A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) | Hacker News Reader

A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)

flatfootfox.com

119 pointsApocryphon160 comments

I have used kagi for quite a while now, and i use it pretty much exclusively. I was unhappy with google ignoring many terms in my search queries and giving me results that I generally considered to be 'intro' pages and generic content, even when my searches were very specific. I have found kagi much better. I dont use any of the advanced stuff like summarisation or ai stuff, i just want search results that have my keywords in them.

Google search is almost useless for anything but the most basic queries now. Anything technical and it ignores half of the search terms like you said.

intext: and quoting solves this…

I haven't found quoting helps much. I also feel like i shouldnt have to craft search queries with a lot of inurl or other tags or quoting. Kagi just seems to work better. Its worth 10$ a month to me to not have to worry about it, I use search engines a lot.

and intext: ? I didn't say that quoting solves it

Google Search has been in decline since they came up with Google+ and removed the Plus Operator from Google Search at the same time (and replaced it with quotes that don't do the same thing). About 13-14 years ago.

If you add minus signs to of popular sites you get better results. However you then end up with a search of something like:

   -google -twitter -reddit -amazon -youtube some search

My brief review of Kagi: I’m never going back to ad-supported search.

I rely heavily on internet search for my job, and Kagi has made everything so much faster that I’ve almost stopped thinking about the search engine entirely. Google search had become frustratingly ineffective, often requiring me to dig deep to find what I needed. With Kagi, it just works. I rarely have to scroll beyond the first few results. In fact, Kagi’s effectiveness has made me search even more—now, I use it naturally without considering other services.

While this article highlights some valid concerns people may have with Kagi, I think the service is solid enough that everyone should give it a try.

And for Android, the Brave widget with Kagi search makes it all just a bit more convenient!

Kagi is a tough pill to swallow. Their search is hands down the best around, there's no other way around it.

That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.

The workaround I found is using Kagi Ultimate. I get access to Claude (and I'm still able to attach files + access a dozen other LLMs) for $25/mo, so I was able to cancel Claude and keep Kagi and get the best of both worlds from either product.

Side note: incredible that a small team like Kagi's can somehow use LLMs more effectively in search than a company that has years of search experience (i.e. Google)

> a company that has years of search experience (i.e. Google)

From experience on the figurative side of this reality, I can attest that it is hard to build a track while the train is running on it.

Agreed on Kagi ultimate.

The agents (optional with a toggle) hooked up to the LLMs are fairly decent. They'll search, grab YouTube transcripts, read online dev documentation, etc.

Unless you're a really heavy user, you can possibly save a lot on those LLM bills by using the API and some third party app. (Like Msty for example)

This is true for me, except I don’t want to run another app, and I like using Claude on mobile.

But the API is tempting for a cost savings.

I put $5 in API for “Continue” extension in VS Code and it’s been months and haven’t used it all up yet.

Can't say I understand how $10/month is expensive.

Quality search results ultimately save time digging through poor quality search results. Add up 300+ searches per month and surely you're hitting minimum wage value at least.

The value proposition is absolutely there at $10.

Value proposition should be compared to the low cost alternative. Is it $10 better than Google? Maybe, I am not sure.

Just being able to rank domains (and nuke the ones that are usually spam) is enough to make it worth $10/mo for me. This is a tool you’re using constantly, so even small time savings per use adds up to a lot.

I am comparing it to the low cost alternative.

Less than half of HN users are from the US and wages are lower in most countries, sometimes by a lot. Less than 10% in Turkey or Ukraine for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...

> That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.

It is more expensive than $0, but if you value your time more than a dollar an hour, the time saved is worth more than $10. I've found I scroll a lot less and have fewer false positive sites where I click in and look around only to find it isn't what my search was looking for.

That is just for the basic search feature. TBH, I haven't even investigated its other features, like lens and the ai stuff.

> That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.

Back in the beta they planned on launching with a $20-$30/month unlimited plan and they didn't think they'd be able to bring the price down. That was a little too expensive for me so I moved on. I like what they're doing and I'd pay $10/month but I just don't have a use for it anymore.

There was a time when it was incredible that a small team like Google could somehow implement search more effectively than a company that has years of search experience (i.e. AltaVista)

In that case -- and probably in the case of Kagi vs. Google as well -- it was entirely dependent on focus. In the hypothetical situation where your goal changes from "provide the best possible search" to "beat Yahoo," your available resources will be used on different things, and then...

That (25 usd for Claude + Kagi) is the best sales pitch ever. I'm switching :)

Not sure what I'll do when Grok 3 comes out (I expect it to beat every other LLM out there hands down) but we'll see by then :p

What is it about Grok that you expect to be so much better? Not disagreeing necessarily, just want to know your reasoning.

