Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

https://blog.kagi.com/search-enhancements

by bluish29 • 3 years ago

167 158 3 years ago

blog.kagi.com

One thing that'd be nice is if they saved your selection of temperature scales. Currently they always show Celsius by default, but let you switch to Fahrenheit if you dare. I know that preferring Fahrenheit makes me a reprobate, but is this a hill they want to die on? Are they being paid by Big Metric? I'm logged in, go ahead and save it to my profile.

gamegoblin• 3 years ago

Looks like it's on the backlog https://kagifeedback.org/d/862-weather-always-defaults-to-ce...

sph3• 3 years ago

Big Metric is a group of French scientists from the 18th century going around with a 1 metre long, 1 Kg heavy stick of pure platinum, hitting people's shins whenever they hear nonsense like "it's cold, it's only 50 degrees this morning" or "is that a 39 and 3/8ths inch stick in your hand?"

DanHulton• 3 years ago

Oh wow, these are legitimately all good improvements. Some are things I'd use, some are, I'm sure, going to appreciated by others, but what's pointedly not anywhere on this list (except cheekily in a few screenshots) is any sort of AI-powered nonsense. I know they mentioned a while back that they were working on some tooling of that sort, but boy am I happy that (in this release at least), they focused on features that genuinely improve and extend the search experience.

Happy to keep paying for this.

evanrelf• 3 years ago

It's possible a form of AI (depending on your definition of the term) is powering some of these features, but it's used as an implementation detail, not a marketing term, which I appreciate.

stavros3• 3 years ago

What's the problem with AI, and why is it nonsense?

mulmen• 3 years ago

AI is hot right now. It’s literally a buzzword. When projects add AI to something that doesn’t need it that’s nonsense. So the claim is not that all AI is nonsense. The claim is that Kagi is refreshing for not using AI nonsensically.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Time to give Kagi another go, Google is ruined for me, I just can’t use Microsoft products. Will try again.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

I use Kagi exclusively. The results are just as bad as googles, but isn’t covered in spam. Given the sorry state of search quality in the SEO garbage world we live in, that’s high praise. I’m happy to spend the money every month.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Thanks, I felt similar last time I used it. Wasn’t magic like I remember Google being.

I wonder what happened to Google?

My theory is maybe their own systems have become too complex for them to understand and tune now. But they’ve invested so heavily into “AI” they don’t known where else to go in order to fix it ?

I’ve here seen or experienced a search product quite like Google used to be. It truly felt like magic in it’s day.

PrimeMcFly2• 3 years ago

Why not just use Startpage?

KomoD3• 3 years ago

The only thing I found interesting/useful was public records search

pzmarzly• 3 years ago

The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app.

Overall, while I'm still not sure whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying, I keep doing it so that they can release improvements like this one. Their quick development speed is great to see.

KomoD3• 3 years ago

The reverse image search is going to be super useful for me as Google recently ruined theirs in attempt to promote their Lens app.

I always found Google's to be pretty bad, I like to use Yandex for reverse image search since theirs is crazy good.

whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying

Honestly, searches being limited just kills it for me, I don't feel like paying per search nor $25/mo, I do close to 200-250 searches per day, sometimes >500

endisneigh2• 3 years ago

Can never get into Kagi. You pay for privacy but if it’s ever sold your privacy will be retroactively taken and will be even more valuable since it will be known by the buyer that you pay.

Better off using a VPN and duck or Brave imho.

In any case these improvements do look very good. Public record search is cool. Lenses improvements look interesting as that seems the be the most unique feature.

ocdtrekkie• 3 years ago

Your privacy can't be retroactively taken: Kagi does not store your search history. The only search history you have is local, your own web browser.

paiute• 3 years ago

I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.

fafzv• 3 years ago

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual

I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or four times per day". They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.

Sakos• 3 years ago

They literally provide sources for those claims. I have no idea how you can say with a straight face that they're dishonest. They're very clear and transparent about how their plans are limited.

It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5.

They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges.

Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do.

edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.

stavros3• 3 years ago

The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.

solarkraft2• 3 years ago

My IDE supports enough lines of code for 99% of jobs!

unshavedyak4• 3 years ago

They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.

Fwiw, i pay for Kagi and i am totally inline with their estimates. Maybe a pinch more, 7 instead of 4 atm. But at $5/m i can't complain, and so far (it's new to me) i've found myself not falling back to Google.

I was on DDG for ~2 years and i constantly opened up Startpage (aka Google) and sometimes even Google. I've been very happy with Kagi, so far.

Not sure i'd pay $20/m, but $5/m is a very nice value to me. I hope things work well for them.

edit: Sidenote, but the first thing i noticed is just how damn fast Kagi is. Not really a selling point to me, but wow.

1123581321• 3 years ago

It's completely honest. You don't have a sense of typical use. I'd argue search power users make fewer searches a day, too, but like you, and unlike Kagi, I can't back that up with sources.

Jochim4• 3 years ago

I was vaguely aware of Kagi from their posts here in the past and thought it sounded interesting but hadn't bothered trying it out as I'm fairly happy with DDG.

I just gave it a quick try there. While some of the features seem promising, the website ranking for example, what they consider a search doesn't feel great from a user perspective. Each step below resulted in part of my quota being used up:

1. Making the initial search.

2. Switching to image results.

3. Waiting a few minutes before switching back to the web results.

4. Viewing page 2 of the web results.

5. Ordering results by time.

6. Changing the sort order to descending. The previous step executed another search without allowing me to modify this.

7. Limiting the search to results from the past 24 hours. This returns a totally different set of results from when we merely sorted by most recent.

8. (Sometimes) Clearing the filters.

9. Opening the Lens > Edit menu, which has a big cross at the top right making it look like an overlay. Instead, it actually sends a GET request for the search again, using up your quota if you've exceeded whatever the grace period is.

This, along with nearly tripling the price for existing subscribers that want the same functionality does not inspire confidence or goodwill. The change might've been more palatable if they'd kept a single subscription and put a monthly price cap on additional search fees to match the $25 unlimited tier.

Maybe I'm not the target user but the 100 lifetime trial searches just means I probably won't return once I've ran out. 25/100 are already gone to evaluating what they charge for and I don't think I'll get a good idea of whether they're actually providing value over existing providers with the remaining 75. The amount charged isn't low enough that it's not a decision.

The main justification for all this seems to be that adding AI to the search experience is expensive. The obvious rebuttal is that if AI is such a big value-add why don't they just charge for that service in a higher tier or as an add-on.

cetra3• 3 years ago

~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day.

There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

It doesn't quite sit right in the same way github actions charges per minute: The slower their runners are, the more money they make.

And both of these scenarios there is no user agency to assist with that past a certain point.

endisneigh2• 3 years ago

To be fair to same disincentive exists with ads, and any timed work. Ideally you’d be paid per successful search but that’s an intractable problem.

runnerup• 3 years ago

they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable.

Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan.

The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.

jpalomaki• 3 years ago

they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers.

Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, where you assume 80% of low volume users will cover the costs for the 20% heavy users

hattmall• 3 years ago

I don't know, it seems low, but it works for me, but I still just use Google for most things. Like most of my searches are simple things where Google is fine. Recipes, weather, easy queries. For more advanced stuff where Google doesn't work I use kagi with fair success. Like today I was looking for an obituary from 1843 and Google just kept giving me shit about the Ukraine War. Kagi worked! But also gave me some Ukraine War results, but somehow the most relevant page was near the top of Kagi but nowhere to be found on Google even with multiple searches.

levidos• 3 years ago

So you essentially have to budget your queries to make sure you have enough. Which is unproductive. The "simple queries" should already be cached aon the server and should not even count to the quota.

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

It also doesn't say what currency it's in anywhere on that page. Is that my local currency or (presumably) USD? That makes a very large difference to my price.

KomoD3• 3 years ago

USD

freediver24• 3 years ago

(Kagi founder here)

You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot).

But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential.

