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Comment by chrisandchris | Hacker News Reader

Similar here. I didn't know Kagi until, as I remember, there was an article here on HN. I thought too why should I pay for search?

Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results - now Pinterest, Stackshare and all those AI-generated content filler sites are gone from my search results. Search results are great and it's just worth it.

The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is location-aware search. For certain keywords (like "gym") it feels like Google better looks for results that are within your area, whereas Kagi needs some more input (like a city/district name).

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Some other stuff works better at Google, like "train from Heathrow to London" gives you the next 4 trains right there in the results. In fact it can give accurate results, link ups, walking estimates between bus routes, where the official transport app or website sucks (like Dublin buses). Oh and shop opening hours, cinema times etc.

Kagi has gotten better at directly providing answers (like 15lbs in kg) but it's still lagging.

I don't know the term for the box that comes up at the top of results and gives you suggestions. I'm going to call it the whatever-box.

The google whatever-box is more frequent than the one at Kagi. Is it better?

The number of times I have googled a question and had weird and probably completely false information inserted (using reddit as a source, no less) is ... well, it's more than I'd like. It's at the point that I try to deliberately ignore the whatever-box at the top of the google search results page.

And if I google for a product, the whatever-box gives me some very useful... price aggregates? ads? reviews? Who knows.

I certainly wouldn't go back to google search just because the whatever-box appears more often.

Fair enough. But when I'm getting a bus and train to visit my parents I will always use the whatever box because it's instantly there with the right info whereas the shitty official website is slow, horrible, demands precise start and end locations or just offers me a PDF of the timetable. Kagi links me to the shitty website.

Those are Google Maps features vertically integrated with Google search. Kagi probably won't ever have this feature (unless if they have Kagi Maps in the future?).

You can set the location for your search, but I find it a bit tedious. You either have to push two buttons (advanced search+change location) or do the search+change location. This is my main gripe with Kagi so far.

edit: I just realized there should be a search bang for this and indeed there is. Adding !countrycode to your query works. Still a bit tedious on phone, but helps on computer.

That's actually something I dislike, I don't want my results to be different based on where I am.

The results that you get in Google also depend on your location

Which is a massive problem. When I travel abroad it becomes unusable as it doesn't give me the usual.

I see you’re in Thailand… all dates are now using the Buddhist calendar. You’re welcome.

Yeah I agree on that one, if I wanted results specific to where I physically am I'd append the city/country name to my search.

Example where this annoys me with Google: if I search for "gdb", the first result is a local burger place named GDB, and not the GNU Debugger

I really love Duck Duck Go's solution: Below the search input is a small toggle, allowing me to toggle whether results are based on my location or now. Most of the time I don't, but every now and then the results improve if I explicitly toggle results for my country on

Edit: I just saw that Kagi supports "regional bangs", e.g. !nl to search results for The Netherlands. This is, for me, almost on par with DDG

Kagi also has the location toggle, it works the same way as DDG

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. If you're looking for something in the area where you live, you kinda need location-based search. Having it something you can toggle makes a lot of sense.

> I can exclude whole domains from search results

Sort of. You can block the domain in the result but not the spammy domain underneath.

If you're getting tons of result with gov.ar (spam1.gov.ar, spam2.gov.ar, spam3.gov.ar) you have to use up your blocklist for each one. You can't block gov.ar.

We can't edit our blocklist directly.

I haven't looked too deep, but kagi does let you regex filter your results[0]. I don't think you can manipulate things to be hidden with this, but it seems trivial. I'm sure you could put in a feature requesr.

0. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html

> The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is location-aware search. For certain keywords (like "gym") it feels like Google better looks for results that are within your area, whereas Kagi needs some more input (like a city/district name).

Actually, you can configure this with Kagi and it works really well, at least on my area.

> Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results

I have an extension that does this for me

You were downvoted unfairly, imo. I love Kagi to pieces but they're still catching up with what these extensions do.

I asked the developer for Google Hit-Hider to add the ability to block a 2ld (gov.br) when confronted with many results from 3ld (crap.gov.br, junk.gov.br, chum.gov.br) - and he did. You can trim the domain right in the action window. JS is one of the best people.

So far i haven’t been able to blacklist pinterest from image results, however — has that been added?

Not as of yesterday sadly.

Not sure, i don't use image search that often and if so, it's fairly technical stuff.

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