Kagi – Paid Search Engine
kagi.com
kagi.com
It has some nice features, like lenses, URL rewriting, and the ability to bump sites to the top.
I have a lens for programming. It shows only certain sites, like GitHub and Stack Exchange, and I enable it when appropriate.
For URL rewriting, I have Kagi set to rewrite URLs from Twitter and Reddit to my own self-hosted instances of Nitter [0] and Teddit [1], so that when I open a Kagi result that would've gone to twitter.com, it goes to nitter.mydomain.com, which lets me use Twitter without an account.
Lastly, I use the site bumping feature to move Wikipedia results to the top.
One thing I'd like to do, that's pretty specific, is having a site with my own bangs that do specific things like for example: open the url in archive.is and archive.org or open OpenLibrary.org and GoodReads. Similar nice functionality might include stripping of spaces for certain queries.
Does anyone know of a tool like this? Otherwise, it would probably be simple enough to build my own and have a kagi bang that directs to it as needed.
I am a Firefox user too, but Orion feels to hit an interesting spot on mobile in terms of the benefits of Safari's power optimisations (via using webkit), with extensions and similar.
I have lots of custom searches accessed by a keyword, usually two letters, and I can modify the query string any way I want or take some other action with it. My 'lucky' searches use DDG to go straight to the top result on the site(wikipedia, mdn etc) but they also stuff the query into the system wide find pasteboard. If the top result isn't right I can immediately jump to a google search of the site with the search query with a keyboard shortcut.
I used Alfred for a while and then didn't use any similar tool and now have been using raycast for about a year and quite enjoy it. They have a built-in quick links feature that lets you paste whatever to open a search but accessing the current URL could improve it so much!
javascript:location.href = "https://archive.vn/" + location.href
Edit: feature request added at https://kagifeedback.org/d/1178-allow-custom-open-in-options...
E.g., in Firefox, bookmark
and save it with the keyword gg (or whatever)
Now whenever you enter gg searchterm in your location bar, it's the same as searching !g searchterm on DDG.
$10 is also to steep for cost of living in my area. Hopefully something like region-dependent pricing comes in the future (although I feel like that's going to be tough with managing expenses so I understand if that's not going to happen). I do hope this succeeds though.
It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse. Bing and DuckDuckGo are worse than google. I tried to switch to DDG many times, but fell back to google at least 1/3 of the time.
I haven't googled a single thing since switching to Kagi. Easily worth the $10/mo to not have my search history monetized, and to work with a company whose incentives are maximally aligned with giving me the content I am searching for.
Kagi also has nice features like personalized upweighting/downweighting of certain websites.
The Kagi team is also super responsive to feedback. I've submitted a few bug/feature requests that have gotten fixed within a week or two.
It's amazing that a small team can compete with google.
edit: oh man, if i could paid and get API access for my own apps.. that would be killer. Slowly extend it to stuff like IOT or AI integrations that i normally don't want to give cloud providers.. this would be really cool
Assuming it's paid per search, just screen-scrape the thing? There's no reason they'd care what client you use to access it if you're paying for each request.
With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
In fact all three of these have some odd results -
- "steve jobs"'s fifth result is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs at a 2003 conference, but the result is linked to a seemingly random 2606s timestamp and it is right below the Videos section with much more relevant videos - "python exceptions"'s second result is a blog post about Python exceptions being anti-patterns. I've not used Python in a while but that seems very wrong, and a terrible result to show to someone who might be learning Python or looking up how Exceptions work.
On the other hand, having such an obvious mistake on the homepage makes me trust more that they believe in their product enough to give you raw, real results (which may sometimes include stale content such as a parked domain) rather than a manually-crafted "perfect" results page that wouldn't be representative of the real product at all.
When I search Kagi for "best headphones" the first link on the page is to /r/HeadphoneAdvice, which is probably where I'd want to go. There are some not as good results down the page, but I never would have even seen them because the 1st link is what I wanted.
For "python exceptions" the top links are all to the python.org docs about exceptions, which is almost certainly what I wanted with that generic search.
If I search "steve jobs" or really <any famous person or event>, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time, and that is the #1 result. I've gotten increasingly frustrated with google in the last few years that they've gone away from this behavior for lots of searches. Sometimes the wikipedia article isn't even on the first page.
So, for my use cases, Kagi is behaving totally optimally for all these searches.
I subscribe to kagi.com and neeva.com but only use neeva for consumer goods searching:
I signed up for kagi, ran out of the free searches in 2 days, my initial impression was "not better than google" and never looked back. I probably would have tried for a few more days if the trial was longer. Still more likely than not that I would have crawled back to google, but it did seem like not enough time to fully evaluate. For instance, the upweight/downweight feature you mention is intriguing but I didn't really get a chance to see any benefits of it.
