I'm really glad something can finally, truly replace Google search and be just as good or better (neither Bing nor DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them).
If we're talking physical products, I'd probably go with the Apple Magsafe wallet. It's a little thing but I love not having a separate wallet to keep track of every day.
If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old.
Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today.
No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.
I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts.
Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use.
If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.
To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do.
Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure.
To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...
> We are a ten people bootstrapped team.
We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.
The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin.
You like it. To each his own.
Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.
I never knew pointing out excuses was a 'dick move' when we are doing the same theoretically (mining web data). In my defense, you could take your opinion elsewhere.
Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150.
Something like this would be much better as a result: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone...
Remember we are comparing this to Google where the entire first page for this query is either ads or results full of ads and affiliate links.
Please don't compare yourself to Google. Most people on HN are well aware that Google search has become a terrible baseline. DDG, appending Reddit to query etc., are workarounds discussed a lot of times on the forum.
I have no beef against Kagi. I wish you guys succeed, but please have a better product argument. At this point, I actually find equally good suggestion on 'headphones' from both DDG & Ecosia. If Kagi needs to win over, it should be doing better vis-a-vis the upcoming search engines, not Google which has been SEO gamed over & over.
We may differ perhaps on what 'winning' means. For us having thousands of people pay for Kagi despite such strong and free competition is already winning. We do not have ambition for global domination, but are creating a search experience for people that want an alternative that has their best interest in mind. And when we have a product glitch, it is not like we are delibarately not achieving even higher quality - we are constrained by our resources.
Also have in mind that we launched our public beta just 7 months ago, give us a bit of time (Google has been around for 25 years, DDG for 15 years, Ecosia for 14 years) and we may reach your standards of quality. Fact that generally speaking Kagi already brought more innovation to search experience in such short period time than these legacy search engines did in decades (by legacy I mostly mean using legacy business model - ads) means that we are serious about it. Just need a bit of time.
This happens on Google too, all of the time. I think this is a reddit issue, with how they have their meta configured...
In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.
I just use ublacklist [1] for that.
I like Kagi by the way, but my problem with it is:
1. major: I value privacy. I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.)
2. minor: The subscription cost is a little too high for my usage volume.
You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments (like PrivacyHQ) if remaining anonymous is imperative to you.
Kagi is 100% privacy respecting though, with the data you choose to trust us with (we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data).
As such, it can still be used to link a person to their Kagi account which means it's not private or anonymous in any meaningful sense. Additionally the service is only available to US citizens. I would strongly urge Kagi to consider adding cryptocurrency payments - ideally Monero.
This is coming from a paying Kagi customer. I like to put my money where my mouth is but I'm not a fan of the current payment options. I understand that Kagi is a small company in early stages, but I would expect cryptocurrency payments to be available 12 months from now.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-21/crypto-tr...
Why not Monero, the clearly top choice for anonymous payments?
Well, that would be an improvement, but all searches will still be linked to 1 account, whereas i can search on other search engines without this privacy issue.
On top of that, privacy laws in the US are... quite bad (even compared to Europe.)
> "we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data"
I appreciate your effort, i might reconsider at some point. Thank you for your reply!
We do not log searches or associate them with an account (check our privacy policy). This is because this would only be a liability for us, with no benefit. We are in the business of selling search results, not user data.
They have a lot of nice features pulled from Google and DDG:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html
I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.
I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.
But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google.
I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.
Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.
When DDG fails, I just re-run the search with "!g" and it goes straight to google and I'm good.
I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.
For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.