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Comment by dewbrite | Hacker News Reader

> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.

That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine.

How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

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I never realized before that sentence, but the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content. I might sign up to Kagi just for that.

I’ve been using Kagi for a while now. It’s worth a shot. I’ve been very happy with the quality of the results and I never find myself feeling like I should check google too.

Please do try it, it’s great. I’m just a happy user, no affiliation.

My favourite feature is the customised down ranking I can do. No Pinterest etc for me.

To me Kagi is as much a life changer on the web as ad-blockers are: Whenever I use a computer without them, I realize how poor the user experience is and how much time and energy is wasted just to filter noise from ads and poor content.

it seriously is. I have grown to resent advertising and mistrust sites that depend on advertising since "What is the ulterior motive here?" is a question that I have to ask myself.

Zero ads. User centric features being rolled out. Kagi has improved more in the last 6 months than google did in 10 years that I used the product.

Search definitely sucks, but I don't know if it sucks enough for $10/mo. I'll try Kagi and see, though.

Happy Kagi user here.

Try it! After you'll be on a site that is just generated content, click backwards in the browser and remove the site from all your future kagi results. That's how search should work (and it should _not_ provide you a top 30 of random AI content).

That just convinced me to sign up

The fact that people who are not affiliated with the company go out of their way to suggest people to use kagi and pay with their hard earned money is a testament to how much people enjoy and value the product.

Personally, if I could own Kagi stock, I would.

Also, I'd love to work for Kagi.

wink wink, nudge nudge.

> Personally, if I could own Kagi stock, I would.

Google stock would be worthless without its ad empire. Without ads, they would have no need to acquire Youtube and Android.

$10/mo also would not be enough for Wall St. Ask Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, anybody really. Ads will always be just around the corner.

Yeah. I chime in all the time to recommend it. It's a great product that I use many times every day, and I don't want to see it go away.

> Personally, if I could own Kagi stock, I would.

I hope it never becomes possible to own Kagi stock. They seem like a great company, I'd hate to see them become worthless chasing eternal growth because shareholders demand it.

They're already worthless then, because they took a round of investor money last year.

> the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content

It's not just you.

If there are ads on a page, it means the advertisers own the author. He is not free to write what he wants, he is free to write only that which the almighty advertisers will tolerate being associated with. He will not write things which bite the hands that feed him.

I'm convinced writers like that will never write anything truly genuine. Chances are if you see ads anywhere you're reading self-serving generic clickbait content meant to attract attention and drive up ad impressions. It's not real, it's just "content", a generic square around which ads congregate like parasites.

I configured Reddit as a "Lense" (similar to what Kagi uses for things like searching across Forums, or news). With that, now I have a simple toggle at the top of Kagi which allows me to immediately turn a search into a Reddit search.

i just pinned reddit, wikipedia to top so my searches will usually display them first.

Thats the best way, because then what you're looking for gets surfaced rather organically, and its right there, so you don't have to go out of your way to find it.

Generally I've started using bangs and lenses for changing searches in a wholly categorical manner. I.e. the !i bang for image search.

I did change the !p bang from podcasts to activating the programming lens, because programming tends to have a lot of terms that overlap with more general language, and so sometimes its nice to swap in and out of that mode.

I did the same and added a custom bang so I can use it from the address bar directly (!r pointing at https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&l=8 where 8 is the lens id).

Probably least a third of my queries are preceded by an !r now. A third of the rest are now question mark queries that activates their AI fast answer. It's like the google info box on steroids since it can answer any query and it works with lenses to restrict the fast answer to specific domains.

By the way, you don't have to manually add a custom bang and point it to your lens id, you can configure a bang for the lens directly in the settings of your lens

You can also define r as a “quick bang” which means you can just use “r” without !

oooh, I didn't know I could do this. Doing it now. Thanks!

I've been using site:reddit.com for ages now on ddg.

It took me way too long to start using Lenses. I've been a Kagi user for a while now, but lenses never really seemed that useful. The unlock for me is that I'm often looking for 3D models, so I added one for all the usual 3D model suspects (Thangs, Printables, etc).

I similarly added one that is for the recipe websites I like the most. It was a game changer!

Do you find that works better than using Thangs directly? It’s a meta-search engine itself.

I have !sgn to search sourcegraph for nix code.

Forgive my ignorance. I'm curious as to how that works.

For extra fun, add a rewrite rule to change every result from reddit.com to old.reddit.com: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html

can you share your reddit's lense?

I've been on Kagi for some months now (six-ish?). Best subscription I carry.

I originally signed up purely out of spite for the SEO scam that is Pinterest (Kagi lets you blacklist domains), but have since been repeatedly pleased with other rankings.

