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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

I've paid and used Kagi for about six months. I used DDG for a while, but I found myself putting !g after every query (especially when looking for answers relating to programming). With Kagi I very, very rarely need to use Google.

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.

[0]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[1]: https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit

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I haven't switched due to finding the $10/month subscription too steep at the moment, but I concur that the quality of search results is high. Often higher than Google actually. Sadly, pre-pending !g to general searches on DDG is practically muscle memory by now.

Been using it since the beta and would agree about the search quality.

$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.

Why not just use DDG !g search as your default search?

E.g., in Firefox, bookmark

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!%s

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.

If I understand correctly DDG !g simply redirects you to Google so this is effectively the same as using Google plus a superfluous redirect.

Kagi is great for letting you customize your own bangs (!g, etc).

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.

You can easily do all that with alfred on mac. For example, I have a keyboard shortcut to open the current url in archive.is and the wayback archive for instance. Just a simple applescript to get the current url from chrome and then open up the two websites. Easier to manage than writing a browser extension or some kind of bookmarklet.

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.

Using AppleScript to get the current URL from Chrome is very clever. I don't use Chrome but I'm going to look into how one might do this for Firefox. Thanks for the pointer.

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!

Just so you know, Kagi does offer direct links to a result in archive.org; it’s under the menu (screenshot: https://send.strangecode.com/f/screenshot-2022-12-30-at-18-2... ). It would be fantastic if they let us add custom “Open in…” options; I’ll add that as a feature request!

Edit: feature request added at https://kagifeedback.org/d/1178-allow-custom-open-in-options...

with firefox bookmarks, you can use tags for something similar to your own bangs. For instance, I have `https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=` bookmarked and tagged as `yt`, so I can just type `yt` and then tab, and I'll be able to put in my search query like that.

The team behind kagi are also building a browser (Orion). One of the new features that's been teased could likely be put to use doing something like this... Think natural language input to a browser.

I'm not convinced of the added value of another Chromium clone. I'd rather use Firefox, given its privacy features.

Interestingly, it's not actually a Chromium clone - it's webkit based, but with WebExtension APIs added to give compatibility with (a growing range of) Firefox & Chrome web extensions.

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 tried out Orion, but I wasn't really impressed by it.

Here is a bookmarklet to open current page in archive.is:

javascript:location.href = "https://archive.vn/" + location.href

Twitter dropped the requirement to have an account to view tweets and scroll through profiles at some point in the last couple months

And then more recently it came back without explanation.

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