I agree partially that they could have a longer trial but on the other hand, $10 without any sort of contract is a low enough barrier to give it a whirl.
As per the comment guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
As a community we want to encourage "curious" discussion, I can't find anything curious about your comment at all.
I can't use anything else then google for more than a day - for me every other search engine returns worse results than google, especially in my native language (polish), but startpage seemed to be best choice if I ever had to switch
It's still !s on DDG and Kagi.
1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network?
2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit?
I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.
Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads?
The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad.
Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked.
(for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability)
A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
I guess it depends on your threat model, but there are also privacy concerns with a search engine you have to make a paid account for.
For a regular user who signs into Google to use Gmail, they'll be searching while signed in anyway - no real loss of privacy, and arguably much gained by not broadcasting anything into the adtech data pools.
For a very privacy conscious user who wants to be anonymous and is already taking steps like using VPNs, there is a loss in privacy due to payment info being attached. (You could argue Google accounts could be pseudo anonymous, but for most users they're anything but - location data, history, emails and search queries make them totally identified).
There are technical solutions to avoid the payment linking issue (cash in envelope, selling gift cards via retail, etc), or through using blind signature schemes to separate payment from usage. The user experience of these options is likely to be far more complex, with people losing access and customer service fiascos with people being unable to prove they signed up before etc.
Which is an option with Brave and DDG, but obviously not Kagi. Yes, obviously, this is only going to be a relatively fringe use-case that depends on the user having generally decent opsec.
No need to argue the abstract; all that matters is the specific. If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.
If Kagi is being honest, typical usage of Kagi is probably more private than typical usage of advertising-supported search engines. But I can more easily verify that using e.g. Brave Search via Tor is private.
True. But even the payment thing could be solved although most users won't care. Mullvad comes to mind: you can send them cash via mail and the payment is associated to a serial number that is simultaneously your login and password.
That's not really the point. It is up to Kagi to prove to their customers that they are trustworthy, not up to the customers to find abuses of trust.
If I -- for example -- use Tor and a private browsing window to access Google search, I have a pretty good expectation of privacy. I don't have to trust Google here; they simply cannot correlate my search with my Google account in this case, at least not 100% reliably (browser fingerprinting, etc.).
But with Kagi, they know that every search I make, regardless of how I make it, is from me (or, at least, from someone using my account), and that account is tied to my real-world identity. Sure, they could implement a more complicated payment method, where I pay a third party, and that third party blind-signs some credentials that Kagi trusts. But they haven't done that, at least as an option, and that bothers me.
When it comes to third parties, the best kind of trust is the trust that you don't have to have. I have to trust that Kagi isn't keeping a record of my search results. I would rather that I just don't have to trust anything, because there's nothing nefarious they can do.
Fair enough. Since that is a provably impossible bar, you’re basically saying nobody should do business with anyone. Which I admire from an ideological purity perspective, but don’t really have time for at this age.
If I'm doing something in private browsing mode, I fall back to DDG. Not only do I feel weird about being signed into something when I'm supposedly doing something "private", either I have to manually sign into Kagi each time I open a private browsing window, or install their extension, neither of which I really want to do.
So I'm torn; I'm not sure if I'll keep paying for the account, or cancel it and go back to DDG.
Then again, I also pay Fastmail for email, which gives them access to all my email. Arguably that's just as bad (if not worse) for my privacy than giving someone my search history. It's not clear to me why I'm ok with that, but uncomfortable when it comes to Kagi. I suppose email is inherently tied to me, whereas search results need not be? I dunno.
Regardless, this is the big issue with paying for something on the internet that you can also get for free. In some ways my search privacy can be "trustably" better with Google (via private browsing + Tor or at least a VPN) than it can ever be with Kagi, which is weird.
One of the main reasons I use Kagi is similar to why I use Firefox & Brave. I want to encourage competitors so that innovation continues to happen.
But a search business where you pay for search is more likely to be privacy-respecting than a search business where a 3rd party (advertiser) is paying for your searches, just because the business model aligns incentives.
2) or HN? :-)
I also just don’t want to see tons of advertisements pretending to be results and figuring out which is which. Google also seems to be particularly susceptible to SEO garbage. Between their own ads pretending to be relevant and SEO garbage pretending to be relevant, I find myself scrolling through pages upon pages of advertisements hoping to find some signal. With Kagi I spend much less time discerning between garbage trying to capture my attention and something about what I’m looking for.