I love that MDN tops the list for DOM ish searches and w3schools is not even in the results.

Using Kagi often makes me forget how awful the Internet can be.

Kagi has a built in 'Forums' search that limits results to Reddit, HN, and other high-quality user discussions. It's probably my favorite feature.

Google had that and I used it constantly. Then they removed it of course. I can't remember if it included small blogs as well.

Yes you're absolutely right, I used it too, it's a shame they got rid of it but Google will be Google

This comment is now the second result for me, below https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/uhga1j/usb_mi... and above https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/comments/g6cm6q/waterproof...

Just entered this query as is, without configuring any lenses, and got a bunch of results from /r/synthdyi. I suppose it's good? I imagine if you use reddit a lot, you should bump its relevancy and add a lens for it, as other folks here described. But from that I see, it does decently even without that - even for topics where there's a lot of garbage contents, like reviews, it returns mostly the legit review sites, even though choosing which one do you trust would be a challenge. If you have your preferences, then bumping the relevance for these sites is easy.

> How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

I’ve started using their quick answers to sort through the crud. In most cases, it catches and filters out the obviously-bought Reddit recommendations, surfacing bloggers and niche industry publications that did their own lab work.

Really well, I just have Reddit pinned so it’s (almost?) always one of the top results, without having to add “Reddit”. HN is another. Similarly, I have lots of domains that I’ve always hated seeing in results, nuked, so I never see them anymore. Kagi is amazing.

With everyone saying how great the "put down websites with ads is" there are exceptions (few probably)

One of them being vietnamcoracle.com, which is, without a doubt the best travel website for Vietnam (if you like to really go deeper.) None of the content is sponsored, just relevant ads (here you can rent a bike, book a tour etc) and they are discrete in general.

Between him researching new destinations and writing / updating/ replying to comments he just doesn't have a lot of time for the classic "money making job + sideproject".

I just imagine (hope) he's not the only website like that out there.

I don't currently use kagi but would prefer if there was an option to filter by ad type (everyone hates pop ups) and amount.

Anyway just my 2c.

With wolfram and the llm + more users I'm hopeful that in the longer term the price will go down and/or stay at 10$ over the longer term.

Hopefully the defaults handle nuance like you mentioned, but one of the other benefits of Kagi is you can boost/de-boost domains, so you can correct for things even if they're using an overly blunt approach. If enough people do that, it'll also bubble up on the leaderboard: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1

Kagi has a !reddit bang, but it sends you to the terrible reddit search. I added a custom bang !reddit with "search?q=%s site:reddit.com" as the URL, which just adds site:reddit.com to the search

you guys are living in a dreamworld. I'm totally fine with a site that has "tracking" like Google analytics to help content makers and businesses alike make decisions. And have visited many a site with valuable content that might have been tracking me at the same time. This eliminates tons of valuable content.

> eliminates tons of valuable content

They aren’t eliminating it, just downranking it. Given Kagi’s search quality, ad and tracking density seems to negatively correlate with site quality.

And the type of tracking they’re referring to is more like selling-your-data-to-third-parties tracking, not Google or New Relic or something. Maybe sales funnel tracking and interstitial popovers. Your average Adblock doesn’t distinguish between tracking methods and goals but trying to block all pages that load Google Analytics would probably lead to an incredibly small pool of websites, which would worsen the results.

Anti-tracking has gone mainstream enough among America’s elite that I’ve seen executives who are otherwise not tech savvy find themselves unable to load a page (or follow through a tracked link in an email), figure it’s because it’s infested and—on that basis—move on from that vendor.

Honestly, I don't care to visit those businesses. Their sort of maximize-engagement attitude is the exact opposite of what I want.

I'd much rather get information from an individual or small group who is intrinsically motivated and is not just looking for the lowest bar of quality that won't make folks immediately bounce.

I also want to note that just putting Google Analytics on there doesn't kill the site's ranking. There are some sites that are just infested, and those are what get dramatically downranked.

The valuable content is still available in the Google dreamworld for anyone not yet ready to take the red pill.

Businesses can make decisions parsing their web server logs. There is no need to involve a third party data broker (or a half dozen) in the process.

It doesn't eliminate it silly. It downranks it and upranks things without a lot of tracking relative to Google.

So on Google you miss out on things that might otherwise be hidden gems because Google wouldn't rank it as highly.

There are tradeoffs on both sides.

I think this is a solid point. Google Analytics is a killer tool for website admins, and using _some_ kind of enhanced logging/parsing tool like this saves a ton of time over building your own solution or manually reviewing logs.

