Hacker News Reader

Comment by archildress | Hacker News Reader

I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."

View on HN

In my experience outside the niche of tech related content Kagi performed significantly worse than Google. Especially for content that was region specific and not just text natch based, like "children clothing stores in Boston"

On the other hand, Google is easy to beat in contexts where it has become unbearably terrible over the last few years.

The other day I pointlessly attempted to craft queries (in Dutch) where "second hand" didn't mean "cars". It hilariously dropped surrounding words and tried to hard sell me a used car.

The engine didn't do a lot of miles, it was only used by an old lady on Saturday to do shopping.

I came in with basically the exact same complaint. A lot of gushing over Kagi in this thread but it is far from perfect. I would argue location aware searches like your example aren’t in the “good enough” territory either. They are just outright bad. Even DuckDuckGo is pretty usable in comparison.

I will say I have otherwise been using it as my daily search driver and as long as it’s not location aware it works great, oftentimes better than Google.

This was my experience as well and was the reason why I ultimately quit Kagi (I was on the $10/mo plan). Google is still tops at searching for "non-tech life stuff", much of which is location-dependent.

Towards I end, I found myself comparing Kagi searches against Google because I didn't believe that the results I was getting from Kagi were the best I could get.

I'll try Kagi again once they figure out location-based searching while upholding privacy.

That's interesting. What are your use cases for location dependent searches? I rarely do them, but normally they'll be something like 'coffee' or 'Officeworks'. Without thinking conciously though, I open Google Maps for these querie (and did before I used Kagi).

Narrator: They won't.

I upgraded my subscription a few weeks ago because I blew past the first tier's limits. Kagi kinda fills the Neeva-sized hole in my heart.

Kagi doesn't need to win, and they know that. Kagi just has to focus on serving a tiny percentage of Google power users in order to be profitable and induce Google search to compete.

I wish Neeva knew that too but ah well. I feel like a lot of people on here share the mindset that unless Google can be demolished, there’s no point in being a competitor…which is, a dumb take IMHO.

Common mentality even outside of tech. Guess those people forgot the days of indie labels or mom and pop shop. Can't really blame them given that being the intent for decsdes.

For Google, it very roughly makes about $25 per year per user in 2019. But it has an estimated 4 billion users. If you can take even 1% of 1% of these users, thats still 400k users. So you're still bringing on $10m a year if you keep the same price.

Now of course Kagi is nowhere near that 400k figure, but also charges more. So you see how it can add up.

And if they stay private they can make a tidy profit without the pressure of "growth tech stock" shadowing their existence. I suspect they have an exit plan to get bought off by google if they grow enough though. Imagine "Google Search Platinum Edition"

I sure hope they don't. Google is big enough, we need alternatives.

Anecdata; I did. Best $10/mo I've spent in a few years.

For search quality, have you tried yandex?

Ten dollars a month!? Ha ha ha, no.

Cheaper than my latte habit. Nothing wrong with paying software devs if you can afford to.

I signed up. Money well-spent.

I have no buyers remourse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com