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Comment by detourdog | Hacker News Reader

I pay for Kagi.com

I switched from ddg which I did ASAP whenever that was. People seem to forget that Google's heyday at search was during a period where they proudly had no business model beyond better search. The response to what is the business model question I believe was "do no evil".

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I had a question that was difficult to search for about a framework recently. While Kagi didn’t fully get me to the solution in the end either (a human query did), the difference in results was interesting:

Google retrieved content spam and mailing list entries about previous versions of that framework that have been outdated for years. There was no code in the first page of results.

Kagi found commented scripts in a GitHub project interfacing with the framework, which basically did what I wanted to do.

While I understand that SEO is a problem that Kagi does not have yet, I don’t understand that Google doesn’t allow me to simply blacklist Pinterest, Quora and annoying content spam and StackOverflow mirrors. Also I never want my queries to be interpreted for me, by ignoring search words or using synonyms so that my exact query is always a few more clicks away. If you want to appeal to the lowest common human denominator then techies are probably not in that target group anymore. Are Googlers still using Google?

Kagi also seems to be ahead of their time in thinking about search. In a blog post they were talking about personalized AI very early and I only really understood what they meant after encountering ChatGPT.

I use Kagi as well: interestingly, they nailed the localised searches in multi-script languages like Serbian too (which all other alternatives to Google don't do). It definitely matches or surpasses quality of results Google would give you. TBH though, they do have the benefit of not being targeted by SEO fraudsters (just like Linux desktop is mostly virus free because it's not relevant enough for virus authors).

Once you look up who's behind Kagi, language support is no surprise though.

Edit: the only thing I dislike is that logo with "g" dominating and reminding you of Google.

Same here.

I split tested Kagi for every result for a few days. I used an Alfred workflow to open results in both engines at once.

Then I switched to Kagi full time and never looked back. Been using it for a few months now and I’m still super impressed.

Sometimes I have my doubts about the results and open google. In the majority of cases the results are not better.

Also using Kagi - I like the customization how you can boost certain sites results and block or derank others on an individual level.

It does take a little getting used to vs Google, but I'd say 95% of my searches are on Kagi now. Occasionally if I can't find something, I'll use Google as backup, but for most things, Kagi is good enough.

I switched to Kagi recently as an experiment after hearing someone suggest it here and I really dig it a lot actually. I was on DDG previously but the results for most of my software dev queries would always go to the most outrageous/terrible content farms or stack overflow mirror sites. Kagi is a breath of fresh air. Only frustration is that it's harder to integrate into the browser (ie, on Mac/Safari it requires a standalone application installation) but the trade-off is well worth it so far.

I also pay for Kagi and have never looked back--consistently good results. And I also pay for protonmail so as not to use Google.

When will Kagi be bought by Apple?

I also pay for Kagi. Similar to others here, I had switched from Google to DDG, but found myself going !g about 50% of the searches. With Kagi, I almost never use the !g bang.

I've used DDG consistently for a year.

In the beginning I went to Google quite often, but now I'm down to <5%.

Now I use Google only if I want to buy things, or do image search. I look forward to trying Kagi.

Same here none of the other engines I tried stuck because I always had to go back to Google.

I still use Google for Google images

is it objectively better than google?

Yes, I did the same result in one or the other for all my searches before I committed to paying and it was always as good or better than Google. (I even gifted a year's subscription to my friend.)

In terms of "basic" search results, yes, at least marginally. I don't find them to be revolutionary but it comes with many improvements, manual control over upranking and downranking domains, it respects logical query filters such as "AND", "OR", +, -, and quotation marks. It reduces clutter of "Top X products in category" type results by grouping them in their own section of the page.

For the downsides, it requires linking a payment card so it's impossible for them to guarantee privacy (cryptocurrencies could save the day here) and it completely relies on other search engines like Google and Bing for search results which is a questionable long-term strategy in my eyes.

> completely relies on other search engines like Google and Bing for search results

Got a quote on that? I was pretty convinced they (Kagi) did their own indexing, and results are significantly different from both Google/Bing.

Sure, they're completely transparent about it. You can find the proportion of external search results right under the filters, with further information in their FAQ. They integrate their own indexers but I believe bulk of the results come from Google, Bing & others (hence the relatively high per-query cost).

https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

I meant that they were "completely reliant" on these APIs in terms of utility, not that 100% of search results are external. I'd love to be proven wrong on this but my impression is that without Google, Bing, and other APIs Kagi wouldn't be a functional and competitive product.

Thanks! Hopefully with all the (monetary and word of mouth) support they are getting, they can move in the direction of becoming completely independent.

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