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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster. Knowing there are no ads and results are higher quality removes a mental load I didn’t know I was carrying.

It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.

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These comments feel like llm authored astro turfing…

I'm sure they aren't. Folk (like me!) love Kago.

> Kago

Nice try, LLM! I'm onto you!

It's a funny claim about me, who doesn't use any LLMs for writing, coding or reducing any kind of mental or manual load.

My comments are on the open, and I can answer any question or comment you have about any of them. :)

No offense taken though. Made me smile while drinking my tea. :)

> Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster.

Likely, the "It's not X, it's Y" phrasing is what probably rang the LLM alarm bells.

Yeah, I figured the same thing after reading my comment and chuckled. :)

LLM's are trained on human phrasings. So now we can't use human phrasings anymore?

I am one of those people that used to write em dashes – and now I self-censor them out of my writings :(

I still use them too. Don’t listen to these nerds. Self censoring is awful.

Wow! Can I ask how Kagi is best for your uses? Would love to try myself

Oh, this appeared late in my feed.

I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further. Same for image search which can also filter out AI generated images.

Also, I find lenses very useful (which is a way to limit your search radius) to search for specific things in the specific parts of the internet. i.e. you can define a lens with specific websites for a subject, and if you need something precisely, you can only search these websites.

I recently started to use SlopStop reporting to weed out AI generated webpages from search results, too.

Lastly, all AI features are opt-in. No summaries, no widgets, no extra "bells and whistles" if you don't want on your result page.

> I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further.

I had an annual Kagi subscription that I let lapse not long ago. That was hands-down the best feature, so I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates it for DuckDuckGo. DDG also lets you turn off ads.

I'd gladly return once they fix the integration issues. In Safari, the redirect via the extension is a bit wonky at times.

Surprisingly, Kagi is actually just a really good business. Look at my comments, I despise AI spam and call it out wherever possible.

I'm a customer of Kagi who is in no way affiliated with Kagi, other than sending them money. I agree with bayindirh: It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

I know that we live in a world where tech increasingly sucks, and positive comments on tech are (correctly!) seen as suspicious. The thing, though, is that Kagi is genuinely just a great product, and search is such a central part of using the Internet that good, trustworthy search makes a huge difference.

>trustworthy search makes a huge difference

That's the rub. Today on the internet, no one can validate that there exists any "trustworthy search". If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it. Most often that someone is a marketing person at the hosting organization. Occasionally it's a random comment on the internet behind a pseudonym we know nothing about.

People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.

Kagi's business model also aligns incentives better than an ad and/or data mining fueled business model. Of course, this isn't proof, but it is evidence. One can also try the search in areas that one knows deeply and compare it to other search engines to see if it's truly better (I have not done this, but it is possible and isn't just trusting marketing.).

I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.

> If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it

That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.

> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.

I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.

The entire point of the Constitution was to not trust each other. We wouldn't even need checks or balances if trust were a reasonable governing philosophy. Nor a Bill of Rights, nor any explicit admonition against slavery.

The reason we need these and many more is that we don't trust each other. And it's wise that we don't.

This doesn't mean trust is bad, only that the founders, rightfully, knew that it leads to complacency.

What's landed us where we are is not a lack of trust. (We've lacked trust from day one, that's how we got the Constitution in the first place). What's landed us here is complacency.

It's distrust - in foreigners, in each other - that got extremists elected, and it's distrust - in the media, in the institutions - that gives them unchecked power to destroy the country.

None of which would have happened if we had not gotten so complacent about defending our democracy through vigorous enforcement of the Constitution, and voting in a fashion more informed by wisdom than emotion.

At the root of all you lament is not lack of trust, it is complacency. Decades long complacency.

Lack of trust is what our republic was founded on, and the entire reason it was structured the way it was. Our republic is specifically designed to function in a trust-free environment.

But no republic, nor any other organizational construct, no matter how well designed, will survive complacency.

