allow using PayPal which is a bonus. The results I've gotten on kagi at far superior to Google so I am happy to make the switch
This is great, I had a limited number of queries with my previous plan and I would end end using duckduckgo most of the time out of fear of "wasting" my limited kagi searches.
The mental gymnastic of having to decide if a search is worth using Kagi for, ended up in my not really using Kagi..
This unlimited (and reasonably priced) solves this, thanks!
Bizarrely, many search engines seem to think it would be helpful to truncate the titles of search results. For example, the example search "python exceptions" suggested by Kagi on their homepage results in:
> How to Handle Exceptions in Python: A Detailed Visual...
A search on DuckDuckGo displays the complete title.
This is a minor detail, but I am impressed that the settings page has custom CSS. Getting this simple option feels special after seeing many companies, which had custom CSS, remove its support for the sake of hypothetical average user who cannot be trusted with anything other than GUI.
I don't see myself paying $10/month for search but I could see myself paying even more for a bundle of services that included search. Maybe a bunch of these companies that treat you like a customer instead of a product for advertisers can partner up and do a single login and subscription plan together.
This is great news. I've been paying for a couple months now and I've been happy with the results and the previous limits weren't something I even needed to worry about in the end (I did worry at the start but only because I had no idea how many searches I do to gauge which plan I needed).
Never heard of this before. But if the results are actually better than Google as people say, than it’s worth trying. I’ve literally stopped using Google for a while now (and instead use chatGPT and Youtube) because all those articles were just some SEO-optimized bullshit
I was about to setup a subscription, but haven't found my language in Interface Language settings. Why there is no translation for widely used languages like Chinese, but avaiable for super rare languages like "Luxembourgish"?
I've been a paying subscriber to Kagi for over a year and I'm sad to say it just gets in my way and I often find myself just wishing I was using Google.
I've kept it thus far because I believe in the mission but man... I get why other promising search engines have fallen to Google.
The last time this came up this was my only complaint. Limits create anxiety for me because I’m weird that way. Either I worry it won’t be enough or I feel like I’m leaving money on the table. Unlimited completely changes the feeling of it for me and now I’m on board. Sold.
This was a very good decision. It was a poor use experience to pay $10/month and regularly get notified that I had gone over my search count; it discouraged me from consistently using Kagi. Glad the $10/month level is now unlimited.
Who was it that observed that one of the horrors of the internet as we have built it, is that because we are the product, we live in a world where whatever is free is evermore enshittified,
and only those with means can afford to not be sold.
What's the language support like? I can find what I need in English, but I really struggle to find good search results in Japanese - but if that isn't something they've been paying attention to then they're unlikely to be good at it.
Browsing the site on Tor Browser gave me a Google 403 page until I cycled circuits a few times. Makes perfect sense given the blog is hosted on GCP but it did make me pause initially and consider if that was some sort of joke I'm not getting.
I've actually found I barely use search engines anymore. I go directly to sites. Seems like people have forgotten this. I've heard good things about Kagi but at the end of the day, we have an address bar for a reason.
They offer crypto payments, and you can cycle accounts through throwaway emails.
Vlad has addressed this several times; it’s a planned use case. They offer it because though they don’t keep logs they don’t expect everyone to trust that.
I can’t find the comment but he just addressed it a couple days ago here on HN.
I don't like the idea of tightening search queries to credit card, however they add option to pay by crypto... That is good approach. But still I refuse to pay subscription model for product that I wouldn't use regularly.
I don't, because almost $200 a year (with tax) is quite a bit more than my ad impressions otherwise pay for, none of which transparently goes to the creators.
This finally prompted me to try Kagi - and it seems like I’m going to be paying for it after all. I’ve gotten on okay with DDG until now, but this certainly appears to be a step better again.
Here is Kagi's quick answer [0], where its AI "extracts and summarizes the important content from the search results including links to the source material":
"Kagi supports dark mode functionality to reduce eye strain.[1][2] Users can select between the Royal Blue or Moon Dark default themes in their appearance settings. Additionally, the Orion browser powered by Kagi includes dark mode that can be toggled on websites.[3]"
Yes, even multiple themes. You can choose between detection of the system preference, light and dark mode. The setting is bound to your account, which I like, but I don't search much on my phone outdoors.
I've been a paying customer for more than a year, in my experience DDG is not even in the same league as Kagi. DDG provides a noticeably worse search experience than Google for most queries, whereas Kagi is either just as good or often better than Google.
It sounds hyperbolic, but using Kagi reminds me of back in 98 or 99 when I first discovered Google. I can get results I want every single time without wading through garbage.
Echoing what others have said. When I used DuckDuckGo, I would have to resort to using Google all the time because Google's results were often better. Since switching to Kagi, I never feel the need to use Google anymore.
I've heard about it, signed up the other day, didn't use it. I tried it today on a medical condition that's been hard to get good info on, and while it wasn't the first hit, there was a great reference fairly high up that I didn't find on Google. I'm working on budgeting for yet another subscription as I figure kagi will be my next go-to if AI doesn't outstrip it first. And probably even then(sometimes you have to use the Dead Internet).
Basically all I want is a search engine that does what I tell it to do, and doesn't try to be smarter than me, because it is not. My killer Kagi feature is the forum search. The only way to get real human opinions on things, rather than regurgitated blogspam that's pervasive on Google and even more on DDG and other smaller engines.
Been paying for a long while now, I expect I'll keep paying a lot longer. It's very, very good.
