Comment by tylervigen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylervigen | Hacker News Reader

I love and respect what Kagi is doing and I was a customer for years, but I recently canceled my subscription.

I found that have two main use cases:

1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.

2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.

I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.

Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.

For your first case, why not use the “?” operator to trigger an LLM response, or use Kagi Assistant (which gives you access to pretty much all the different models you might want to use)?

Thanks. I did not know this, but it triggers a different problem. Many of my LLM queries are for work. My company has data protection agreements with OpenAI, but not with Kagi. These matter more for LLMs than raw search.

For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.

For traveling I have found for cities where it is available CityMapper (started by ex-Google maps devs iirc) is superior to Google Maps in every way.

1) Kagi has had AI features for quite a while. And you get access to quite a wide variety of LLMs for the price.

2) Yeah this is the one thing I still use google for. Though they did recently update Kagi maps (a weeka ago I think?).

> less SEO spammed

I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).

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