How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

eipi10_hn2• 3 years ago

I'm currently in Early Adopter ($10) plan. If I move to $5 tier plan and move back to $10 plan in the future, which plan would I be at that time? Is it still Early Adopter?

danpalmer2• 3 years ago

How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.

As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that group because they won't pay for search, but for users who would pay for search they might see that tier and feel that the quotas are stingy and they're being forced up the pricing tiers for behaviour that to them feels normal.

I don't know what your subscriber base looks like, but as an armchair spectator... I'd probably drop the $5/m tier and then emphasise that the "Professional" tier comes with "10x the number of searches that an average internet user makes", or whatever the multiplier actually is.

Also it would probably go some way towards assuaging fears of running out of searches if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.

aigoochamna• 3 years ago

Why not offer a bare bones subscription, like $2.50 per-month and charge by usage volume every month?

dcow3• 3 years ago

Don't change anything. Your marketing is just fine. The commenter you're responding to is just voicing their surprise at discovering that most people don't actually use the internet as much as they do, or they're realizing they don't user it as much as they thought they did month over month, and, either way, consequently feeling insecure. They don't understand the difference between current user base and target market. You don't market to your current user base. You market to your target demographic. Like you said, if Kagi wants to attract average internet users, then having a plan that suites them is pretty important and in no way dishonest. I experience the same knee-jerk reaction when reviewing your recent pricing plan changes/updates. Then I thought about it for two seconds and obviously understood.

janandonly2• 3 years ago

Would you consider making a pay-per-search model for the occasional users?

This way one search is maybe $0,05 or whatever, but at least one can use KAGI without signing up for an account.

Several paywall solutions exist for this, like:

- http://paywall.lightningj.org/ - https://medium.com/@infolightningj/lightningj-paywall-bringi...

emacdona2• 3 years ago

How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

"Includes enough searches for X% of current Kagi users"

benhurmarcel• 3 years ago

I currently subscribe to the $5 plan, and I'm happy with that.

Most searches I do are simple, any search engine will do. So I don't use Kagi for those. When it's not trivial, I just start my search with "k " to use Kagi. I easily stay below the 200 searches limit then.

For sure it would be more convenient to have unlimited searches, but I'm not willing to pay for a higher plan.

alexruf2• 3 years ago

Having a low entry is very important to get new users on board. But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway). This makes the standard plan absolutely unattractive even for non-tech-savvy professionals. But the professional plan also only offers 700 searches for $10.

Personally, I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches. Otherwise I don't know if I can judge $10 per month for a premium search engine whose service will not even last me for a whole month.

Don't get me wrong. I love the product and would be happy to pay for it, but your current pricing plans are just not very convincing to me and do not fit most peoples needs. Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

i hit my 1000 search limit yesterday, and my cycle is up in a little over a week. I was a little miffed, but there is a helpful button that just redos your search in google

it was my first time using google search in a few months since i started kagi, but.... have google's results become better?

maybe voting with our wallets worked, and google is rolling back some of their less popular recent ranking changes

desro• 3 years ago

FWIW I've been using Kagi exclusively since Nov 2022, and here's what my monthly usage looks like:

  Apr 2023 - 895
  Mar 2023 - 1047
  Feb 2023 - 650
  Jan 2023 - 603
  Dec 2022 - 1367

Trends much higher when I screw something up on my network!

I have been asking GPT-* a lot of what I would have previously searched for. And there's still a lot of searching `+reddit.com` because they can't seem to solve search.

I pay $10/mo and am grandfathered in as an "early adopter" with 1K searches. I would be willing to pay more because I've been so happy with it. It's simple stuff -- it respects and obeys my double quotes and boolean operators. If my query returns no results, I get no results. No advertisements, period. The ability to pin, raise, lower, or eliminate the rank of domains in your results.

It's just nice to feel a modicum of respect as someone who's been using computers since shortly after they could read.

keyle• 3 years ago

Yeah. It's just sad that it was what search was, for free, before. This idea that you search for things, and you find them, instead of paid per word shitty articles and ads. Nutty concept in 2023.