Better LLM seems to be about who has the most compute and data for training.

xAI has (by far) the most compute and data now.

I love it too, and I do think it's expensive, too.

A lot of people laugh at thinking $10 (USD) pm is expensive, of course it's not huge money for most people. The problem is Kagi is a kind of "vote" towards moving the internet away from the ad-supported crapware trying to spy on your every click and capture your attention non-stop. If you're trying to replace a lot of free services with paid services to cast said vote towards shaping the web into what it should be, these costs really add up.

After paying for search, email, supporting a creator or two (e.g. a podcast), and some software here or there, you can easily end up in the hundreds of dollars, then you look back and notice that at best you've saved yourself from a few annoying ads and maybe gotten a fractionally better service and at worst your experience is unchanged and you're just deriving some intangible satisfaction from having not been spied on (which at the individual level doesn't make much difference unless millions of people follow your lead) or supporting a creator you admire.

It's tough.

It is tough.

For my company, it's easy: I pay for the tooling my devs need. Overly simplified, I only pay 50-65 % of that, because expenses lower taxes. And compared to salaries, a few hundred $ is not a big deal. If I think about the time it saves us and how much money we can make in that time, it's a no brainer. Even just having people enjoy their work more pays off.

There's opportunity cost. Ad supported services are not overly incentivised to provide a quality product in the long run, so it's a safe assumption to make that they will waste your time to some degree, at least as they mature and enshittify. Some are great, eventually they all become bad, in my experience. It can be smart to use free stuff while it's still good, with an eye on migrating.

I don't know how much sense it makes to apply this opportunity cost thinking to your personal time. I don't really do that, but I do try to reduce time spent on anything that annoys me, and to do more stuff that brings me joy or pride, even if it's not economical. Life is short.

Is $10 really expensive?

For most people, no. Can you think of $10/m you spend on something less important than search? A couple coffees, a sandwich, HBO, Netflix, a drink, using two gallons of gas recreationally, etc

How many coffees can you drink in a day? How many services and even standalone apps that don't use server resources want a measly 10/month from you?

Most people I know can afford some of the luxuries you list, but only barely. If you have to choose between having a drink once a month at a place other than your own home, and having an ad-free search engine that actually works, you'll find that many people are thick enough to go for that drink.

For context, this is speaking from the Netherlands, where housing is relatively expensive.

A couple of coffees isn't a luxury, not even for the worst penny pinching Dutch miser imaginable.

I almost never buy coffee. Rarely buy sandwiches out. I get HBO for $3/month now for 6 months and will cancel after. Netflix is $7/month, though the whole household uses that. Two gallons a gas can buy a lot of transportation to necessities for the kiddo. Though we have an EV and $10 gets us maybe 250 miles more or less of driving -- that's a lot.

No, $10 a month is not expensive. However, the problem is the amount of products and services that in the past you could buy once or buy and if you wish to upgrade to the next version you had to pay again have become less and less and subscription services have skyrocketed.

I don’t drink coffee or alcohol, watch movies or drive a car.

> Side note: incredible that a small team like Kagi's can somehow use LLMs more effectively in search than a company that has years of search experience (i.e. Google)

But Google is not a search company. It used to be, but now it's an ad company. I'm sure their LLM use serves their purposes right.

I'm discovering that Claude is included in Kagi Ultimate and this is also slightly blowing my mind... Probably going to do the switch.

The fact that it's expensive is true but for me largely compensated by the niceties of the service. I don't really like the fact that they use Yandex either but the other search engines are not really satisfying for me anymore.

I've used Kagi Pro for several months now and it's working great for my personal and professional needs. The only thing I'm missing is the shopping features but I can with that and switch back to Google when I'm looking to spend my money on physical goods...

> [...] incredible that a small team [...]

Here, this. Small, focused teams usually deliver more output per person (or even overall) than larger ones. Less management overhead, clear goals and responsibilities, tendency to employ people with cross-disciplinary experience, hiring for talent and not checklists, etc.

> [...] can somehow use LLMs more effectively [...]

LLMs are an incredibly effective tool for the few areas where they do fit the problem. But there's so much "AI" hype going on, everyone is trying to cram it into anything and everything, running around with a hammer trying to smash things just in case they turn out to be a nail. Even the old-time players (who should know better) can't resist the urge.

It's almost like oligopolies faced with changing markets tend to start collapsing under their own weight.

How does Kagi Ultimate compare to Perplexity?

