Hacker News Reader

Comment by tastyminerals2 | Hacker News Reader

Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don’t know a single service that packs that many features for the that price nowadays.

View on HN

I hope they don't stray too far of course with other features. Been using Kagi continuously since August, and I've developed a pattern where I still jump to Google when I need to buy stuff, get latest news and find local (national, or EU) content.

It's great for technical lookup, and answers, but for general search usage it's not there yet. I'd love to give actionable feedback on how they could improve, but can't figure out exactly what's missing on that department. It could just as well be a small crawled index.

I switched to Kagi almost two years ago. I have an experience opposite to yours. I never ever use the google bang. I did in the beginning, when a query wouldn't give me results, only to get worse, more verbose, equally useless results from Google. Quickly learned that if Kagi can't answer a query, Google will fare no better (and will waste my time with junk).

I'll note that to get local news, I do have to switch the region selector from "International" to "Portugal". Kagi doesn't have Google's behaviour of using my IP location. Which is good. Getting international results from Google is a struggle.

Been using kagi for awhile, also in Portugal. Google shopping is the one thing that Kagi can't beat them at yet. If i'm looking to buy a product online not from amazon it's still the best option.

I don't know what you're searching for, but I'm also from EU and I'm able to use Kagi for everything, including content from my own country. Sometimes I might have to change the country or language filter, but I've never had a situation where something was available on Google but wasn't available on Kagi. Nowadays, I'm only using Google for some quick answers, like showing the score of a football match or the population of a country. Kagi doesn't seem to support quick answers for these queries yet, although I have seen quick answers for weather, calculations and shipping and flight tracking. So I'm sure more quick answers will be added eventually.

Kagi has just also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so it is now much better at answering factual questions such as population of a country or timezone. Wofram Alpha has always been more accurate than Google on these questions.

Showing the score of a football match, and doing online shopping, are the two remaining use cases I have for google. My usage of Google has now gone down. 95%. Kagi is simply better.

Wolfram Alpha seems to work quite well from my small tests, even with recent events. However, I don't really like to read an answer that seems like it's a person talking, I would rather just see the data in a big size like on Google. That's just a nitpick though, it's definitely useful. Thanks for telling me.

One example is that if I try to lookup a specific product I'd like to buy, I'm going to find more results on Google. Also (with the country filter enabled, Romania in my case), I still get results from US, Canada and other countries (which in practice is a hassle with delivery), but even if that weren't the issue, the pages are not in Romanian either to have a reason to show up in my results.

It seems someone else in this thread has the same issue as you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39395823

This seems to be recent, so I guess that's why I didn't experience it.

I didn’t realize they supported full conversations with my choice of model. They need to advertise this better! I just upgraded to ultimate and can cancel my ChatGPT subscription. Love that I can give more support to Kagi _and save money_ VS my pro plan+ChatGPT.

Kagi assistant is technically still in beta, gathering feedback. We are not satisfied with the experince yet and are working on an overhaul, planning to officially launch it in March. This is why it is a bit 'hidden' from view, but yet available.

Is this a watered down version of GPT4 or something that they can offer it for cheaper, plus all their own features?

It depends on the feature/product. They have custom models for some things (and honestly FastGPT and their summarizer gives pretty good results), but when it says it uses GPT4, it really does.

Does the "code" part work for code completion in say vscode or is it just a chat interface?

The "code" assistant is just a chat interface configured for programming tasks powered by gpt4 (Ultimate plan) and gpt3.5 for (Pro plan).

I see. Thanks

is it worth the subscription?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com