Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com