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Comment by BlackjackCF | Hacker News Reader

I wasn’t really sure about paying for Kagi but I was convinced when I couldn’t find some meme video I saw only a year ago using Google, DDG, Bing, etc., but found it almost immediately using Kagi. I hadn’t realized how bad most search providers had gotten.

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Pretty much the same boat as far as "a single experience sealed the deal".

Had been having this recurring weird behaviour with the Apple TV. Every time it happened I'd spend a little while trying to search for it and figure out what was going on. The results were consistently completely irrelevant and useless. This had been ongoing for months.

First time it happened after I started my Kagi trial I tried looking for an answer with Kagi. Second result nailed it. Understood what was going on, pressed one button and put it back.

Then knowing the answer I went back and tried the exact same search with Google. I did find the answer... somewhere at result 50+ well past a link to Google Books offering me an article in a 2008 copy of Men's Health Magazine.

Didn't even use up the rest of my free trial. Subscribed right there and haven't looked back.

I don't know that Kagi's always better, but I've yet to run into anything where it's substantially _worse_. I haven't had a single instance where I've exhausted Kagi and tried Google and found a result there instead.

I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?

Try Yandex...

Not a bad solution if you're looking for things that are usually removed from results in the west, eg, torrents and stuff like that.

So streaming didn't kill the warez scene, it just got massively shadowbanned?

Yes and no. Because of aggressive action from IP holders a lot of these sites went underground and deliberately aren't indexed in the US and EU but providers from Russia or Switzerland got shadowbanned.

It's certainly not dead, but having access to cheap, high quality, easy to use alternatives certainly stopped many from using "pirated" content.

With price increases, more subscriptions needed, more restrictions, etc, we'll probably see more people sailing the high seas.

Or things from the old Internet that are not profitable, not advertised, don’t use Blog spam tactics, or https.

I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.

Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.

I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.

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