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Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

Switched to Kagi 2 months ago, can't recommend it enough.

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.

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Kagi is in fact better for me very frequently. I customized it to my liking and it shows better results than Google. Sure, I would be able to find the same content on Google, but that would require using keywords for site or file type.

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.

I've been using kagi as a paid customer since August 2022. My experience is that for programming related tasks it is much faster to find a useful answer/discussion/site. The most compelling experience I've had with it was during a road trip across Europe. Using the country selector allowed me to find succinct search results for signs, shops and regional attractions. The few times I did comparison searches using google.co.* search the results were more confusing than the kagi results.

Just made a programming related search and got useful results instead of the SEO optimized crap I get with Google. Just this, without taking into account privacy, justifies the subscription for me.

Honest questions:

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.

> 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?

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.

1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible.

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.

> It disaligns the incentives.

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.

> What are the downsides to having your search history monetized?

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.

> Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating

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.

This is a good point as well. Ultimately any search engine has user IP address though, modulo VPN and similar technologies.

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.

> modulo VPN and similar technologies

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.

I don’t think the argument is that “paid” is more private than “free” in a general sense, just that Kagi specifically can allow you more privacy than Google because Kati’s business model is direct monetization.

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 you have to pay to use Kagi, that means you can only use it logged into a user profile that's associated with a payment method. Which means you have to trust them not to log your traffic in a way that can be associated back to your account. I would feel a little more comfortable if they had a warrant canary, but I can't seem to find one.

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.

> If you have to pay to use Kagi, that means you can only use it logged into a user profile that's associated with a payment method.

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.

> If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.

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.

> It is up to Kagi to prove to their customers that they are trustworthy

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.

I have a Kagi account, and am pretty happy with the search results. But I don't like that I have to trust them not to keep a record of my search history, tied to my account. I have no reason to believe they are malicious, but I also have nothing -- aside from their word, which is worthless coming from someone I don't personally know -- to give me a reason to trust them.

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.

Monetization of my history just feels gross to me. If it were a smaller company I wouldn't care as much, but Google as about as big as it gets.

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.

This is truth. Monipolies are anti competitive.

Basically none if you use an extension to auto delete your cookies and ad blockers. You have more potential privacy issues by paying for a search engine.

Maybe less anonymity, although you can use anonymous email and credit cards - there are many providers out there.

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.

1) I often search for things I’m curious about but find repulsive at a moral or ethical level. I don’t want the assumption of “searched for = agrees with/motivated by/associated with” indelibly hashed against my identity then sold to anyone and everyone for any purpose. If I lived in areas where thought is a crime, the ability for a company to assemble a complex personality profile is even more concerning as it’s discoverable and could be used to screen people against an ideology. While I don’t worry about that today, I don’t know who holds the guns tomorrow.

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.)

I keep seeing comments like this when Kagi is brought up. One of them motivated me to try kagi about a month ago. I would love to replace google and try out every alternative search engine I encounter. I admit it will be hard to replace. I'm a programmer and searching is basically a sixth sense for me at this point. I'm frequently frustrated with google results but have never found anything less frustrating.

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.

Software engineers - the breed that goes to extremes and compromises a lot just to avoid… paying for software.

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.

I'd be thrilled to pay for such a service if I found it even remotely sticky, and I genuinely wanted it to be. I just found it mediocre. If some of their features' benefits compound over time it seems like it would be better to have a lengthier trial period.

What results does have it to echo in order to not be mediocre for you?

Kagi free plan includes 50 free searches every month, so the trial period is basically infinite.

I can blow through 50 searches in 3-4 days, easy.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. I have the same impression just that my reaction was, "not better than google for real money." It's too much for not enough of a difference as far as I was able to tell.

> I don't know why you are being downvoted.

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.

"It's not worse" is exactly how I feel using Kagi. I REALLY wanted to like DuckDuckGo. But it simply did not work for me most of the times. I have no idea what Kagi does to make it "not worse" but just by being "not worse" and "not google" at the same time it's kind of better.

I have nothing to add except I've also had it for 2 months and fully agree in every point. I wanted DDG to work, but I had to !g so often.

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'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.

For Google from 5 years ago.

Their current product is worse than few years ago.

For the same search quality they have now, and in a world where Kagi exists for $10, no.

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.

Why not use Firefox's search engine keyword to just make it use Wikipedia directly, or duckduckgo with !w ?

I understand your pain completely. I actually wrote a custom extension for myself where instead of using Google search, it'll automatically redirect and use the Wikipedia search.

I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine.

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.

For me, yes, but now I prefer Kagi, so Google would need to compete on price.

I wouldn’t. Ultimately search is a business that is built on trust, and Google has failed it.

Not for the current state of Google. Their results have been dropping in quality for over a decade now (I wrote a blog post about this back then, so it’s been on my mind ever since). They’ve slowly lost the war against SEO and the search features they’ve built are more about keeping you on Google than helping you improve the quality of results.

Ddg sucks big time, but I found brave search not worse than google like 70% of the time, 20% times it is better and 10% it is worse.

I wonder if Kagi gets significantly better results than Brave's? I almost entirely moved to Brave from DDG, and the difference is like night and day, but could Kagi's search really be worth $10/month? I could use some more Brave vs. Kagi comparisons.

Curious too, perhaps you can do one yourself?

> 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'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.

Google would never let you tweak their results. You can use third party addons but they expose your browser activity to an unacceptable degree, and I don't even know if there is a collection of addons that can tweak Google results to match kagi's.

Have you ever tried startpage.com?

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

Startpage used to be Google with personalization off. So the results tended to be "better". (Haven't checked if this is still the case.)

It's still !s on DDG and Kagi.

> It's not that it's better than google (although it is for some types of searches). It's that it's not worse.

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 have to say their own homepage does not inspire confidence - it currently shows three sample search results, and clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result. For comparison DDG shows a bunch of headphone review sites, all of which seems reasonably reputable.

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.

> clicking on the first, "best headphones" has quietheadphones.com, a parked domain, as the fourth result.

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.

Kagi is great for the kind of searches I do -- mainly searching for wikipedia articles, stackoverflow questions, etc. If I ever want to buy a product I don't know much about, I usually spend some time reading the megathread on whatever niche subreddit there is on the topic.

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.

If you're a searching for headphones kind of user, check out neeva.com.

I subscribe to kagi.com and neeva.com but only use neeva for consumer goods searching:

https://neeva.com/search?q=best+headphones&src=mkthome

re: weighting, can you weight sections of sites? Like subreddits?

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

> if i could paid and get API access for my own apps

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.

Kagi actually provides programmatic API access: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-api/overview.html

Turns out this is only for the Team Plan, which seems far worse than the individual plan for individuals.

Well i'm not going to pay and jump hoops like screen scrape. My question was more that if i'm paying, i'd also love first-class API access. Sounds like they give it, sweet!

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