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Comment by the_pwner224 | Hacker News Reader

I switched about a year ago. At the time it did seem like a step up from Google results. But there's been an increasing prevalence of low quality results. Blogspam, AI websites, etc. Obviously not blaming Kagi here, web search has gotten hard recently.

Is Kagi still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point I feel like I'm with them out of inertia more than being an avid supporter. One of these days I'll re-evaluate Google and decide whether to switch back or not.

It does occasionally surface interesting results from small sites that you wouldn't get on Google. I do find that to be useful.

Kagi definitely isn't a bad search engine by any means. Honestly if you haven't used it, try the 100 search free trial on one device. Maybe you'll like it. This feels more like a general decline of the open web.

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I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience, Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's "better than Google".

"Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites to exclude from my search results are two features that I remain willing to pay for, however.

DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free

Only up to five of them, which is almost completely useless.

Blocking Pinterest is not completely useless.

The top seven blocked domains on Kagi are all Pinterest: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

Failing to block Pinterest and then also having no room for anything else is almost completely useless.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.

I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

I’m confused by this comment. The original comments talk about Kagi not living up to the hype. You say you’ve had the same experience and wish you could get LLMs to use Kagi for web searches?

Especially odd as that’s exactly what Kagi assistant already does. Maybe they’d just rather use their key than pay Kagi for LLM based search.

On that note, Kagi research is legit amazing. There have been times I’ve spent 30min searching for something without success. As a last resort I asked Kagi research and it found why I could not. More than one option even. Now intend to use almost more than normal search.

Yeah, I agree with other comments here that the traditional search offering has gotten a bit worse (I think because the whole web has gotten worse), but research surfaces great results. Forums, small blogs and websites with authoritative views on subjects I search for. Really great. Yes, it is as expensive as any other AI pro plan unfortunately, but worth it for me.

I'm extremely confused by these comments. Are we all using the same google? Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I just did a search on Google and 1/2 the page was a combination of google AI result and ads. Below that there were 2.5 links visible. One reddit result, and two blogspam.

The exact same search on Kagi ('best lllm for coding') nets reddit, hacker news, and some other forum results right at the top, followed by a long dense list of links to various sites (including some of the same blogspam of course), but over all the results are hugely more rich and varied and also not at all the same.

How can you possibly say that a site that gives you 50% ads and a bunch of low quality links is remotely "only a little better" than a site that gives you zero ads and a huge number of better quality links?

I just block all those results on Google for free with uBlock Origin and uBlacklist.

I've been using it for 2.5 years at this point, and have the same experience. I don't think it's hopeless, but Kagi will need to step up their methods. IMO, there's actually a lot they can do here.

Everyone has to answer for themselves why they would be OK with Google hoovering up their data in order to deliver substandard results, vs Kagi actively working to remove low-quality results all while collecting no personal data.

Yes. I use both (Google only at work) and Kagi is certainly no worse and comes with the massive benefit of simply not being Google. It's worth paying for for that reason alone, even if the engineers at Google are constantly working on making sure I'm tracked anyway.

I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved is what's keeping me with Kagi.

Is usage based pricing available?

I'm thinking of trying it out Kagi, but adding another monthly commitment is what's holding me back.

A single credit top-up and occasional usage until the credits run out sounds good to me.

Edit: Kagi has a starter plan with 100 free searches: https://kagi.com/pricing

Also, from the Kagi privacy pass FAQ at https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq:

    *Do you plan to allow purchasing privacy pass tokens without having an account?*

    Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be 'loaded' with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know *here* ( https://kagifeedback.org/d/6163-kagi-privacy-pass )  if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it.

Personally I don't like being signed in during searches, this seems like a good solution.

"the effort involved"

Feels like your comment saying it was too much effort to cancel Kagi took more effort than cancelling Kagi.

Actually their payment model has some baked in niceness.

If you don't use the service in a month, they just refund you. This has kept me from unsubscribing for years now. Some months I use it, some I don't.

It's more of hassle to unsub, and re-sub again when I want.

I think you're right, haha

It’s definitely not Kagi’s fault. The AI slop is simply taking effect and I feel sorry for them. I never expected them to match Google’s quality, but I was impressed with how close it was when I used it a few years ago.

Kagi used to use Google's search API. They discuss the current state of their index here: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Buried under a lot of complaints about fairness, Kagi mentions they are still using Google search results, just without authorization.

> Because direct licensing isn't available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page).

So in one sense, yes, Kagi isn't quite Google, but in another sense, it very much still is.

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