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Comment by rfarley04 | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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.

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.

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 :(

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

> 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.

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.

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