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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results.

Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.

Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M

When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.

To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.

> When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time

lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.

That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).

Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.

I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.

Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar.

At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.

Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.

We haven't rolled out our local results yet. It is work in progress, ETA 2 weeks to shipping first version.

By local I meant like when I’m searching for Adidas trainers or garden fence panels it will bring up shops that sell it in UK and a lot of them are local as they have physical shop in my location. With DDG I was getting shops from America even when I had UK setting switched on. For example tool shops like Screwfix or Toolstation never came up in DDG whereas Kagi shows them on first page.

I didnt mean like places to eat near me etc. sorry. Not something I really do to be honest.

A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search.

It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term.

It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.

Kagi does not have local search results (yet).

Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org

And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org

> It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.

If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now.

The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned.

The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.

HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else.

Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular).

Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey)

Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath

From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.

Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.

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