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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Mullvad customer and will check this out. I can already see that this is not so convenient for when you're on a device or network where your Mullvad connection is not active. For example, I'm typing this from my work laptop on the corporate network as we speak. :P

On a related note, I am also a happy Kagi customer. It's a paid, privacy-focused search engine that gives you a "magic" session link to allow easily searching from multiple devices. Very happy with the search there. Haven't used Google more than a handful of times for several months!

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Same, love Kagi. I think the biggest surprise for me was that it is getting frequent improvements.

I'm so used to Subscriptions being just a drain. You "buy" the product, and then you pay just to keep using it. Which can feel, emotionally, a bit unappetizing because i'd rather just purchase it fully. The subscription just feels like a money sink with no added value.

Conversely i've not had that opinion with Kagi. Not only am i happy with the product, but the frequent[1] improvements[2] make me feel like i'm buying something newer and better each month.

Developments on FastGPT, increasing what i get for my dollar, integration of more features in general. I frankly assume i just joined at a good time, because this pace can't keep up.. right lol? Regardless my Kagi subscription has felt like i'm getting more value each month. From other companies i'd feel lucky to get these advancements, and if i did i'd expect it to cost me more. "5 new features? Welp, i guess i get to buy a Pro subscription tier to access it" or w/e, is what i'd expect.

Really can't praise Kagi enough.

[1]: within the last couple months, at least, as i'm new to the product and have only been subscribed for 2 months.

[2]: You can see some here: https://blog.kagi.com/blog

Image search was already good and hugely improved - and the native reverse image search is also pretty cool!

I really hope they improve their pricing/usage plan. I wasn't that impressed with the results when I first tried Kagi out, but was planning on giving it some more chances down the line. Sometimes it takes a few tries before a new tool really sticks for me.

Unfortunately they ended that sort of trial usage with the new payment plans. I'm already wary of starting any new saas payments, and one where I need to worry about how many searches I'm doing per month is a non-starter.

It's definitely worth a month, just to see what your search baseline is at. I was worried i'd be on an expensive tier but i am far lower on average than i thought. And they increased the quota by 50% recently.

I'm really surprised how tech savy HN users easily tight their search queries to credit card. Isn't that worry you in terms of privacy?

I never heard of Kagi before. I'm always looking for ways to increase my privacy, so I study the site a little bit and I find this:

"Next, your request will find its way to our servers hosted on Google Cloud platform, where our main application is running [...]"

I stopped there. I'm not going to subscribe. But I appreciate that at least they were honest.

Honest question, but is there something specific you're concerned about? Do you expect Google spies on Containers running on their servers, such as decoding RAM or decoding Network Traffic (that isn't ssl encrypted, at least)?

I get the paranoia, but honestly i'm more paranoid of Kagi themselves than i am of processes running on AWS or GCP.

The percentage of the internet you'd be unable to use if you couldn't use any cloud provider for fears of 5 Eyes-like monitoring is kinda intense for me. So i'm not sure where realistic and excessive paranoia meet with respect to AWS or GCP infra.

Thoughts?

It's not very hard to spy inside a container, or even a bare-metal server if you have hardware access and the network is yours, but why would they even do that when there are a lot of very easy methods of profiling users available to them?

I didn't mention but they also use search results from google.

1) A direct contract with Kagi: Pay less for our services in exchange for user's data ("anonymized"). And google has a lot of services that Kagi may benefit greatly: servers, low latency to google search results, "personalized" google search results without ads and the various sheganigans google uses to promote websites, up to the point where all searches actually comes directly from google.

2) No contract, just get my IP and the search string the Kagi server asks of google at the same time. I don't think there are enough simultaneous searches on Kagi to actually prevent IP-to-search-string pairing. Then do the google-ad-to-IP match on the target sites that I visit.

> but why would they even do that when there are a lot of very easy methods of profiling users available to them?

That's fair, but the GCP was mostly what i was relying to.

Fundamentally do you dislike Kagi's offering more than Mulvad (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402162) on the privacy front? Clearly the two companies have different goals, so i'm not trying to equate them. Just curious.

Also what search engine _do_ you use then? I feel like all of them would be disqualified?

> I feel like all of them would be disqualified?

Yes, they are. Until I find a better one, I use DDG.

I might try Mulvad next. I didn't use VPN before, except to access my own LAN.

Kagi is awesome - also a paying customer on their now grandfathered in tier - and it only gets better with time! The image search function is hugely improved and the main core search is blowing away Google for most uses.

Also love that they added reverse image search now

Not currently a Mullvad customer ( I was in the past ) but this looks definitely like a good thing!

Both a customer (and now investor!) if Kagi’s and can’t say enough nice things about the product. It’s refreshing to have a search engine that will give you relevant results rather than shoveling ads down your throat.

The magic session link was such a great idea. I could easily add a session to my work computer.

May I ask why specifically Kagi? What's special about it compared to other search engines, aside from being privacy friendly? Like, you could say Searx is also nice because of that. Or Duckduckgo. Or Brave Search.

What sets Kagi apart, and especially, what makes it different?

After years of trying Duckduckgo and then always going back to Google, it was this 2022 interview with the Kagi founder https://dkb.blog/p/kagi-interview that I read a few months ago that got me to try Kagi. I was shocked that they thought people would pay $10/month for a search engine. Then I thought, "if Google lets us search for free, how much must it be worth for them?" Over the last few years I've started trying to pay for things that I use, and financially supporting developers working on products I like. That's when I decided to try Kagi.

