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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

I tried out paid kagi for a 3 months (even if you pay in bitcoin they still require your address). One thing you might want to know before going in is that Kagi does not return many search results. It never returns more than two short pages of results (~100). It is impossible to use Kagi like you'd use a search engine from 1995-2015 to 'surf' the web and find things by accident. That said, google only ever returns <400 results and Bing only ever returns <900. So there are no real options for search these days.

I thought paid Kagi would be a real search engine. But it's not. And Kagi's browser is closed source so that's a no go too.

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I’m a happy Kagi customer, but that’s an interesting use case for a search engine that I hadn’t previously considered. Is there a “golden era” of search engines returning results for discovery?

I use forums, wikis, and content aggregators (e.g. Reddit) to discover related topics. If a search engine returns too many results, I refine my search terms.

In my mind, the three eras of search engines are:

1) Before Google.

2) Google before ‘08.

3) Google after ‘08.

1 and 2 were both pretty good for just exploring.

I think Google after around 2022 is also another phase, where it became completely unusable.

They probably need your address for tax purposes. Especially the EU is really strict on charging us VAT for foreign purchases.

It does completely kill the anonymity though, I agree. It's strange that in this case they're worse than something like duck duck go. Because they don't require payment they simply have less data on you (especially confirmed data). I'm sure kagi protects it but the data you don't even have is even better protected.

You can detach searching from any association with your paid account:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

Yeah but that means trusting them.

I don't need to trust anyone not to share information they don't even have.

They should really allow anonymous payments like mullvad does. There you're just a random number and you can pay with crypto without any addresses.

Privacy Pass removes the need for 'trust'. It gives you cryptographical guarantees of anonymity.

Just as long as you now give your trust to the Kagi made browser extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-privacy-...) that is required and has access to your browser. Big yikes.

Big yikes? Is it not open source? https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension

Can you explain your use case? Looking at hundreds of results from a search query doesn't strike me as "finding things by accident", but I'm curious to know more.

I used to do this too - it used to be that after you passed the first couple of pages of results from the major/mainstream sites the rest would be minor personal websites, forums, and similar. Find one good article on one of them and it was often worth adding to your bookmarks or RSS collection to ensure you saw the writer's later additions.

Kagi has its “web” search, but you can switch to “small web” and get results like this. Or the “forums” lens if looking for user generated content.

My use case for a search engine is for the search engine to return all URLs that match the search pattern I enter. Then I decide which of these I want to visit, not the search engine, becuase the search engine doesn't and cannot know what I want (especially since I might not even know). It's job is to spider the web and create the database for me to search in. It's job is not to tell me what I want like a social networking site.

Have you tried kagi small web?

https://kagi.com/smallweb/

It’s not “browse search results” but more “curated stumbleupon”.

You can also change your search lens from just generic “web” to “small web”, “forums”, “academic” etc or create your own lenses.

I don’t think these answer your particular browsing pattern, but I for one am happy that it doesn’t return hundreds of results. I feel like that is kind of the point, even. I’d rather get fewer, but better, results and have it just say “look buddy, there isn’t anything else”. Plus, I’m not stopped from just adding `!g` to the query and getting 1000 garbage Google results if I want.

Even when Google was good I can't really recall ever browsing beyond 100 results unless I was looking for a post in a forum, so I don't know that this is really a knock against them given that their value proposition is that you pay them and they don't collect your data. I do find it surprising that so many people in this thread seem to be excited about Orion; I'm not interested in using anything proprietary to browse the web.

> they still require your address

Provide a random one if this matters to you? It's not like they have any way to check.

you may like to try https://marginalia-search.com which is great for finding things unexpectedly and much more from the small internet. https://stract.com is great too

https://millionshort.com/ might be the search engine you are looking for.

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