At this point, the free options are so bad I'm considering writing my own. It won't do 50% of what the big ones do but it will do it well.

piva00• 3 years ago

I started using Kagi exclusively around the same time, I'm almost exactly on the same boat as you. Interesting to see that even though you seem to have a bit more variance than I do we land around the same range of searches/month:

    Apr 2023  651
    Mar 2023  708
    Feb 2023  613
    Jan 2023  611
    Dec 2022  759

drcongo• 3 years ago

Apparently I've been using Kagi a year longer than that but I can't work out how to find my stats though. I signed up to the Team plan for my company as soon as I saw it was available - before Kagi I couldn't imagine paying for search, now though, I couldn't live without it. It's impossible to overstate how useful a functioning search turns out to be.

csomar• 3 years ago

I was a customer for a few months until they decide to raise it. I do, on average, 30-40 searches per day. I'll need the $25 plan and while they are (subjectively) better than Google, I couldn't really justify the price bump.

radicalriddler2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately I stopped using Kagi just due to it not being worth the money for me personally.

But look at the company using bearblog.dev, that's awesome. bearblog.dev remains one of my favorite services I've found through HackerNews.

esafak3• 3 years ago

Same here. Too expensive after the pricing change and their browser is irredeemably buggy. I gave them a chance.

On to neeva.

radicalriddler2• 3 years ago

I was more talking about their search. It was fine, but it wasn't worth the money for me. The browser didn't really pique my interest on release but I wouldn't expect it to be great on release (they're still a small company, but they're doing some really ambitious stuff which is cool)

solarkraft2• 3 years ago

their browser is irredeemably buggy

Seconded. I gave it a few months, but it just wouldn't improve by itself. To be fair: With a detailed bug report (via Discord, making it excruciatingly hard to find duplicates/follow up), the problem would often be fixed in the next release.

But it wasn't 1 or 2, it was more like 20 easily spotted issues. Come on, I can't do all of your testing.

I think I've never said it this clearly because I don't want to offend (I still very much like the browser's concept), but it was just too painful for regular use for me.

This about a year ago. Your comment seems to indicate that it hasn't changed.

rebeccaskinner• 3 years ago

I’m currently on a grandfathered plan. When that’s up I’ve thought about whether I should look around elsewhere due to the price increase. Ultimately I don’t think I want search to be a race to the bottom. There’s no guarantee that any service provider will remain aligned with users and privacy long term, but kagi is bootstrapped and I’d rather pay more than push them toward needing to look for other monetization strategies that might be more adversarial to my interests.

skinkestek4• 3 years ago

their browser is irredeemably buggy.

Are we talking about Orion? It is one of my absolute favorites!

On to neeva.

Not available where I lived last I checked, which also means I now don't like them.

Please someone who knows neeva let me know if they are good enough to forget that they disrespected me last time ;-)

jiveturkey• 3 years ago

Not sure how orion is related. You can still use kagi search (or neeva) with any browser ...

I've rage quite Orion a couple times. But I keep going back. Some of the features are great. I use multiple browsers anyway so I'm ok with using Orion for the bulk of my browsing, then using other browsers each for certain sites or for certain uses. I'd love to work for them but I don't see a viable business model.

My SO uses multiple browsers as well although I can't make head nor tail what their "strategy" is for choosing. I doubt that having to switch up browsers is acceptable for the public at large.

I imagine there's a /reason/ you were using kagi, and that reason is probably privacy related? Why then would you use neeva as an alternative? Started by ad execs. There is zero chance neeva has your privacy in mind, no matter what they say about it. They are focused on pushing consumer products. This requires user profiles.

richardbarosky• 3 years ago

"Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews."

This is a breath of fresh air. Ever since CNN Underscored started being a thing, I've grown to dislike more and more the swamp of affiliate link promoting content.

Some concent creaters on YouTube for example (like randomfrankp), are able pull it off, but deeply affects the credibility of most content.

mtlynch2• 3 years ago

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for four months for both work and personal use, and it's been a great experience.

The only time I find myself re-doing a search in Google is when I want to look something up in Google Maps, but everything else, Kagi is on par with Google or better. I really like that Kagi lets me filter out blogspam results and sites that are just remixing content from StackOverflow.

