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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

Kagi is ok but I don't understand the level of gushing over it that I see here. I got the 100 query free trial a few months ago and haven't used it up yet. So I'm not willing to buy a monthly subscription for something I'd rarely (won't say never) use. A flat $20 for 500 queries would be fine and might last me a year or so.

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Just a couple of weeks ago, and this is a perfect moment to share, a colleague told me how he wanted to reschedule a flight and in a hurry clicked on one of the first Google provided links (ads) and got redirected to a scam site which was identical to the one his airline uses. In the end, he had to suspend his credit card and lost money. He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him. But you are right, ppl tend to justify their choices more, especially when they paid for them ;) Still, no harm knowing there is a good alternative out there I guess.

> He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him.

This is a nonsense comparison as the Kagi fee is guaranteed while the loss from a scam is not.

right, call it a yearly anti scam insurance :D

Google, Instagram and Facebook are so infested with scam ads that protecting yourself against those platforms is necessary. How is it possible that there is no lawsuit against all the rampant scam ads on these platforms? Alphabet's and Meta's main source of income in 2023 is blatant crimes.

For me it is a combination of the search results being of equal or slightly better quality combined with all the nice little touches (Lens, auto redirect, etc). I am trying to banish ads in general and Google specifically from my life so I am also a little biased.

Last 2 months I used around 500 searches each month. So, the unlimited pricing is good for me.

Yeah, my trial was also sitting with unused searches because I treated it as a scarce resource and couldn't search like I would.

Because of GPT4 and Claude 2 chat models available in Ultimate plan, I thought I'd gonna try it for a month.

No problems using it for daily search/google/bing replacement. Just few times I tried fallback to google and the results where either about the same or once the google gave trash.

Yeah, but I bought it for AI features more than the search.

Do you still use other search engines?

You should start to do your everyday searches on both and compare the results. For me, this showed that kagi can save me time, I'm rarely scrolling to find good results where on DDG or Google I'd rephrase and search again often.

I don't like Kagi for other things, but that's not the topic here.

I mostly use DDG. Kagi results are comparable. When DDG fails I sometimes resort to Google. I can't use Kagi routinely with just 100 queries but I try it sometimes. It is subject to the same spurious results as the others afaict. And I haven't yet seen it find anything that the others missed.

The thing with Kagi is, you can demote or remove the domains which you don't want to see, making it more yours than Google.

Also, not having ads and results manipulated for money is a real, underrated gem.

I tried Kagi for a day, and signed up right away, and I don't care that I pay for it. It works wonderfully.

If you think Kagi is comparable to DDG maybe it doesn't make sense. For me DDG is terrible, while Kagi is comparable to Google.

It does seem unremarkable sometimes, but every now and again I'll accidentally search for something in a private browser session (which defaults to google) and I'll immediately think, "these results are terrible, what happened?" and then i'll notice i'm not on kagi. That experience happening about a dozen times really sealed the deal for me.

I'm also not sure I quite get the love. I got the free trial, and I've set it as my browser's default search engine for now to get used to using it. The problem for me is that it's at best equivalent to, and at worst a lot poorer than the same search in Google. Which is a shame, because I've been finding Google less and less useful recently.

Maybe I need to fiddle around with the settings more, get some better filters in there. But part of the advantage of Google is not needing to fiddle - it knows that I probably want programming results if I search for "rust" and things like that. I'll stick Kagi out a bit longer, because I really like the idea of it, but I've been fairly disappointed so far.

EDIT: one specific criticism is that I speak English but live in Germany, so I typically want English-language results except around German-specific things where I want local results more. Setting my location to Germany results in a lot of German results for unrelated searches (e.g. documentation for some library, or information about an actor), but setting it to "international" makes it harder to find the local results I'm often looking for (e.g. libraries in my local area). Google isn't great at this either, but it gets it right a lot more often.

Why not just use bangs to change from the more common to less common region on a search by search basis?

Or just use the programming (or other) lens for documentation

Thanks for mentioning bangs! I'm having the same issue as in the parent comment and didn't realize you could use bangs to set the location.

Still not an ideal solution for me, because it requires me to plan ahead when typing the query (or rewriting it later, which is slower).

Bangs can go anywhere in the search term, and if you press "!" on the search results page it focuses the search bar and types it there.

That could work, but it's not perfect. I think part of it is that it's all very contextual - for example, if there is an English language version of the exact same content, then I almost always want the English language version, even if I'm searching within Germany, plus there's a bunch of exceptions where e.g. I always want German Amazon (because that's where my account lives).

Google mostly gets this right, at least in my experience, although it's become a lot worse recently. Having to configure it with bangs might work, I'll have another go at that in the future.

I set mine as international, and when I want a local search I add the bang for my country (that's !de for Germany).

> it knows that I probably want programming results if I search for "rust" and things like that.

If you search for web stuff on Google, how often do you get MDN as the first result?

I don't know about the first result, but I think I get it above the fold at least 70% of the time, which works well enough for me.

You are clearly in a different usage bracked to me.

I had the opposite problem, I used up my 1000 searches within a month and didn't want to pay more than 10$.

They since introduced unlimited searches for 10$ so I'm pretty happy.

I’m in the same boat, I think I actually used the 100 searches up in two weeks or so. I remember wanting to search something on the couch and then being told I’m out of credits, throwing money at them was a no-brainer at that point. I think if OOP hasn’t used their 100 searches up in a few months, maybe they just don’t really need a search engine that badly? If you aren’t in the market of moderate to heavy search engine use, then paying any amount of money for one would also not sit right with me.

Be careful with the "100 free searches" limit, it's not always really 100.

If you click the "More" button at the bottom of the search results page it reduces the number of free searches left.

In hindsight, it probably means they're re-running the search again with different parameters, thus "using" another free search.

However it's not at all obvious to the user that asking to display more results from an existing list would do this. :(

Frankly, it seems a bit dishonest to me. Which is unfortunate, as I otherwise liked Kagi.

This is my only “complaint”, having used it as a paid service and now just on the free trial after cutting subscriptions en masse. I was doing some research and had maybe five tabs open to different searches, had a browser update, then after the reload I had five less searches available. In your example they are actually running a new query, mine I wish the result could simply be cached since I’m a logged in user etc. I was disappointed but not sure what they should really do– flash a warning to all new users? Perhaps just when they bring a similar query, “hey we noticed you’re making another search, this time it slides but normally it costs another search”? Like others in this thread I’m hoping they can drive down the cost of unlimited searches rather than spend time creating special cases for us plebs.

In my case, if they'd just made the "More" button say something like "More... (search again and display new results)" it would have been clear what would happen.

That's very much how new/intro users should be treated, if not all users.

And I would have subscribed. Alas, they didn't, and I just can't mentally clear the hurdle of paying money to a place which I feel deceived me. So, I didn't become a subscriber. :/

Heya, I work at Kagi. This sounds like a great idea, thanks for the input! We'll put it on the requested features list (which our users contribute to).

Cool. Any chance you could let me know if it's implemented? I'll likely subscribe at that point. :)

When we’re at it, could you add a (toggleable) remaining search count in the header so that it’s immediately visible when some action spends a search?

I agree they should make you aware of that more directly when using the feature/before registering but to be fair it's in their FAQ.

Heh. Didn't even know they had an FAQ. :(

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