Occasionally, I'm on someone else's computer where I'm not signed in to Kagi, and I try DDG first, but I frequently resort to pulling out my phone and just searching there.
Previously i used DDG and fell back to Startpage/Google constantly. With Kagi, i can't remember the last time i did that. I also get a lot of value out of FastGPT (a labs search thing from Kagi).
Overall, i'm very happy with my starter subscription.
Been paying for Kagi for about a year now. It’s great and worth it. As good as google for search, but with much better tools and basically zero ad spam.
i really wanted to ditch google and gave my best shot to DDG and just couldn't use it, had to go to !g all the time.
been paying for Kagi close to a year and I only do !g when I am proactively seeking to look at SEO spam
- the speed isn't that great (results can take more than 1s to show) : does it become faster once you pay for it ? Or maybe it has to do with the access from europe.
I have just tried it and it is a little disappointing. `mjml2json in browser` returns completely irrelevant results in the third link, that have 0 mentions of mjml or mjml2json.
More interested in the Summarization API. There is no way to control the summary generation though, like, specifying that I am only interested in certain kinds of information.
I love Kagi! Happy customer since they started asking for money! I tried so hard to use ddg but I always found myself just banging to Google. I actually use Kagi results!
I tried Kagi when it was in beta, and I couldn't tell the different between other search indexers like You (you.com) or Searx. I emailed Dimitri telling them about my concerns with a subscription base search index model and they replied, "You are either used by your search engines or you pay to be free" (paraphrasing). However, there's non privacy comprising ways to do ads. I doubt a large number of people will be willing to pay for a search indexer in $current_year. Especially when there's FLOSS alternatives.
I'd guess there are more people willing to pay a little than maintain the FOSS alternatives themselves. I ran my own mailserver for a couple decades, then found myself at a place where I have more pocket change than free time and started paying someone else to manage the hassle for me. That's where I am here, too. It's worth it for me to pay $10 per month to get Kagi's benefits without having to do it myself.
Apparently they believe there are enough people in that boat to make it a worthwhile business plan.
this is welcome news, and i will likely reinstate my subscription.
however, i'd like to point out that in my understanding, most of my $10 will go to google, in kagi's payment for their search service, rather than support kagi or their mission.
I can only comment on german. For general stuff, like articles, blog posts, etc. it performans really well. For local stuff, like finding restaurants, opening hours, etc. it's okay-ish, but switching to google with the bang commands is easy enough to not annoy me. It is the weakest part of the product though.
Thanks. I created a lens that searches PubMed for scientific papers. It’s not bad, but not sure if it’s better than just searching on pubmed or scholar.google.com
Any of the DDG search libraries on GiHub + ChatGPT-turbo-3.5 is cheaper than this, especially if you need to do a lot of searches and then apply a heuristic to narrow them down. Doesn’t seem very competitive.
Do ddg has a public api or are these search wrapper in violation of ddg tos?
Also gpt gets expensive real fast if any of the linked result is long enough, and no search augmented result over the search engine snippet is often not enough to answer the question. And you are not accounting for the cost of where langchain or similar tooling runs.
That said I haven't tested yet fastgpt searches, so quality is still unknown. It is useful however to have a real api with a real tos, a clear pricing model and good enough is great to have in the toolbox, compared to a library that may or may not work for unknown stretches of times.
"We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance."
How are the results outside SV/tech/software development? I worry it'll be like early DuckDuckGo with a hard tilt toward libertarian and conservative content no matter what you search for. I couldn't search DDG back then for anything remotely queer without at least one result telling me I'm going to hell and a menagerie of op-eds from right wing figureheads.
I can't do a long demo like I did with DDG because of the free limits, and $5-10 is a lot of money for me right now. So I ask here.
I love seeing the success of kagi! I’m an early adopter and the search results quality plus the hidden gems plus the ability to customize them is just fantastic!
A example of customization that I’ve been experimenting is lowering a bit the results from stackoverflow to see official documentation first, it’s been working like a charm!
Thanks again for making kagi in spite of all the naysayers!
I respect your desire to downvote me but I respectfullu disagree after signing up and using them.
"Bad HN stuff" is lazy argument. They sell google searches and their value is "we promise". Bad HN stuff is how the HN crowd loves to hate on commercial VPN providers who have the same business model but the Kagi dude speaks and talks like your crowd so you rally around this product.
As if DDG didn't do the same thing for free. ADs were never the problem, the way ads work in search was the problem.
One of the first lessons I learned on the internet is never to trust online services on their word alone and that what you post online (search in this case) is there to stay forever.
You know what made me swtich from indifferent to opposing Kagi? After my trial ended, i kept searching for stuff in my nav bar, historical hits come up and when I select them, boom, Kagi paywall!
That's why my challenge to Kagi is if they ask money for what DDG and like a dozen other competitors offer for free with privacy promises similar to Kagi, then at least offer insurance and put their money where their mouth is if they're going to ask for people's money.
Also, search results after you stop paying shouldn't go back on paywall, you paid already for it!
I commented fully expecting to get downvoted as I do now, but you haven't countered my fairly reasonable assertions.
This is hilarious with all these celebrations from Firefox fans on HN using Kagi paying for search.
Firefox fans need to know that by using Kagi you're hurting Firefox (and Mozilla) as they are completely dependent and need to beg for Google's millions for being the default search engine.
Unlimited Kagi searches at $10 is still unsustainable vs free Google searches. By default, Kagi will either (eventually) raise prices or reduce them to compete in the race to zero on search with Google already at the finish line.
When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Now? Never.
10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.
There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.