(I’d note here, as a bit of a non sequitur, that if/when something like chatgpt becomes more accurate and can provide references and do information retrieval better, I’ll be happier to use that at an even higher price point than Kagi. I find the ability to ask a question and get an answer even better than searching for documents that contain symbols in my term and personally assessing the contents for clues about an answer to my actual question. ChatGPT reminds me of the moment I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on some webpage someone sent me in 1998 - the tedium of answering questions had reduced dramatically.
That said, I think the semantic understanding required to answer questions in the ChatGPT way will allow for even more nuanced personalization, and I’m afraid even more insidious (1)’s.)
Their current product is worse than few years ago.
I read a lot of wikipedia. Probably ~10 articles per day. Some people watch Netflix, I read wikipedia. If I search for <famous person name> or <historical event> with no additional context, I want the wikipedia article 99% of the time. Sometimes google is fine and it's the top link, but sometimes it's not even on the first page. This regression is pretty frustrating for my (admittedly niche) use-case.
If Kagi didn't exist and my choice was only between 0$ ad-tier google and $5 no-ads google, I would pay the $5. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads there.
Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.
This is a great way to put it. DDG feels worse than Google, which is why I would always use !g. I rarely use Google nowadays.
I've been using DDG happily for years and only fell back to Google at most 5 times during the last two years and I think half of the times it wasn't even useful to me.
Maybe it is the way how I write queries?
Nowadays I find Google's result page just confusing, so I disagree with calling Google better.
I'm also using their Orion browser and finding it quite a pleasure to use, a litt buggy, but good enough for a daily driver.
I think it would work better if they added ads and other forms of revenue so they can lower the price.
We all know how Google turned out, and that's despite themselves admitting early on that an ad-based search engine would have misaligned incentives.
The kagi team are transparent about what it actually costs them (in cash) for searches you make. If they go down the advertising route, they'll just become another Google, as the incentives are not aligned.
First you'll get more ads onto the page to crowd out organic content. Then you'll subtly adjust what users search for, or what you return, to ensure you optimise for your highest paying ads. Then you'll hyper localise to make even more from sponsored listings etc.
If we want an internet where users aren't the product, there needs to be more transparency about what "free" things are actually costing in compute resource and similar. And ultimately a user has to either bring in more money than they cost (not ideal in developing countries where ad impressions and clicks can be worth a lot less), pay for what they use with a margin on top, or the company has to go onto the VC treadmill of promising greater future returns from eyeballs (back to advertising and data brokering again....)
Therefore while it is expensive compared with free, they're also being transparent about their real costs, and what the services that are free elsewhere (with monetisation) are actually having to make from selling ads to you to break even.
``` Your payments to usage balance -$8.50 ```
If I have to pay $18.5/mo, it will definitely bar me from using Kagi
Since the costs in question are per search, I think they were previously considering different pricing options, recognising that getting to ramen profitability is likely better than having more users and losing money every month (they're not venture-backed).
But it depends on what the true cost is. Is it indexing? Or actually searching?
Plus I think that bookmarks, shared search results, and curated searches (for whatever that means) are an implicit version of Page Rank, since of the bazillions of URLs in the world, ones which are bookmarked are by definition more valuable than others and should be refreshed more often and whose in and out links are also themselves probably more valuable. I'd argue the same thing for any URL that got the archive.ph treatment (if those are available) or manually saved archive.org snapshot
However over the past two weeks it seems, blog spam and SEO started creeping into my results. I use the "Lower" and "Block" controls much more today than when I first started, but I wonder if there's a better way to flag something as obviously nefarious or worthless?
The "# of trackers" sidebar panel with the popularity metric help my eyes filter out the nonsense, but could the community's Lower and Block ratings be fed back into the rankings for everyone? Unless someone is actually paying $10 a month to artificially inflate their page rankings by Raising their own spam...
I think the results have been better for me, though in a couple cases a top ranked result was 404'ing, which I've never had on google.
The UI is better imo, and I've occasionally used lenses which has been useful.
I haven't ever used !g in two months. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Google of years past, I fondly remember finding it in 1998 and feeling like I had an absolute superpower not just over people not on the internet, but over people still using the other search engines.
And I also am somewhat of an apologist, when people dump on Google search results getting worse over the years I'm quick to point out that it's a highly adversarial problem and they're the primary target.
But 24 years later, I couldn't be happier switching to Kagi now. Frankly, while I'm quite happy with my current work, it makes me fantasize of working for them.
Like for example: Forums only search, travels blog search (with filtering travel destination etc.), cooking recipes search only, fashion, markets
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756
The Age of PageRank Is Over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 - Nov 2022 (373 comments)
Kagi/Orion status update: First three months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676993 - Sept 2022 (191 comments)
Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments)
Kagi: A Premium Search Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 - Jan 2022 (221 comments)
I know from experience that Brave Search is a lot better than DDG (and way cleaner than Google) and also supports bangs. When I was on DDG, I frequently used !g but on Brave Search, I haven't had such need (except for when I want to search for images)
Among all the search engines I have tried, Brave search has been the crappiest- hands down. Nothing even comes close.
