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Comment by terhechte | Hacker News Reader

I switched to the Kagi paid search 2 months ago and I'm very happy with it. Of course, Google is free, but "search" is a product that is critical to my job and I use it countless times per day. As such it felt reasonable to me to pay for a better search experience. That's in line with me spending extra for my computer, monitor, keyboard, etc. Because they're my tools of trade and I use them 8+ hours a day. I can recommend giving Kagi a try if you're in a similar position as me.

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This might come off weird but I can't help but comment on how markety/"I need to justify myself" your comment looked to me at first.

You started off very normal "I switched ... and i'm very happy with it." But then there's almost an entire paragraph of "yes it makes sense, yes I made the right decision, it's just like spending on other things, etc..", up until the very end where you come back to "give it a try if you are in a similar position".

Not trying to offend or anything and happy that it works out well for you! Just struck me weird when I first read it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification

When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.

I also pay for Kagi. I'm not sure it is justified - it's not that cheap. They're pretty open about their costs though, and I think that demonstrates how much advertising is paying for other services. So I'm happy to pay for now just because I really dislike adverts.

I agree with this. The only real advantage to Kagi over just using Google + Adblock for me is an easy way to just completely block certain sites from ever appearing in searches. It's probably not worth $10 a month but I pay for it because SEO spam sites bother me on a personal level.

I don't know how true this is, but I really like the concept of a customer-driven search engine versus an ad-driven one. The incentives are better aligned, and it frees Kagi up to really try to kick ass at search instead of kicking ass at ad revenue. I'm enjoying the features they've been adding, and an looking forward to more.

Besides, what else was I going to do with that YouTube Premium money? ;)

> luxury item/service

The price for Kagi is not really in the class of "luxury" at $10 per month. It's peanuts really. In exchange you have the best search engine in the world.

If you could upgrade an economy flight ticket to first class for $10, that would be a bargain. If you could buy the best bottle of wine in the world for just $10 more than your average bottle of wine, that would be a bargain. Kagi is the best search engine in the world, that's why I pay for it.

Luxury is a loaded term, I probably should have used something less vague. The examples you gave are still luxuries even if they're only $10 more than the basic version - the cheaper plane ticket still gets you there, the cheaper wine... I'm not really into wine, expensive wine doesn't taste especially different to me... still gets you drunk?

Google still returns search results. You have to crawl through ads or search in different ways, but your result is still going to be in there. So if Kagi is a price and has extra comfort, it's a luxury.

It's a luxury for knowledge workers, like having a chair to sit on is a luxury.

These are not in the same realm. An extra $10 on a $500 or $1500 ticket that you ride maybe once a year is not the same as going from $0 to $10 every single month.

It's $10 more per month for the best service of its kind in the world. On top of that a useful service that can save you time. What other services that are the best in the world can you get for $10 per month?

If two restaurants were side by side, one handing out average meals for free and the other selling the best food in the world for $10, which one would you go to?

Best food in the world? 3 star Michelin? Ok, I'll pay the $10. But if it's only a little better, probably the free one. And if I'm going to be doing this every day.. I'd probably still do the free one most of the time.

I'll argue that Kagi is the best search engine in the world. If there's any better out there, I'll switch to that. For $10 per month it's a bargain. But "free" does things with people's reasoning. As you admit, you'd choose free over the best food in the world most of the time, even if the best food was dirt cheap. I'd choose the best food in the world over free every time, if it was that cheap.

Yes, free messes everything up. If Google was $1 or $2/mo and Kagi was/is significantly better, that drastically changes the equation.

> When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.

That is a gross assumption about the GPs personality. I've bought luxury items before I'd happily publicly badmouth, and others that I'd happily publicly sing the praises of.

Every Kagi post is filled with comments like these and I've been wondering for a while whether it's organic or not. I'm inclined to think it's organic but the early adopters of Kagi are the type of people to write comments that sound like astroturfing, mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service. Or to put it another way: I'd place more trust in a review from someone who received a lifetime of free Kagi access than I would in one from somebody who just started paying for it.

I've been paying for about a year. Every time I'm reminded how much I'm paying, I think it sounds like too much. But every time I sit at a new computer or accidentally use the default Google search on my phone's home screen, I think, "Crap, this is terrible. I'm glad I am paying for Kagi."

Or they just provide a really good service in the environment of ad-driven internet crap. I'm paying for it for the same reason as I pay for zerotier and give bcachefs donations - voting with my wallet for my environment to be a bit more like I wish it looked. And I'm happy to tell people about those things as long as they are better than alternatives.

Thing is, though, it's free to try it for yourself and see if it's worth it to you. I don't know that astroturfing is necessary or useful.

> mostly as a manifestation of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that emerges once they start paying for a service

I find this take quite odd. If you're paying for a service you're unhappy with, you stop. What's the element that's holding users in a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario?

Also started using it a few months ago, and it’s so good that I forget it’s there most of the time. It’s fast, accurate, clutter free, and gets out of your way. More than happy to pay for this experience, because I want it to stick around forever.

kagi is the first search engine i dont regularely fall back to google when i get bad search results. because googles good results are usually none the better. In google i get more results however most of the added results are spam or duplicates.

For me, the ability to create custom bangs is worth it alone. I probably have close to a hundred bangs now and even created a bang to edit my bangs. I’m sure there are extensions that can replicate this behaviour but Kagi works on any device without any prior setup. My ‘site:reddit.com’ (!r) bang has to be my favourite, although I have found myself needing it less with Kagi since I’m already able to preference Reddit in search results.

DuckDuckGo can do that for free though.

Where is the place to add personal bangs to DuckDuckGo?

I can't find it in https://duckduckgo.com/bangs or https://duckduckgo.com/settings.

AFAIR you can use and submit custom bangs. That said, they're curated, I think. See: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

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