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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

For search, use Kagi. You don’t have to use their AI products at all to just use search.

If Kagi made a cheaper "no AI" tier I would be happy to subscribe. AI is costly to run, so even if you don't use the AI it's priced into your subscription fee - you're paying for an expensive product you don't want or use.

e: according to Kagi's pricing page they do have a 'no AI' tier, but it limits your number of searches to 300/month. Seems like a totally arbitrary limitation, but its still better than forced AI.

Yeah I'm on the 300 per month tier. I tend to hit that limit after about 3 weeks, which is certainly annoying.

yeah I hit it in about two. I just signed up monthly to try it out for a bit but am wavering on whether I consider it worth it. It's good but I'm not sure it's enough better than DDG to pay for.

And for AI I'd usually rather have API access and use it with tools rather than a web chat.

I understand your point in general, but I don’t think it applies to Kagi. Users were paying the same monthly fee and then the company added those features on with no extra subscription cost. I also like that it doesn’t clutter my search. It doesn’t appear unless I press the AI button or end my search with a question mark (can also be disabled).

The only extra costs are if you use the (opt-in optional) AI Assistant which is a web UI to access various models for chatting purposes. As an aside, they recently updated this UI so it’s actually usable as a ChatGPT or Claude alternative.

Left field tip if you think a search engine is hiding stuff: Yandex. They're not actually Russian any more, but they're far enough down the list of search engines that nobody bothers to DMCA them.

They are in fact Russian any more, the Dutch company that owned Yandex sold to Russian investors last July.

Maybe you have a Chinese search engine to suggest? North Korean should be even better

Strongly agree. Whenever I search something and am met with a sea of

TOP 10 X; THE 20 BEST Y; 20 REASONS Z; etc.

I go Kagi and am immediately refreshed.

And yet Kagi isn't anywhere near as good as Google was ~13 years ago.

Yes - a big part of that is that online content is so much worse than it used to be. But it became bad over time because of what Google incentivized.

Google ~13 years ago dealt with a much less complicated search landscape where

1. Its own products weren't (as much) part of the search result quality problem. Today Google has hungry product managers from Ads, Youtube, and various AI products convincing higher-ups that their product deserves higher placement. That placement used to be sacrosanct.

2. The daily volume of AI-generated garbage content 13 years ago was probably a rounding error in today's volume

So Google was operating in a different landscape than Kagi of today. They had to do a lot less to achieve the quality they had.

I disagree that that Kagi "isn't anywhere near as good as Google was ~13 years ago". It's near. For me personally, it's better because I'm never served first-party ads.

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