I used Kagi for a year. It was a great experience, no ads, decent search results. I quit recently, when I discovered that they integrate with Yandex. I think it is unacceptable in the todays reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

why? yandex is not just a great search engine but also a very promising company - at least was before it was brought to the dogs by US/EU.

Because some of their taxes will fund human safari in Kherson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaig...

that's a pretty indirect contribution. if we start to boycott companies because of what is done with the taxes they pay then there won't be many companies left to use or do business with.

The country has literally started the war and keeps killing people. Is it not enough to boycott any relationship with it, especially those from which it benefits financially?

as far as my observations go it's a little more complicated than russia started the war and apart from that life is not just about politics but also about mundane practicalities.

Only psychopath children: “I’m not bullying him, I’m just saying if he does anything I don’t want him to do I will bully him.”

Allegedly astute observers of European history: “Russia isn’t an aggressor, it just will aggress if its independent neighbors do anything Russia doesn’t like.”

Yeah bro that’s still called “starting a war.”

sure, but that is sadly how world politics works. if the US expands nato right to the border of russia then they retaliate. ukraine fought a war against their own citizens in the eastern half when they sympathized with opening up to russia - a majority there perceives themselves as russians. this is not just whataboutism - if you don't fight for resources then you'll have to buy them for a very high price. and ukraine is very rich in resources. as is greenland.

Don’t give yourself credit for understanding the “much more complicated” picture of the invasion than what other people are identifying.

You’re right here saying that it’s a resource grab. That’s what everyone else identifies it as too. You don’t have a more “complicated” picture or a more complete one, just one that’s devoid of a moral imperative.

i'm not giving me credit for anything. just saying how it is. so, what's your point?

> as far as my observations go it's a little more complicated

It is literally not more complicated, as you’ve just laid out.

your explanation boils down to "russia is an aggressor and hence will aggress". i'm considering the context - so, my perspective is a little more complicated.

Like "the US expanding NATO" haha. No one is coerced into joining NATO, ya goofball.

Yes, dictators who express imperialist ambitions and who fashion themselves after former emperors tend to engage in empire building. Ooooo so complicated!

You don’t have to feed russian trolls. They dont care about morality or facts, they just spread propaganda

Oh I know I have no hope of convincing them! But there are all sorts of less engaged people on here ready to be taken in by whatever slightly contrarian take they come across.

My position as a russian, if you want something (resources, gas pipeline, whatever) you make a better offer than the other guy. it is called diplomacy, such a new concept. You attack = you are unilaterally at fault.

I heard so many times how ukraine "invited the attack" by behaving in ways russia didn't like. Tbh I feel like anyone who says that is a potential domestic abuser.

While Kagi is not good enough for an advanced user I see no problem buying it for a tech illiterate relative. But that is assuming Kagi doesn't literally pay in some form to Yandex for using their search

They do pay Yandex https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

Well, that changes things a bit. Glad I don't use it anymore... IMO their "pay to help us rank search results we get from other engines" is not great anyway.

if it is a majority today, it is because those who had pro-Ukrainian views were killed or had to leave not to be killed. people have families and not always can just "move away" - that's why they are forced to get russian passports not to be killed

it has never been internal war in the east of Ukraine, and the full scale war there today is the proof.

the crimeans not just didn't defend against the russian invasion they applauded it.

And those who didn't applaud learned what "punitive psychiatry" means:

  Refusing to bow to an occupier in Russia’s world labels you as “mentally ill.” Through forced diagnoses, drugging, and institutionalizing—even children—Russia’s modern occupation of Ukraine echoes a horrifying Soviet tactic: punitive psychiatry.

https://united24media.com/anti-fake/how-russia-revives-sovie...

> sure, but that is sadly how world politics works. if the US expands nato right to the border of russia then they retaliate. ukraine fought a war against their own citizens in the eastern half when they sympathized with opening up to russia - a majority there perceives themselves as russians.

This is not some "nuanced view", but blatantly wrong Russian propaganda:

1. The notion of "the US expands NATO" is ridiculously wrong. In Central and Eastern Europe, getting into NATO is considered the holy grail of foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been regarded as the top goal in foreign policy (along with the EU membership), because nobody wants to return to being unfree prisoners under Russian rule in severely stagnating dictatorships, from which European nations broke free only 35 years ago.

2. I stress: Central and Eastern Europe passionately wants into the pact that would help to defend them in case of another Russian invasion. Sweden even abandoned its 200 years of neutrality and entered the pact. Trying to depict this as some kind of American initiative is plain wrong.

