Introducing Kagi Search's New Design | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Kagi Search's New Design

kagi.com

50 pointsmoojacob62 comments

I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."

To illustrate how good kagi is, here's the things it's not as good at (for me):

1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today

2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index.

3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info explicitly stated, otherwise "best restaurants" returns a list of restaurants in Poland for example. Sort of inherent to the privacy thing though.

Everything else, all the normal queries work as well or better for me than Google.

In the old days, I could search for something niche on Google and get blogs/enthusiast websites. Does Kagi do that, or will I only get commercial results like modern Google?

Yes, you can ask it for small web results and they are mostly personal websites.

They filters out sites with ads or trackers. The results are clean sites. Some blogs/old sites do have ads so it's not exactly like google. Naturally Porn / nsfw types site are missing.

Sign up for the Kagi trial (100 free searches) & see for yourself. If garbage floats to the top, you can easily block the domain or lower its ranking in your results by mousing over the shield to the right of the search result. If you find blog/enthusiast sites you like, raise their ranking in your results the same way.

Yea, you'd use the "small web" lens: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

(I swear I don't work for Kagi haha, I just love this product so much)

It does. They also have filters you can apply to your query to further restrict the results for things like small web (blogs and niche forums, using the Marginalia index AFAIK) and forums (Reddit and so forth), so that you don’t have to resort to appending “Reddit” to your searches.

Kagi is basically $20/month to time travel back to 2014-era Google with extra features. It’s fantastic and well worth it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Edit: Upon checking my billing it’s $10/mo, not $20. All the better!

Kagi also doesn't support TV show/movie cast queries where it lists the photos of the cast and the name of their characters.

It's pretty much the only thing I still use Google for.

I am a huge fan of Kagi, been using it for 6+ months now as my “main” search engine. However, I find that queries in my native language (Swedish) results in way less accurate results than if the query was in English.

I would still recommend it to anyone, it’s heaps better than anything else.

Yep. Last month, I finally hit the $5/mo plan limit of 300 searches per month & upgraded to the $10/mo unlimited plan. Totally worth it not to waste my time sifting through garbage SEO sites on Google or half-assed DuckDuckGo search results.

> a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it."

What happened to Duck Duck Go?

It's still around, but their search results are lackluster; I was constantly having to rerun the same query in Google to find what I knew was out there. Kagi's search results are way better -- close enough to how good Google used to be 10-15yrs ago that I'm willing to pay $10/mo for it.

Nothing.

Its still there and still my goto search engine when I'm not on one of my personal devices.

I just prefer Kagi now because I pay for it so I'm their customer not their product. I also like the configuration options Kagi offers.

I love that you can pin, raise or lower results from specific websites. They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins. It's wonderful. Trust me too, it's worth it. ~850 searches a month here.

> They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins.

That sounds really interesting, have to check those out! I've only used that feature minimally so far.

> have to check those out!

Dropping a quick link if anyone is interested: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Also, as always, a great potential for abuse :(

What put me off is the AI stuff, I found out Kagi is an AI company.

I feel it synergizes well with their search, especially the quick answer summary of the results. Using it it feels more search than AI to me.

Yeah I don’t want to pay them to develop AI stuff.

I don't pay them to develop AI. Just like I don't pay Google to develop their ad business. I pay Kagi for search that I use (and Google for limited cloud storage) and what they do with that money is up to them.

I've had Kagi for several months now and have no desire to go back. Brave is horrible, DDG is bad, and Google is bad AND Google. I decided it was time to trim subscriptions a few months ago and chose to ditch ChatGPT and keep Kagi.

I just don't want another monthly payment. I know it's good etc, but I just don't want it. I _really_ don't

I really like Kagi and this is probably Apple’s fault but the requirement to install a safari extension which then hijacks your default search is very janky and is my #1 complaint.

Any reason it can’t just be added as a search engine?

You hit the nail on the head - Apple does not allow the addition of custom search engines at this time.

You're right, it's not possible to set a custom search engine on safari. An extension is the only way. Blame apple :)

Insanity. There used to be some kind of opensearch type thing even in Safari years ago.

I guess they took it away. Ridiculous.

Probably the reason why google pay so much to them. This is so insane....

It's pretty bad, but to be clear, it's not that you can't pick anything other than the default, it's that you are given a tiny selection of the biggest players and have to choose from them. Other browsers allow you to specify an arbitrary URL for it to inject the query string into.

I think Safari used to allow this. Or maybe they didn't, because I used to use something like this years ago and maybe that was when I was using chrome. Does anyone remember if Safari had this?

Damn, that's something that needs to be regulated.

Even on other browsers, you need an extension if you want search in private browsing mode to work, since the private tabs/windows don't have access to your Kagi signin cookie. I generally just use DuckDuckGo when I open a private window, though, to avoid needing another extension.

isn't that a feature? kagi search requires sign-in, so it's not private and should not be used in a private browsing session.

Have you tried their browser Orion? I can barely tell I’m in a different browser.

I love Orion. My only complaint is the way that the address bar disappears when scrolling is a bit jarring, the animation seems too fast.

I have both Orion and Vivaldi instead for this reason. If Orion ends up being too janky, I fall back to Vivaldi.

https://kagi.com/orion/

https://vivaldi.com/

I've been using Kagi for 6 months and I honestly don't know how they do it, it's amazing and it makes me want to vomit every time I see Google or DuckDuckGo, Bing etc.

