But once I did it, that was very great, and a source of joy in my life. No regret at all.
I didn't realize Google had gotten so bad. They've been cooking their frogs for a long time
I signed up for the 100 search free trial, and in that, Kagi was as good as, or better than, Google.
I then began also to use the filtering Kagi offers, and that simple feature makes a big difference.
I'm currently on the starter package (5 USD/month for 300).
Kagi also provide an Onion service - but of course you do have to be logged in, so your searches can be logged and be known as coming from you in particular (as you provided payment method), which is the downside of paying.
Much as anonymous payment systems are abused, they have utility for ordinary people.
It's funny in a way the reluctance people have to part with relatively small amounts of money like $5 or $10 a month for something so core. Given the amount of complaining online about being the product instead of the customer, you'd think more people would jump at the chance to establish the proper relationship with their primary source of information on the internet for the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee or a fast-food meal.
Just that alone is easily worth the cost, not to mention the drastically better search results, and the ability to customize things intentionally, based on what you actually want, versus what Google thinks you should want, or more like what their actual customers, the advertisers, think you should want.
And it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so.
That said, a lot of people want it, so I hold no grudge that they do it. It certainly is reasonable use of AI compared to others.
Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan? Are you saying you’d feel better if they charged you $9 and turned off quick answers? (Which are totally optional to use.)
But the search itself is worth $10/mo. if you ask me.
I subscribed a year before I bought into AI, and I was very happy with it.
I believe you're funding a free tier more than you're funding AI product research.
It’s very frustrating that “turn it off” is a fucking afterthought to “turn it on” for a service I pay for.
Kagi is an AI-oriented company from the start, not an “… and AI!” gimmick. AI-curated search results are believed to eventually replace normal search results.
If I just want a factoid on a website, I might as well have a program crawl and scan for it.
If I want the summary and I don’t bother reading the long version, I might as well have a program crawl and summarise.
If I want specific details in a big document, and I am not familiar with the wording to look for, I might as well prompt.
It’s like complaining about shellfish at a seafood restaurant. :-)
If I want a factoid on a website, I want to see it with my own eyes, not filtered through some non-deterministic shit machine that might tell me the right answer. To each their own but me getting what I want doesn't get in your way at all, so we should both be able to use Kagi the way we want to.
Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan?
Regarding your point b: Heavily disagree. Even ignoring HN's seeming love for Kagi, surely you must have noticed the narrative about how AI is fixing search? People asking ChatGPT or Bing instead of googling things? Why would they do that if they were satisfied with Google? Also, Google search quality worsening has been a common news headline for years now.
EDIT: Two people have emailed me, so if you are reading this you are too late.
And yeah, to the GP: Understand that fans of paid services like Fastmail and Kagi aren't shills... we're just... enthusiastic about stuff that's just... so much better. And yeah, there's probably some sense that for paid services to take hold for things like this, more people coming to it is a good thing.
It only falls down if you care about taste and quality.
Honestly it was odd to read an article about leaving Google search as if it was a momentous thing. $10/month or whatever is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
It's been over 18 months I'm a paying customer and have absolutely no regrets, I cannot stand Google search anymore after being used to Kagi's results and tools.
Anecdata, and I have yet to switch myself, but Google has gotten noticeably worse over the past few years and I’ve been considering it.
https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-...
Not having half page of the results with ads is also great.
And in addition, results are not only from Google/Bing and other sources but they also use their own index.
Id consider using their browser too if it worked with Private Relay, but alas.
I don't think I've deliberately done a Google search since I signed up, apart from to check that the !g option works as expected with the Safari extension (c'mon Apple, support custom search engines already)
Is it easy to launch a Google search from Kagi if you need this kind of functionality?
For local businesses I always search on Google instead, that’s the main topic in which it is clearly superior still.