3. Existing members had refused to invite Ukraine into NATO in 2008 and the topic of Ukraine's entry into NATO was completely off the table by the time of Russian invasion in 2014.

4. There was no "war against their own citizens" in Eastern Ukraine. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the entire thing was a covert Russian special operation, directly under Russian military command. Their verdict is long and gives a really good overview.

The entire war is about as complicated as the invasion of Poland and France. Just plain naked aggression by a totalitarian dictatorship that first crushed all internal opposition, then turned outwardly expansionist. History has seen many such examples.

Great points. But have we considered (or perhaps blindly trusted) what the lying, stealing, cheating dictator has to say about this?

> if the US expands nato right to the border of russia then they retaliate.

US didn't expand NATO, those countries begged and pleased and threatened to get in and the US and other NATO countries finally threw up their hands and said fine. Note they didn't build any bases there or station significant amount of troops there.

> ukraine fought a war against their own citizens in the eastern half

To portray any part of the Ukranian war as a civil war even 2014-2021 is wrong. Ukraine fought Russia. At most there were a handful of far right and criminals who were willing to fight their own country. Girkin the FSB agent who took the first steps in the war admitted that if it hadn't been for Russia Ukraine would just have arrested the handful of troublemakers.

> when they sympathized with opening up to russia

I feel like you don't know very much about Immigration or business between Ukraine and Russia before Russia invaded, things were pretty open. It's that Russia ruined it by invading.

> a majority there perceives themselves as russians.

If you don't know the demographics or identities of Ukraine then please don't make stuff up. The majority considered themselves ethnically Ukranian in almost all parts of eastern Ukraine including Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. And of course ethnicity isn't politics there are shit ton of soldiers politicians and ordinary Ukranian citizens of russian origin supporting their country. The head commander of Ukraine is an ethnic Russian who moved to Ukraine as a teenager and still has family there.

> this is not just whataboutism - if you don't fight for resources then you'll have to buy them for a very high price. and ukraine is very rich in resources.

Russia has many more resources. Granted this war has been built on idiocy but invading Ukraine for resources makes no sense considering how much it would have business/expenses it would have cost even if Russia could have won

> as is greenland.

Greenland is militarily useful because of its location. It already has a US base so the status quo is good for the US

The problem with people who claim the Russian war on Ukraine is more complicated is that they dont seem interested in the actual complexity as opposed to the Russian propaganda.

What do you use now? I mix Perplexity and Google depending on the query, I wondered how that compares to Kagi. Yandex is a no-no for me as well

I explored the landscape and didn't find good alternative yet. I basically fell back to Google.

One interesting initiative I discovered is that Qwant and Ecosia are teaming up to develop a new independent European search index:

https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-j...

Very much look forward to see this :)

Perplexity serving ads now made me cancel them

Do they still serve ads when you subscribe?

They do not. Also, the ads are sponsored follow-ups. Maybe someday they will be more blatant, but for now at least, they are easily ignored. I almost never use the canned follow-ups.

Kagi seems to genuinly have a good mission when it comes to the internet.

I want small web search. I want good results. I will pay for search!

I do not want to support Russia.

And I do not want my search experience and product I pay for be dictated by US foreign policy and relations in a given time. Why should a search engine company get involved in international relationship affairs?

“Wars of aggression are bad” is more of a moral/ethical position than a US foreign policy position.

I’ve been using Kagi for over a year now. I just don’t think about it most of the times, I search, I get what I’m looking for quickly, and I move on. That’s all I want and it’s delivered well, without ads.

Long time Kagi subscriber here.

I think their focus should be to reduce resource usage on their side and make servers cheaper to run. Not other shenanigans like t-shirt or FastGPT or whatever. They can then offer a more attractive price for general public, who has never paid for search before and gets caught in the headlights when they hear you pay. Because right now, they don’t even have 40k users and if it goes on with this tempo, while also burning their resources for AI-things, I am afraid they will not stay much longer. Don‘t get me wrong, I am okay with the 10$ I pay, but, come on… who needs a t-shirt of a search engine and two different AI-thingy?!

> I think their focus should be to reduce resource usage on their side and make servers cheaper to run.

I'd like for them to expose their result cache. Lately I've hit a run of pages that have updated my result away. I have a result-blurb with the search result; I could use what comes before and after it.

Funnily enough I quite like my Kagi t-shirt. Especially because it does not look like a tech company shirt at all. Could they do better things with their time and money? Probably. Do I care? Not really.

But, I don't care about AI integrations either. I just like having decent search. And happy to pay for it as they seem to be doing things in the right spirit.

I am personally fine with the cost too, since I can afford it. My concern is that, they will go out of business because of these things. I would be really sad if that happens.