Well, I poked around with Startpage for a day or two. Maybe it was crappier than Brave Search.
DDG, Bing, etc. are miles better than Brave search. Kagi is a lot better than DDG/Bing.
If you search the comments here, you'll see a lot of people share the same opinion as me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782517
I think they wanted to emulate proton maybe? But they don't have a free tier with at least ddg like experience and charge for premium features. Only people with a lot of disposable income who really care about privacy but also trust a company to not associate their info with their search history will use this.
That drove me crazy with Neeva.com, too, and I actually suggested to them that they could offer a URL with a pre-shared key in it that I could use for incognito windows, like https://search.example.com/?login=edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-90... or (arguably superior) https://edf91f14-21d9-40d1-ae96-9086bc65360d.search.example....
They still haven't fixed that :-(
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
In additional Kagi implements the same thing you suggested basically, called a private session token that allows you to be logged in by appending it to the URL if you do not want to use the extension.
Kagi’s results have been great. My biggest complaint is that it’s a weird name, which is really a compliment.
On the flips side, though, getting a "you cannot search anymore until you've paid" message was quite a shock to me. Like - I paid for it to try it out. It worked well, so it wasn't really a "nobody told me there would be a subscription" kind of shock, but more like on that second month I got the "wait, am I actually paying for the access to a search engine?" realization.
Makes you notice how much we are getting conditioned to the "out business for your data" business model.
The search results are noticeably not worse than googles, even for things that depend heavily on location. I really didn’t feel the need to fall back to Google more than once or twice in total. I also feel like their ranking is slightly better in that the first or second result is usually what I’m looking for, not half a page down.
10$ a month is the upper limit of what I am comfortable paying for it, I’d feel much better if it were 5$. But I really, really want Kagi to succeed. They have a great product, if they can’t make paid search work then I fear it’s not going to happen at all. So I pay 10 bucks a month for a great search engine with a great interface where I can be sure that my data isn’t sold of.
Sidenote: I can also highly recommend their Orion browser for Mac. It’s based on safari (so it’s light on resources and very battery friendly), but supports chrome extensions + it has first class support for tree style tabs.
I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly.
Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year.
Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up.
Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.
For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.
Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.
Apple doesn't need to buy everything and in my opinion they're not the saviour.
The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default.
That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trilli...
There's one aspect Kagi is not improving - the "explicit" results. Personally I find it's difficult to justify the universal effort across all the platforms and "monopolies" to minimizing the explicit results for adults.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972
[2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20160204034922/https://www.kagi.c...
It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).
$0.0125 per search seems awfully high. Do they think this cost can be compressed as more users use Kagi thanks to economies of scale?
I wonder if the API calls to external providers could be cached. I am also wondering if they are also using expensive big-tech VMs in the background?
I am feeling costs could be reduced.
Initially I could not even believe, Google offered this kind of paid version to somebody. And I’m still a bit suspicious if they are only doing this to gather insights on how much people are willing to pay for ad-free search.
I love the lenses feature and the search in discussions, so much easier to use than having my curated list of "site:<domain>" to search through on Google.
It's been very worth the US$ 10/month for what's arguably the internet service I use the most: search.
This is how paid versions of free services should be. Time is valuable and I’m easily distracted - one interesting ad/link/snippet can take me to a rabbit hole. With Kagi my feeling is that there’s less of these distractions.
This is also something I dislike on YouTube. I pay to get rid of ads, but still they employ the usual trickery to keep me on the site as long as possible.
If you try "best air purifier" then this is the second result, because surely somebody searching that wants to 3D print and assemble their own air purifier https://github.com/Kels316/DIY-Air-Purifier. And this is the FIRST result: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/watchdog-rejects-mol...
Yeah I think I will stick with Google
And I get proper results for your query, not the ones you mention [0]
Although fastmail is quite a developed thing you can see where kagi is heading the longer they stay in the game.
It's up there in value with Youtube premium for me...I will pay a reasonable price for a life without ads given the option for a service I depend on.
Just me 02 cents.
I don’t think this offer still exists and I vaguely remember that it was always meant as a temporary way to quickly generate some cash.
youChat will get a lot better in the coming months
I think it would be wonderful!
Richard from you.com here.
EDIT: Kagi beats you hard on this EDIT2: More criticism. I feel like I am reading 10 lines at once of your menu instead of results. Move it to right/top, add padding, border or something like this. Also font is like from those cheap websites that spam.
From their FAQ:
> We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.