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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

Been using Kagi for a few months now and, unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google.

I guess now is where we see if Kagi's model can actually work. Will people pay money for a search engine when all other major players in the space don't transact with users in cash? I definitely hope for their success!

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My experience matches yours. When I was using DDG, it was mostly sufficient. I'd fall back on Google a few times a month.

I haven't yet done that with Kagi.

I just entered my CC details into Kagi (using Orion, natch). I hope more people follow suit. I really want this model to succeed.

Kagi's quite good for general purpose searches, but there's a number of specific queries where it falls down: timezones ("9AM SF in Tokyo") and currency conversions ("100000 JPY in USD") are two big ones for me.

It would be great if Kagi could open source the engine that powers these queries, so people could contribute their own features.

We plan to do exactly that. Our constraint is not the lack of vision but the lack of resources. Opening widgets API to users would be a great thing to scale this effort (provided there are enough users to build them).

My only question — do you censor based on politics or political correctness?

As per their FAQ, they don't seem to.

But as per searching for "rt.com" it seems they do.

Edit: But as soon as I changed the region to 'International' instead of my own region within the EU, it produced the relevant results.

Or offer a simple way to farm queries like this out to google (until a native solution is available).

You can with the !bang syntax like in ddg, example !g for google (then keep the rest of your query)

That currency conversion query works for me. I've used it a few times the past week.

For some reason it is a hit or miss for me. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

The only time I've felt the need to use Google instead of Kagi was earlier today when they were having service disruptions. Apart from that and some searches that take a little longer, Kagi has been indistinguishable from Google as a default search. I'm very impressed.

I've dropped back to Google simply for comparison purposes a few times, and the Kagi results are better virtually every time. The only exception is when you get one of those very convenient quick result thingys that google has for like sports results and stuff.

> unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google.

Same here. I have now been using Kagi for about 6 weeks. While using DDG for many years (at least 9, probably over 10) I built up an automatic response: When the results aren't what I want and it doesn't seem to be a problem with my query, I add !g and expect better results on the other side. A week or two ago, while doing exactly that, I realized that my expectation for better results has disappeared. I'm now slowly learning not to do it at all.

Been using Kagi too. Search results are pretty decent, and sometimes better. Problem is that I need Google almost exclusively for shopping and price comparison. Wonder if there's any other websites that can replicate this (non-US).

> Been using Kagi for a few months now and, unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google.

Yup, the only queries I turn to Google for nowadays are for non-English.

I guess Google is the backend so that makes sense but how about weather, stocks, short translations, directions, etc?

For example weather ("weather <location>") didn't work when I was starting to use Kagi but now it works.

Unsure about stocks/translations/directions, how do you use them with Google?

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