Yeah I thought the t-shirt move was ridiculous, but it's genuinely a very high-quality shirt. I'd like all my company shirts to be made by them. It's still a bizarre unrelated business decision, but at least they nailed it.

Agree about not being interested in AI integrations. I pay for a quality search engine, and I am happy with that product at the moment.

It's already dirt cheap at $10 per month. Businesses who want to be successful do not bargain on their prices to try to satisfy cheapskates who are never satisfied with anything else than free anyway. They set a fair price for their product and continue to improve the value they bring to real, paying customers.

With that said, they should of course reduce their operating costs when they can, just like any business.

10$ a month is not cheap for a search engine where theoretically bigger and older engines out there are available for „free“. 10 is also psychologically difficult to accept than, I don‘t know like 4.99 for example.

That‘s why it should be their focus to find a sweet spot, where it‘s still acceptable for general public to pull the trigger and subscribe and for them to keep doing this.

This is not a streaming service or whatever. Their starting point was to fight Google who don‘t give a fuck about privacy and show that it‘s possible to fix the search, which Google fucked up during the years. I am also a subscriber because of this mindset, not just because it is a „product“ of a business who wants to be successful. At least that‘s what Kagi & CEO looks like at the moment.

My criticism is directed to AI and the stuff they are working on. Because of all these AI and shenanigans, they are focusing their valuable time to something other than becoming the big guy in privacy sphere. Customer counts show that. And I am 100% sure that if Kagi would cost 4,99$ a month, we would be talking about hundreds of thousands of users already.

The general public will never pay for a search engine as long as they have a free option, supported by ads. And that's not a problem. There are millions of companies who have millions of customers, without being something for the general public.

> And I am 100% sure that if Kagi would cost 4,99$ a month, we would be talking about hundreds of thousands of users already.

I really don't think so. The difference between free and paid is gigantic in the minds of people, but between $5 and $10 not so much. Especially when it's a product that brings incredible value already. If you could have dinner at the best restaurant in the country for $10, or free cup noodles in the supermarket. Would you argue all day with the waiter that the dinner should be $5? I think most people would be happy with a great deal, or go stand in line for the free cup noodles.

As for privacy oriented customers, those are the absolutely worst customers imaginable for anybody selling anything. They bring a lot of headache and demand very much for the very little they pay. Building a business with trying to get people to pay because they hate your competitor is not sustainable. These customers are fickle and can start hating you instead for any or no reason. It's much better to have customers who like your product and think the price is great.

I'd pay $10 in a heartbeat if Kagi reliably used all my search keywords. But they don't, and I don't understand it. Just use all my words except stop words. I took the trouble to type them in.

I don't care if your coverage isn't as good as Google in its heyday. "0 search results" should be a mark of pride now.

I find it interesting that another comment states that they love Kagi exactly because Kagi uses all their search terms as opposed to Google. Not doubting your experience here, but I wonder how those experiences can differ so much.

That comment you refer to confused me, as I have a similar experience as OP (posted in a sibling comment).

Say something positive about kagi, receive karma.

Say something negative about google, receive karma.

No place with this kind of system should be relied on for veracious claims.

It's not a system, you are just describing sentiment, people generally like Kagi and generally dislike Google.

> people generally like Kagi and generally dislike Google

The reason the words "on hacker news" is missing from that statement is the karma system. I am describing echo chambers.

No way that people on a tech-focused forum like a technology designed for power users! Must be an echo chamber!

Hey! Thanks for asking what I would do to make it better. First, of course, the karma system has to go - scoring can still exist without being visible and therefore pressuring people to be performative. In addition to that, I would adjust the rankings to show not only the most popular posts but also some of the most controversial ones (controversy being defined as least agreement among voters). These are changes that will alienate many, however, and unlikely to be incorporated by a platform that amount to a content marketing tool for an investment group.

It’s highly annoying to me as well. I’m still paying for now, but since they started (I was using them in Beta), they’ve been slowly using towards the mainstream "implicit" behavior and away from "explicit" behavior. I now see myself quoting terms far more often, which has other disadvantages (no typo correction, diacritics becoming relevant, etc.).

It’s the same for regional searches. Used to be (until Dec 2023) I could search for an ambiguous term (e.g. a product name that’s the same in English and German) with "!de" for German regional search and get German results. Now that’s impossible as most results will be the same English pages I’d get with my normal international or US region.