And yes, I have used Google only a dozen or so times in the last few months since I went all-in on Kagi on all my devices. The search results are very good.

The thing that has held me back from Kagi (I've had the pricing tab open for the past month, just staring at it), is the usage limits. I have no idea how many searches I make in a month. I don't know if I'm looking at a $5/month situation or a $20/month situation, and my inability to predict that makes it hard for me to commit. From a single device, my firefox history says that in May I had 750 different variants of duckduckgo.com/?q=X. And thats not counting my phone, or work device. Will the $10/1000 queries be enough for me? (This isn't necessarily for you to answer, but just restating my anxiety around the product.)

I too love to pay for things, and thus use a product, rather than be the product.

If you use Google, and you have not disabled it, you can visit your search history to get an idea.

Looking at my account usage summary, I've been averaging about 550 searches a month on Kagi. I'm grandfathered into the "Early Adopter Professional" plan so I get 1500 searches for $10, though clearly I need to try harder. ;)

I just got the cheapest plan, and configured my devices to use Kagi when I prepend a search by "k ".

This way I use whatever free search engine for most searches (like when you type "steam" because you don't remember the url), and Kagi when I actually want more than the simplest first result.

Interesting. I do that a lot, which is partially why I'm concerned about count.

However, if I'm paying for Kagi, it would be because I want to cut off using other search engines. Either I trust DDG and it's privacy and don't think theyre selling my data, and I continue using it, or I don't trust them quite enough (not accusing them of anything, I just don't know where they get their money from, and I know its not me paying them, so naturally just a bit worried), and I pay for Kagi instead, then I trust Kagi with all my data because I'm paying them to not share it. And in that scenario I've deemed DDG "not private enough", which would mean I dont want to keep giving them more info about me.

So in the end, I either keep not using it, or I want to make sure I have enough to cover everything. Which is probably just my own issue.

I recommend starting with a $10/mo plan and treating as if it was unlimited. This is where Kagi is heading anyways. To control cost, Kagi allows you to set soft limit and hard limit so the cost can never spiral out of control.

Hey Vlad, I share the same sentiment as the person you replied to - I keep checking my Billings page wondering if the 1000 searches are going to be enough, but decided to just give it a month with the hard limit set to $25 which would be the point at which I should have just paid for unlimited and see how I do. I love what Kagi is standing for and, while I really understand that the business has to be kept afloat, $25 feels like a lot to get better search results.

What did you mean with that that is where Kagi is headed anyways? Will you offer the unlimited package for a price which is a bit lighter on the wallet?

Correct, unlimited for $10/mo is what we are trying to get to.

I too worried that my cost would balloon but I find that I actually search less as the results, for me, are better quality.

Not the person you are replying to but DDG is just as bad as Google at returning and prioritizing blogspam results. “Recipe for oatmilk” returns a slew of 2500 word articles that start with “What is Oatmilk” and “How is Oatmilk Different from Milk”. I just want to know the ratios. A search engine they can do that for me would be great.

Another example “XYZ-brand motorcycle boots after crash”. I want to know how well they survive an actual crash and the brand is popular enough that I bet there are plenty of images out there. Yet all I get is a bunch of promo images of brand new boots.

Give me a search engine that’ll actually return results I want!

I've been using DDG as my exclusive search engine for longer than I can remember now, possibly since they were first mentioned on HN, I can't remember though. Unfortunately, it was much better than it is today. Not only can I no longer refine results in a meaningful way by negative searches, but the results themselves are also worse even in cases where that does not come into play...

Not op but also a very happy kagi customer. This is usually hard to answer because search results is very dependent on what is searched. For me the quality of results instead of a bunch “top 10 libraries to use with react in 2023” kind of results is what sets it apart for me. I can prioritize what kind of results or sites I want stuff from, I’ve been surprised multiple times by finding a random blog post from somebody working with some tool/library that I’ve search for.

I’d suggest to give it a try, it took less than then 50 search a month limit for me to jump onboard

My apologies if I missed your point, but don't other free search tools do that?

Or maybe it is because I haven't used high-quality search, and I am blinded by it's true greatness.

What about privacy? Why would I tight my search queries to credit card?

They don't keep search histories, supposedly.

Is there any proof?

Proof would be hard to produce, but instead you can try to answer the question what would be the motivation?

Why any other company track and sell users data?

Kagi is excellent and I’m happy to be a paying customer.

Are the results really that much better? I use DDG and paying $10/mo for a search engine seems like a tall order, especially when I don't know if Kagi can be that much less broken than Google.

I did not do an extensive comparison to DDG but I would say it is definitely worth it. Been paying for awhile now and it blows away Google. And they are constantly adding new features and improving old ones (and finding new ways to improve their back end costs as well which makes it more sustainable).

I use search engines a TON though (especially for work) so 10$ a month is absolutely worth it for me. I am currently trying to convince my boss to buy it for our whole IT team

That's interesting, I'll try it for a month, thank you!

For technical info like programming language references, I get much better results in Kagi after I spent a few minutes setting my blocks and pins. I just searched "run a test suite in go" in Google, DDG and Kagi, and blogspam results were higher in Google and DDG while GoDoc and Stack Overflow was higher for me in Kagi. Many of the DDG results were about running a single test out of a suite, rather than running a suite.

Interesting, thanks, I'll try it for a month!

IMHO yes. With DDG I always felt I needed to make it work. With Kagi I forget I even use something not-Google

Hm, I don't want to forget I'm using something not-Google, because that would mean it's about as good as Google, which is terrible.

I want a search engine that's actually good.

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