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Comment by greybox | Hacker News Reader

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time.

Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

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I've been using Brave Search for months now, much better than DDG. I had a Kagi invite sitting in my inbox, just signed up and set as default search.

Will give it a spin, but so far I like what I see.

EDIT: I immediately boosted all `github.com` and `reddit.com` results. That's a killer feature!

EDIT 2: better than Brave Search on mobile: there's a search button to enter a new search, and the textbox doesn't move around like Brave or Google do causing you to click on the first suggestion. I bloody hate that. Well done Kagi.

Yeah I've running Kagi recently and in most areas it outshines Google.

Love how I can easily banish garbage seo-only sites from results

I appreciate how it groups results into a more compact section if they're from forums or review sites. The UX give you the ability to scan for relevant links quicker

e.g. Searching for a generic "best wireless headphones" looks like this https://i.ibb.co/GPyb6Zp/kagi-exmple.png

I really like what I've read about Kagi, and I'll likely end-up paying for it too, but I _hate_ the metered fee.

I've never run a search engine, but I don't imagine that offering "Unlimited" searches where "unlimited" means "do not abuse" would meaningfully hurt their margins. As a benefit, you avoid losing customers that then need to ask "Do I make more than 5*80 searches a month? How many is that a day? What do I if I go over?". It also just feels like I'm being nickle-and-dimed.

I love that they're charging for the service, it makes me feel like they're building something sustainable. I just don't love the fee structure.

They're not going to do a metered plan. From an email sent today:

> Kagi will come as a free version with limited use; and an unlimited use, paid option at $10 a month, both versions having great search results with less spam and completely ad-free, tracking free, and with none of your search data being retained

Sorry for the confusion, we have not updated the FAQ yet. We are going to try with a flat fee ($10/mo) model.

(kagi founder here)

Awesome! I was just going off of their FAQ

https://kagi.com/faq#cost

I sent the founder an email asking for clarification, he replied with "$10/mo is what we decided to use. FAQ needs an update."

$10/m for a household, if this is as good as people are saying, would be a no-brainer subscription for me.

Not paying $10/m per person in my household, though. That'd be way too high.

[EDIT] Though I guess with no retained search history, we could just share one account anyway, so it doesn't matter. I was thinking about keeping those separate. Unless there are per-user settings that we might not all want to share.

I like Kagi too, and I will be a subscriber. It actually kind of reminds me of early google. Just the feels of it.

Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.

Yes i too would like to see a side by side comparison why it's better than just dude trust me..

I've been using it during the beta and plan on paying for it once they start charging. Previously I had tried switching to DuckDuckGo, but found myself using !g half the time because I knew the DDG results would be garbage compared to the Google results.

I haven't found Kagi's results to be significantly better than Google's results, but unlike DDG they're not hugely worse than Google. It's all the extra stuff that makes me want to use Kagi instead of Google:

* Ability to banish sites from results forever. E.g. I never want to see the Concordia Lutheran High School's website when I search for things in the Common Lisp HyperSpec with clhs.

* Ability to weight sites higher. E.g. there are two mirrors of the Common Lisp HyperSpec that appear in results, one at http://clhs.lisp.se and one at http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/. The lisp.se mirror is hilariously slow for me (5-10 seconds to load) while the lispworks one is instant. Google always ranks lisp.se first which tricks me into clicking it and wasting my time. Kagi lets me weight that site lower so the lispworks site comes first. Banishing lisp.se would also work, but just upweighting it means I can still find it if the other mirror ever goes down or something.

* I reported a minor bug to Kagi and they fixed it within a few days. I doubt that would happen with Google.

* Supports DDG-style bang queries, which I use occasionally.

* No goddamn ads/tracking (I use uBlock Origin, but it's the principle of the thing). I've almost entirely de-Googled my life at this point (Youtube is the only holdout for me).

So it's not that it gives better results than Google, it's that the results aren't any worse and the extra quality-of-life features are really nice.

Basically everything you wrote above is what I'd say - except I haven't submitted a bug report or feedback to Kagi...

Basically, when I used DDG, I found myself frequently using !g to search Google instead. For Kagi, I haven't really found myself doing that anywhere near as often.

So yeah, you have to fill out a survey (took a couple of minutes and I got an invite the same/next day), so it's not the easiest to recommend right now. Two weeks and they go free+premium according to an email today.

I think it's just that I, like a lot of HN, have been getting super disillusioned with Google lately - and most importantly the preponderance of obviously machine-generated zero-value spam pages for everything I search for - so I was desperately trying to find something better. DDG constantly disappointed for my searching. Kagi doesn't do that. So I'm happy. $10/month happy? I'm not sure.

Generally, there's a growing group of people who are feeling about Google the way a lot of us felt about Facebook 10+ years ago - it's time to stop relying on it and maybe cut it out entirely (and yes, I know there are plenty of people who felt this way about Google for years already). So I pay for Fastmail now. I guess I'll likely be paying for Kagi now. Quality is getting expensive, but at least I'm paying with my money rather than my data.

>* Ability to banish sites from results forever.

And for this I will HAPPILY pay $10 a month. It's the most freaking annoying thing about Google. Obvious link farm sites with zero way to remove them.

I've been relatively happy with Kagi so far. Happy to post some search results if you want to propose some queries to compare against Google.

Not only requires a login, but also Joe Regular cannot use it - beta means here closed invite-only, so it's just an internal tool for some group of people. So any news about it should be taken with a grain of salt.

AFAIK it's an open invite system. I put my email, the next day I received an invite.

They're about to move into public beta. But you'll still have to log in because they want you to pay. I think its worth it, and its more honest.

I know you are getting downvoted here ... but there are multiple mentions of Kagi in the comments, so it struck me too.

they didn't provide a link that got you login-walled, they mentioned a product that's working for them. Don't see why that's an issue

Why?

There’s no way to test without giving your info away and taking a long survey from what I remember. It’s kind of like posting Facebook links I suppose.

Our goal at this stage (invite only beta) was not to get users who just want to try it out, but who actualy wanted to contribute by reporting bugs and suggestions as beta-testers. This is why we have a survey form, as completing it signals wilingness to invest time in the product. Soon (in two weeks) we will move to public beta.

Even then we won't have search without an account, among other things because bots would probably kill us.

(kagi founder here)

Could you show some examples of search results?

I have been trying Kagi for a few months and have found it better than Google in most cases, though not a silver bullet.

Here are the queries from the original article in Kagi:

    how to fix a flat tire