Overall just not a fan of the direction they are moving in (which seems to be DDG with personalization and no ads, but no more expert search)

Did you raise it to the Kagi feedback forum [1] already? Based on Kagi's release notes [2] they regularly fix things like this.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/

[2] https://kagi.com/changelog

The issue thread about regional search has been open since January 2024 [0], with a lot of talk but no change at all. Some people like the change because they apparently always search in regional mode and want all results there. I posted several examples of my issues there.

I also asked on discord about the dropping of search terms and was just told to use verbatim search (quotes) if I don’t want dropped terms.

[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-ideas-for-improving-localint...

I agree. Perhaps you could help me add examples to this Feedback thread? https://kagifeedback.org/d/5354-kagi-ignores-search-terms

I've added a few, but I worry that adding more is counterproductive. Maybe it would help them prioritize if more people chimed in.

"The 300 search plan unfortunately just isn’t a very pleasant experience. I’d find myself wincing any time I accidentally typed a query I already knew the result of like Serious Eats Channa Masala into Kagi’s search during my metered month" "...do yourself a favor and jump straight into the $10 USD per month plan"

This exactly. I love using Kagi and felt the relief sweep over me when I went to unlimited. Well worth it to me.

This is so true. I only exceeded the 300 queries once but the following anxiety around hitting the limit was really bad for some reason.

On unlimited for a few months now and it is so much nicer to not worry about it anymore.

I use DuckDuckGo or pretty much anything else that feels suitable at the time, but I never think about searching this hard. It sounds like using Kagi inserts a conscious awareness of the product you're using. You're not just in the middle of an activity (whatever you're searching for), you're consciously Doing A Search.

Switching to unlimited searches sounds convenient if you can handle the price, but then a sort of Amazon Prime conundrum emerges: since you're paying for one option, why would you want to go anywhere else?

Maybe that's why I see so much enthusiasm for Kagi: when people use it, it's conscious.

Unlike most subscription services that rely on dark patterns to make cancellations difficult, Kagi does the opposite: it emails me every month to remind me that my subscription is still active and that I’ll be charged in a few days. It’s a small but significant gesture that shows respect for users.

I remember reading the linked Dan Luu article [1] when it came out. It was much more even handed in addressing the question, in my opinion. In particular, he includes comparisons and analysis of specific queries. For some of them (e.g. “download YouTube video” or “ad blocker”) none of the search engines were even passable.

That’s the kind of side by side analysis you should be looking for.

The second point when people talk about Google getting worse is, is the Internet just getting worse? Maybe it’s both? Google’s interests aren’t aligned in the same way Kagi’s are, but if Kagi can’t keep blogspam out of its search results why are we blaming Google when they also fail to do so?

This is a genuinely hard problem and it’s interesting so I might take a look into it when I get a chance.

[1] https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

> Google’s interests aren’t aligned in the same way Kagi’s are, but if Kagi can’t keep blogspam out of its search results why are we blaming Google when they also fail to do so?

Because some of Kagi's results come out of the Google index, so Google could be doing at least as good a job as Kagi is and they are not.

> people talk about Google getting worse is, is the Internet just getting worse? Maybe it’s both?

I've had a lot of experiences where I've inputted a search in Kagi, gotten crap results, tried the same search in Google and gotten the same crap results.

It's starting to feel like the internet is getting worse. Either that or I've been too coddled and I expect direct answers to my questions.

Orion had an update recently that broke my autologin to HN. I posted a question to their forum and they fixed it within a few hours. Incredibly responsive!

I have been using if for a year, with the LLMs and the facets and keywords. I have used google only a couple times when I couldn't find things easily and google was much much worse for my queries so I continued to ignore it.

I have reported a few issues to the Kagi team, their feedback system is super easy, they update you at every step of the process and they fixed everything (always minor issues) in about a week every time, plus you get a changelog of everything that changed.

I have made on average 1000 searches a month and never got frustrated by it, every time I stumbled upon a SEO-farming crapsite, I just filter it out to never see it again.

Excellent experience.

This article is great but it doesn't even talk about the assistant. The assistant is an LLM powered version of Kagi. It's been my daily driver for months and the productivity boost is incredible. I rarely ever use kagi's actual search functionality anymore unless I'm looking for something very niche. I love that you can also swap models. Happy customer here!

It is one year old, the assistant was not out yet afaik

I agree they cannot ignore llms in search nowadays despite a few ppl here not liking them

I've been subscribed to Kagi since trying it out early on in 2023 and have been paying the $10/mo for unlimited usage since they introduced that tier (if you are a heavy search user, I'd agree the $5/tier "limited" tier doesn't make so much sense). It takes a bit more clicking, but I found 6mo usage view https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption&range=1 and its nice to check on it after having "lived with it" a while. My lowest months are 500 searches, and a few higher, but one month goes up to 1300 searches. The "killer app", and what made me subscribe when I started was being able to up/down-rank site results myself. Being able to just not see content farms is the starkest difference now vs when I use Google Search (it's striking and seems to make search downright useless).