One important thing people rarely mention is that it is so fast. It's so much faster than Google to show results, makes it for a much smoother searching flow.

They also added gemini 1.5 pro to their chat assistant.

However, it seems like it isn't added to the select menu yet, but it can be accessed by changing sub_mode to 8 in the url query.

I had been using multiple AI assistants to get information because Google search really wasn't delivering it.

But now that I'm using Kagi with super fast unlimited searches I almost never feel the need to ask one of these AI things anymore.

I recently heard of SearXNG and I use it instead now. Where I live $10 is a lot of money, more than it's worth to me especially considering I use LLMs a lot now instead. I find I search a lot less now.

And I like the way SearXNG is self-hosted. You can configure and prioritise a lot. And it can even search torrent sites etc.

I used to think Kagi had their own index but as far as I've heard most of it is actually meta results from other engines, just re-ordered.

The only thing I miss is an integration with ChatGPT, that would be amazing.

They do have their own index which is used to detect how many ads the website has etc and for small web / blog searches, but they use meta results to have more results.

Also, they do have integration with multiple LLMs - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral and their own

I used to use open SearXNG instances, but the results still have all the inapplicable garbage in them that I can't filter out. And the results are often incredibly slow. I switched to Kagi because it gave me better results from the get go, and I can customize to block all results from things like YouTube or various poor GitHub/StackOverflow content clones.

Where did you find hosting for SearXNG that costs less than $10/month? I have my own server and I can barely get a public reverse proxy to bypass CGNAT for that price. Also, SearXNG isn't very easy to add custom "always block these domains" lists last I looked.

I've been using Kagi since June of 2022, daily. I had to use Google the other day because I was on someone else's PC and in that moment I was reminded just how awful Google's search has become. You genuinely see how you're the product when you use Google these days.

That's some super steep pricing

$10 a month?

$54/year for 3600 searches.

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=individual&per...

So 10 a day? I do way more than 10 searches a day.

Or unlimited for $10/mo or $108/yr.

If you're in the Silicon Valley and spend most of your day on the Internet, $10 for superb search is a no-brainer.

If you're a student / postgrad somewhere in the US, it still likely feels worth the price, even though $10 is already not below the threshold of observability.

If you are, say, somewhere in Thailand, or Uzbekistan, or Botswana, the $10/mo become unironically noticeable: not prohibitive, but you really want to get a lot of value in exchange.

And basically anywhere in the world, if you're a kid, and mom and dad would not buy Kagi for you, you're out of luck.

If you hate Google's obnoxious deference to paid affiliate placements, $10 is nothing

Do you want to be the product? If not, pay the provider enough to stave off that whole "biz dev" mining process as long as possible..

It only feels that way because search has been free essentially forever.

But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain!

Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's steep.

> Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web?

It was fairly common to use the web before people used Google, or even Altavista.

The web had such a size that a catalog like Yahoo or Moz could cover a significant part of it. (I remember how Netscape was released, and how cool it was compared to Mosaic.)

No, it feels that way because music is a monthly service, any media is a monthly service cost, backups are monthly service cost, news are a monthly service cost, VPN is a monthly service cost, internet is of course a monthly service cost, password management is a monthly service cost, anti-malware/AV is a monthly service cost, ...this list just goes on and on.

And they want $10/month for unlimited searches full well and knowing $5/300 isn't even a reasonable bracket for half of us.

It's steep, and we're all swimming in in these costs.

$5/unlimited would be more reasonable, but it still piles on all these SaaS costs that everyone now uses. Gotta grow grow grow grow you know. Capitalism is great!

> $5/unlimited would be more reasonable

Hell, I'd even take $5/600. 300 is just ridiculously low. I like the service, mind you, but really can't justify paying $10/m (+ tax now) for it.

I should have jumped on the Neeva train when I had the chance. It was 50€/y. The results weren't as good as Kagi's, though. But anyway, Neeva's dead now.

If you had two pubs next to each other, one selling the best beer in the world for $1 a pint and the other giving away free low quality beer, the one giving away free beer would have an enormous line and the other a few people inside. You just can't argue with free when it comes to most people. People will drive for hours to get a free hot dog. People have got it in their head that things on the computer screen have to be free and you can't easily take that out of their heads.

Correction: one giving away beer with a little bit of arsenic in it. Which they have slowly been increasing as people build a bit of a tolerance to it.

I'm always surprised how cheap software engineers can be when purchasing products created by other software engineers, specifically designed around their needs.

No matter where you live on earth, if you're a software engineer $10/month is nothing. I seriously don't think you would notice if someone was quietly stealing $10 a month from you.

And yet that $10 a month would pay for a product that nearly all of us in this community wish existed.

But the biggest irony for me, is that all software engineers get paid what they do because someone on the other side of their business is willing to pay a lot more for what ever service you're ultimately helping to build. If everyone was this cheap about software, software engineers would be making minimum wage.

Why is sales tax being applied now? Is there some new tax law or is Kagi offering a new benefit that requires taxation?

Every company is legally required to collect sales tax above certain threshold (defined by each jurisdiction). Kagi passed the threshold in most places and now needs to start collecting it.

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