That said, I am still quite opposed to js that tracks users across the internet for advertisement purposes. I do use ad blockers despite the fact they block a lot of less-harmful tracking by default, which I don't love, but it's too much work to differentiate between. (At least adblock users are the minority of internet users in general, so hopefully Analytics users still get enough data to be helpful for their purposes.)

I have been using Kagi for quite a while. When I’m looking for code stuff at work, I will get results from Reddit that come to the top or close to the top. It doesn’t throw all of Reddit away, even when I’m not specially looking for Reddit.

I just tried your search, without even adding “Reddit” on the end. At the very top was a “Discussions” section, which had a tile for Reddit. The first result was also Reddit, with a few discussions nested under it. The the gearspace forum, followed by YouTube, then it bunches up a bunch of those 10 ten lists that pollute Google all into a section that is easy to use or skip, then sweetwater music, and then funny enough, your comment here on HN. It keeps going, but yeah… Reddit isn’t deranked to the point of not being used, Kagi sees the value in discussion forums when looking for the “best” something.

I think quite well. I've been using kagi for a couple months and I'm super happy with it, esp for programming-adjacent searches. You should give it a try! (not an investor, just a happy user).

Honestly, I don’t think I really notice the difference, but I’m just happy to pay for anything not google.

There are built-in bangs for reddit, and users can prioritize reddit.com as a domain if they'd like.

Not only that, but you can make it rewrite all reddit links to use old.reddit.com

Yes! Instructions here (old.reddit.com is one of the main examples): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html

I do the same for Youtube links to Invidious.

Interesting https://invidious.io/

You can also change your Reddit settings to use the old UI for www.reddit.com.

Only if you're logged in, though. (I believe?)

It doesn't work on mobile though.

What do you mean?

Even if you set your preferences to prefer old.reddit.com style, the reddit website will only respect that when accessing from a desktop device. On a mobile device you always get the "new" reddit.

Ohh okay. I skipped a comment in the chain and thought you meant either the redirect on Kagi doesn't work on mobile, or the old.reddit.com site doesn't work on mobile.

Reddit has ads and tracking (so does facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc) not to mention your local paper.

Do they filter out reddit or just small ma and pa sites with adsense?

It has "lenses" that you can tailor yourself. Just pay and try it. Cancel if it's not your goto in a month.

They have a free trial as well. I didn't even finish half my 100 free search queries before I decided to pay.

In my case 100 was not enough. I almost didn't sign up for Kagi because I hadn't yet felt the value and configuring a browser to use Kagi as the default search engine isn't a zero effort task.

It probably took me about 200 to 300 searches before I was firmly decided that paying for Kagi is worth it. If I hadn't been freshly mad about Google's declining search quality, and displeased with DDG for something they had recently done (can't remember at this point), after the trial I probably wouldn't have paid and just would have gone back to DDG.

The latency of Kagi is so much better than Google or DDG. Just for the responsiveness and ball of "stuff" that Google tacks onto the front of search is an abomination. Worth if for the latency and the kruft ball removal alone.

> I almost didn't sign up for Kagi because I hadn't yet felt the value and configuring a browser to use Kagi as the default search engine isn't a zero effort task.

It's fairly easy to set up now.

Im sharing some saved Kagi searches:

best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers+...

best waterproof midi synthesizers https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers&...

Where do you use a MIDI synthesizer that it needs to be waterproof? In the rain, the ocean, the bathtub? Inquiring minds want to know!

In case your in the bath, poked holes in the bar of soap and want to oscillate the bubbles in to midi notes so you can code your new cloud platform with Velato?

Beach raves. Pool parties. Orgies. Anywhere there's booze/fluids next to electronics.

Your username makes more sense now.

It's OK. One thing it does is rope "reddit" into the "Forums" Lens, which on face seems good but I search mostly for car stuff and forums are a trove there.

Feature request: block a domain?

"saab 900 power steering rack -reddit"

still returns a ton of reddit results.

This is actually already possible!

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

You can block specific domains, as well as make them rank lower. And if you ever want to ignore those rules, you can easily do that too!

Not affiliated with Kagi in any way, just a very happy user.

Seems like they are asking to block a domain for an individual query, or to remove it from their forums lens. It is weird that "-reddit" didn't work for them, seems like that should do it to me

Well that or let me pick sources for my lens default! Because reddit just overwhelms it with low quality content

You could create a custom Forum lens and disable the default one in favor of your own. I think a great way to do this would be a "derivative lens" feature, that way you could use all of the sources for the Forum lens, minus the ones you want to remove. I will make feature request for that probably.

-site:reddit.com works for that.

I think it might also be possible to create a new lens from an existing one while blocking a domain.

Wait, why do you need a waterproof midi synthesizer?

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