I've used 0 "AI Tokens" for the entire period. (I've never found much use for their FastGPT or Universal summarizer, but I am already a heavy Claude, ChatGPT, and w/ Gemini 2.0 models, AI Studio user now). I was also subscribed to Perplexity Pro at a $10/mo introductory rate this past year, and while I enjoyed it when I used it, I found its utility somewhat situational and didn't renew at $200/y - I use Claude, ChatGPT, and AI Studio now w/ the Gemini 2.0 models extensively, and when I want search result analysis, I think both of the latter now fill that niche pretty well. I just saw thanks to this thread that Kagi's "Ultimate" tier has access to their new "Assistant" product, which looks pretty well thought out, so I'll be giving it a spin (they should probably give like once a day trial access or something if they're looking to grow it, most people probably wouldn't put down $25 sight unseen): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

Been using it for a year or two, but recently I've been making heavy use of LLM results using the ? character. I actually discovered this by accident while searching. Even though I have a ChatGPT subscription, the Kagi interface is faster to use for simple questions and I have web results underneath as a backup if the LLM answer isn't good enough. I agree with another poster that being able to test ultimate would be nice before I shell out more money.

How well does Kagi work for places outside the US and non-English languages?

I've only ever seen it mentioned by US users, so I have no clue how support is elsewhere. I briefly tried duckduckgo and its non-US/non-english search results seemed to be lacking (though this was about 2 years ago).

I use it with Arabic and I can say it is pretty good. I don't use technical searches in Arabic obviously but I find the quality of search in Arabic better than English without blocking many sites like I have with English. I live in the US though so the local results is not something I do in non-English.

I use it for Thai result (and sometimes English result relevant to the Thailand region). I found the experience similar to Google. Not once that I need to !g, and the times I do wanted to check Google were producing similar garbage. It still doesn't filter blogspams (where a business website would produce low quality content to appears in keywords) nor pushing small websites - forums and personal blogs are almost non-existent in both result pages, even though it might have been popular result when searching for pre-social media era content.

The deranking & blocking feature doesn't help much as it only sort the result. There are multiple "web portal" that may be useful in one category (eg. entertainment news, travel content) but producing clickbaits in other category (eg. local news) so domain-wide blocking isn't exactly usable here.

Unfortunately this is a major blind spot for Kagi. I am hoping they fix it soon. Forum thread: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-ideas-for-improving-localint...

That's exactly where Kagi is so-and-so: Google is much better at focusing results on locality rather than just language.

For instance, a search for Serbian terms will frequently turn up Croatian sites (they are largely the same language), which is not necessarily a problem unless you are looking to get a product locally or for a local place.

Google also does a better job of accepting both Cyrillic and Latin script (Serbian uses both, Croatian only the Latin script) for search terms and finding results in either script (a good test is to type something in Cyrillic and get results on a Croatian page), and I do not get results in Bulgarian or Russian (also using Cyrillic).

Kagi does some of that, but it's obviously a bit worse.

I've found it's got a lot better in the last year as a user from the UK.

Still English, but the results are a better fit.

For Dutch it is fine really. No issues.

I fallback to google when I need to search for anything shopping related, e.g. in what store can I get this item in my country.

I've found the opposite. One of the reasons I switched to kagi was that Google would not give results for NZ stores even though it had that location set, whereas kagi puts NZ results at the top

Works great in Danish

Try it! Kagi is the only search engine besides Google that caters to non-English searches.

Duckduckgo has a selector for country on the search results page, is this different somehow?

Try it and judge the quality of the results. I never got any quality non-English results from any alternative to Google, before trying Kagi.

Note that you should select your preferred non-English language as your standard language in Kagi and not the "International" option. You can still search in any language.

Thanks, I'll try that in Kagi! Still meaning to try it out in the first place after they rejected my first payment last time (took the money, didn't credit the account, refunded some time later, forgot to try again after that).

Must agree the quality of local results in DDG is mediocre, but then there's also simply much less information being posted in these minority languages (locals posting info in English and thus not matching the keywords, like I do nine out of ten times as well) so I don't know how good it could be in a perfect search engine

Orion on iOS is such a relief. I can have much needed extensions like uBlock Origin and DarkReader without which the web is a painful experience.