You know who else sounds like LLM from time to time? ESL - English as a Second Language. People learn English from books, and get introduced to phrases through reading or interacting with others within the same community. So, it sounds like you're using the LLM argument as a way to diminish their voices as well.

As an ESL person who has spoken English as their main language for two decades now I find this very interesting. The vast majority of my English has been spoken with my wife who used to be a marketing VP or in a professional context. Sometimes people complain about the ways politicians or corporate executives talk and I don't get it and to me it sounds totally normal because that's what I'm used to. Makes you wonder how ESL speakers will sound more and more like LLMs because that's a large part of their exposure.

As a native English speaker, I worry about picking up LLM-speak simply due to interacting with Claude Code all day.

I think we're good https://www.instagram.com/ahh.gpt/reel/Da12ufvt69B/

As an ESL, it hurts me to see the atrophy of written English. "Your right!" is just painful.

As an English phrase, that isn't strictly wrong, but I understand what you mean and it's your right to complain. ;)

It's only correct if "your right" is used as in "his right", "her right", "their right". Usually what they mean is "you are right", ergo "you're right", and they are just not educated enough to know how it's spelt.

That's because many (most?) LLM chatbots were pre-trained by Kenyan ESL people

On the other hand, your comment sounds to me like Anti-Kagi astroturfing.

Together, both comments make a good example of the reason one should not trust what one reads on the internet.

It sucks. But there's just too much astro-turfing.

Yeah that one was praising in a non-specific way. Whether or not it’s genuinely a user, it did feel like astroturfing, which is sad if it’s a real comment that they can’t compliment a good service.

If I wrote the features that I like, and god forbid I use a bullet list, then I'll be labeled as a LLM user or LLM again.

What do you want me to do? :)

I can answer your questions if you want? :D

Edit: Heh, I saw your other comment, too.

That comment was obviously LLM authored but it is true. Using Kagi really does feel like taking off a huge weight. Or generally any service where you're used to being the product and then you become the customer instead.

> That comment was obviously LLM authored...

Wanna bet? =]

This one is so short and only has one LLM-ism, it's entirely possible it was human, I'm 60/40 on it. Unless you are 100% sure it was LLM, please don't call it out.

The funny thing is, In my whole life, this is probably the first time I have used that form, and I wrote it in a completely honest way.

I just want to bang my head to the keyboard.

Reading LLM's all day makes me really cynical, and I have to suppress the urge to judge all text written in that sense. SO I get where they are coming from, but people need to consider that they can be wrong, and that there is a real person whose feelings you can hurt by saying "OH this is like LLM, gotem!"

I can relate, because I also try to understand whether the text I'm reading is written by a human or emitted by a model constantly, and I don't use any LLMs day to day.

On the other hand, I'm not new in the internet, and have relatively thick skin. I'm very amused today by the unintentional attention I got with my cloudy, morning brain.

Nevertheless, regardless of what we do, believe or say, we shall be kind first and remember https://xkcd.com/438/ dearly.

This is what I'm trying to do all the time, but I'm not perfect. Just a human, trying his best.

Thank you for words of support and love the background picture on your website.

Hey! Thanks a ton. I took that photo while waiting to board. I don't remember which airport though, need to look at its date. It's an old one.

Thanks again for everything!

/ot Hamburger menu at the bottom right is pretty nice too. Haven’t seen it there before but seems like a very user friendly choice for its placement.

eww

It's one thing to throw in a, "hey, I've used this service and I recommend it to others," but this is just gross, blatant advertising.

> It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Even if this is true, only an LLM would ever believe posting this sentence would come off as anything other than bullshit lol

Thanks for your opinion about my opinion of a service and its effects on my life.

If you can provide me your contact details, I'd love to send my similar comments to you and get them cleared by you to satisfy your standards of endorsement.

For your information and entertainment, ZeroGPT returns 97% human for that whole comment which I wrote while having my breakfast and my phone was laying on the table.

Unbelievable.

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