CapmCrackaWaka• 3 years ago

I have been using Kagi with good results too, but some things it completely shits the bed with. I wanted to find the AWS portal, so I searched for "AWS". First result, American Welding Society. Fine. Second is a medium article about AWS. The third is a reddit post about AWS. On down and down, the AWS website doesn't show up on the first page. So I searched "AWS Portal". Again, the AWS website does not show up. This is still happening for me. Just checked, I haven't blocked their domain. It's honestly such an outlier, I wonder if they intentionally blocked results from the AWS domain from showing up.

freediver24• 3 years ago

That sounds very odd indeed. I just checked and my results look as expected:

https://ibb.co/hmWNbyK

Do you mind sharing more information about this on kagifeedback.org so that we can have a look?

mtlynch2• 3 years ago

I get the same (relevant) results for the query of "aws" as freediver21.

I've never seen Kagi miss something blatantly obvious like that, so I echo sibling's suggestion to reach out to Kagi to investigate what's going wrong in your account.

toss1• 3 years ago

>down-ranking sites with a lot of ads and trackers more aggressively

This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move!

Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site.

It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine...

Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!

malikNF• 3 years ago

Kagi shopping results have no affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews."

Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to game the system over time.

freediver24• 3 years ago

Which is why we can not say how, but please check and let us know if the reviews sound unbiased :)

thewebcount2• 3 years ago

I’ve been using Kagi for almost a year now and love it. I’m on the early-adopter plan, but just checked and haven’t been anywhere near my included number of searches in the last 6 months. I probably do some searches with DDG on my work machine, so I’d probably being doing less than twice as many as I actually am if I set up my work machine to use Kagi. (But I like to keep work and home stuff separate.) Overall very impressed with it and also using the Orion browser and loving it.

j3s• 3 years ago

to anyone doubting: kagi really is that good. it has completely replaced my google usage - i haven't used google.com to search for anything in months. feels so good!!

Josteniok• 3 years ago

I was an early adopter of Kagi but I cancelled the moment they started messing with the plans. I know I'd have the early adopter flag but I just felt betrayed by the messaging and I also don't want to use a search engine where I'm trying to think about how many searches I'm making and if I'm going over a certain number. The updates in the article look pretty good but I can't get past those two issues.

browningstreet2• 3 years ago

I’m not going to count my searches and pay for tiers. Honestly, I could live without caring about search. It feels like another thing that could go by the wayside, like music albums.

I have Apple Music because it comes with my family plan, and I have YouTube Music because it comes with YouTube Premium. If I had to pay just for a music service — like Spotify — they wouldn’t get my money. Even if it’s the better music streaming option in my car. But my car also plays Apple Music.

The dark pattens and ubiquity of some of these verticals means not having to care too much and still getting most of what I want. I don’t really want to care about search the way some people care about vinyl.

toastal• 3 years ago

Do I have to be the guy to say that I still listen to music as whole albums and store my music for offline? Artists in a lot of genres still release the album as 'the music', where a song is like one chapter of the book and you wouldn't just read one chapter. I only stream during the discovery phase for new music and even then it's usually: one track good, okay then it's time to try the whole album. There has always been folks that prefer records to radio and it feels absurd to me that this would be going away.

browningstreet2• 3 years ago

I think individually we all have the right/option to make our choices, but I'm speaking to the market makers. If you want to be a vinyl shop (Kagi, Bandcamp), go for it. But you're not going to be Spotify -- or the Apple Music Store ($0.99 per track, remember?) -- in a world of TikTok and bundled music platforms.

And I have my personal version of vinyl, I listen a lot to soma.fm and Radio Paradise. It's very interesting to me personally how few other services like those really exist out in the world. There are things like DI.FM and Mixcloud, but I don't know anything else like Radio Paradise (music channels, forums, etc). I've scoured all the channels and platforms expose on TuneIn and the like, and there aren't quite as many variants as I would personally expect. So the niche music world isn't even as numerou$ as you'd want a long tail to be.

dcow3• 3 years ago

I pay for Kagi and never once have I needed to count my searches. I think the FUD is largely unfounded once you actually use the product.

eitland3• 3 years ago

Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now.

Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers.

For me it has value in two different ways:

1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you.

2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out.

I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas.

I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search:

- Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic)

- I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively

This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way.

I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.

viraptor• 3 years ago

but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text

All that content was created with existing SEO rules in mind. As soon as GPT-likes have established behaviour, we'll get new kind of content that specifically targets them. But at least we can enjoy better results in the meantime.

vosper• 3 years ago

Have you tried asking ChatGPT? That’s where all my technical questions start these days.

In the past few days it’s helped me with a bunch of k8s stuff (“explain this coredns log message”, “give me the kubectl command to show all events sorted by most recent first”, etc…)

eitland3• 3 years ago

Yep. I have started to like it a lot.

Lately I have started using https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt as well, which seems to be more up to date and less censored.

cvalka2• 3 years ago

Please note that the founder worked for GoDaddy!

vntok• 3 years ago

So?

cvalka2• 3 years ago

One of the worst companies in the history of the Internet era.

freediver24• 3 years ago

Yes from 2016-2018, amazing people, easily my best corporate experience.

Zuiii2• 3 years ago

In what sense if you don't mind me asking? Technical know-how, ethics?

smusamashah• 3 years ago

How good is Kagi at searching for very very old parts of the web? Sometimes I use google to search in some old date range e.g. between 2000-2005?

skinkestek4• 3 years ago

They build on top of Google and Bing and adds its own index as well so it should be reasonable, but I haven't tested.

However, I think it should be easier to filter down searches to only show these results as Kagis advanced search operators mostly work reliably (and if they don't you can file a bug).

philip-b• 3 years ago

I have 3 questions.

- How is your search in languages other than English and local to countries other than the US and Europe? In particular, I am interested in Russian and Turkish. I remember that previously (a year or two ago) it was not very good. Also, does your GPT based search work for other languages?

- How is phind.com related to kagi? I remember that at some point, I was searching for something on phind and got an error saying that Kagi is out of capacity or something like that.

- What underlying search providers do you currently use?

dcow3• 3 years ago

I am a happy paying customer and I love your product. Thank you for continuing to improve it. I LOVE paying for a good product. It's so weird.

pt_PT_guy• 3 years ago

Awesome features! Nice! Now work on reducing your costs and making each subscription with 5x more searches a month :D.

I was a subscriber and I absolutely hate the feeling of "spending" searches every time I search

Veen• 3 years ago

Amusingly, I searched for Kagi's founder and the new public records search section in the main results showed his citation for failing to stop at stop sign and a 2020 patent for "a search interface [that] allows the selection between multiple presentation modes".

https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05

freediver24• 3 years ago

It is amusing - and just for accuracy it was 'failing to stop at a stop sign, on a bicycle'.

TradingPlaces• 3 years ago

User since beta, subscriber since he started charging, and my primary search engine since January. About 500 searches a month. Very happy customer. I do a monthly sweep of subscriptions to make sure we are using all of it, and I never think about dropping Kagi. It keeps getting better, not worse like every other search engine, and the reason is because the user is the customer, not advertisers. Every ad-supported medium turns to shit, no matter where it starts out.

Zuiii2• 3 years ago

Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know a project that indexes webpages as I visit them in my browser? I revisit a lot of sites often and would like a private search engine that can search the content I have previously visited.

I'm downloading and rendering the web page on my browser anyway, so it seems like a giant waste not to index it while the page is open.

jaclaz• 3 years ago

I will throw this on the table (and quickly hide my hand behind my back):

If the price model (IMHO correctly) is connected to the actual costs of the search, why not make a "searches account"?

You pay 5$ per month as a "baseline" and each first of the month 200 searches are credited on your account.

Then, if you use less than 200 searches, at the end of the month you have a credit that goes over to next month.

If your credit goes to 0 within a month, you can buy "packets" of searches, 5$ for 200, 10$ for 500, or something like that, and recharge your account.

Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

Related Stories