Great search. I use the summarizer all the time, and even occasionally use the small web. It's better than StumbleUpon. I really like Orion's site for bug reports and feature requests. I'm impressed by such a small team taking on browsers!

Kagi is amazing. The ability to permanently remove sites from the results and promote sites you want to see is a game changer.

I use duckduckgo and I get great search results. To get summaries of stuff that interesting, but not important, I use duck.ai, perplexity.ai or iask.ai.

Since I am happy with the searches, and it takes very little time, I do not want to pay 10 USD per month.

I do find it interesting that so many people have such great problems with their searches, but I suspect it is because they are searching for very complicated programming problems. Maybe then, duckduckgo does not work.

For me duckduckgo works great for programming stuff, but for searching local events and restaurants it does not perform as good.

> I do find it interesting that so many people have such great problems with their searches

Even ignoring the quality of the results, the idea that people refuse to pay 10 dollars for something as essential to life as a search engine continues to baffle me.

I think we can all agree on a couple of points:

- Information shapes our thoughts and our behaviour.

- Search engines provide and direct us to the majority of the information we consume.

- Thus, search engines have a significant influence on our thoughts and our behaviour.

How anyone can then conclude that the search engine of a hyper capitalistic ad company is the best alternative, just because it is 10 dollars cheaper, is beyond me.

Kagi Ultimate subscriber here (even got the t-shirt) and I love it. The other comments are all pretty spot-on.

I'll add that I adore the summarization feature and use it all the time with a bookmarklet (both on desktop and mobile). It's amazing for cutting to the chase of recommended links and YouTube videos (and for plopping the big ideas into Logseq, nvAlt, Obsidian, et cetera).

Big ups.

The t-shirt was kind of a disappointment though. relatively low quality. Love the search engine though!

It's great and I'm never going back as long as it stays great. But I have one complaint: Maps. I have no solution to offer, but google maps is so damn good, the maps in Kagi which appear when clicking certain results (e.g. looking for a doctor) are almost unusable for me (slow, outdated).

> The core experience is largely still dictated by Chromium’s foundation however.

It isn't, the core is always about the UI that you've dismissed. It's the reason I use their browser on iOS and customize a few annoying gestures away despite the more frequent app crashes vs Safari or other browsers and despite the fact that extension support is poor

> but Safari on iOS is the platonic ideal of mobile web browsing

Ah, that explains it, this was never true for me, too many UI issues with no way to customize/avoid them

I've been using Kagi now for about a year, at the $5/mo. level, on browsers both at home and at work. Only once have I run out of searches before the end of the month (though I have no idea how often I've come close). I'm not sure it's worth $10 a month either, though it's the only search engine I use and I'm very happy with it. Depends on whether I run out of searches before monthly renewal or not, I guess.

I would like to emphasise Yandex as free alternative for specific queries. It was really relieving actually finding what I searched for.

I tried Orion for a bit but unfortunately it is still a bit too unstable. The one bug that made me put it aside for now was Orion maxing out a CPU for no reason (while locked) and coming to my macbook burning to the touch with almost no battery. This happened to me twice. Otherwise the browser is really good

Interview with the founder.

https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416

One of the worst interviews I've listened to, unfortunately. That Gruber fellow should try to shut up a while and let his guests talk, instead of endlessly jabber on uninteresting details.

Been using Kagi for just over a year and I'm very happy with it.

I make about 1400 searches per month on average.

I have zero interest in the AI features and don't use any Apple devices, so Orion is also of no interest.

I recently set up my sister's phone to use Kagi. Her comment: Now I have to unlearn skipping the first three results!

Kagi is a good product, but using it means paying for it and financing Yandex, the Kremlin.

Not for me.

I’d happily pay for it if they stopped doing AI bullshit.

That I won’t pay for.

This isn't meant to persuade you, just sharing my own experience. I've found myself almost relying on Kagi's `Quick Answer`. Its fantastic having it off by default and being able to opt-in when I just want a quick summary of some brief search where the info cards don't give me what I want right away.

Agreed. I made a search for "big black sea bird with a name that starts with c" today, and the quick summary helped in a few seconds that Cormorant was the category I was trying to remember.

Glad I didn't have to click into results and dig through the faff, especially as there are plenty such birds.

And you don't have to pay for it? The lower tiers that Kagi offers doesn't have AI stuff it seems.

The lower tiers don't have Kagi Assistant, but they do have the Quick Answer and Summarization features. You can turn them off or not use them though, so it shouldn't really be an issue.

Ending a Kagi query with a ? gives ok responses with plenty of citations. And those citations are a goldmine when exploring an unknown topic. And it's unobtrusive. I don't see the issue.

Nice post.

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