> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.
That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine.
How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?
I never realized before that sentence, but the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content. I might sign up to Kagi just for that.
Try it! After you'll be on a site that is just generated content, click backwards in the browser and remove the site from all your future kagi results. That's how search should work (and it should _not_ provide you a top 30 of random AI content).
To me Kagi is as much a life changer on the web as ad-blockers are:
Whenever I use a computer without them, I realize how poor the user experience is and how much time and energy is wasted just to filter noise from ads and poor content.
The fact that people who are not affiliated with the company go out of their way to suggest people to use kagi and pay with their hard earned money is a testament to how much people enjoy and value the product.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now. It’s worth a shot. I’ve been very happy with the quality of the results and I never find myself feeling like I should check google too.
> the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content
It's not just you.
If there are ads on a page, it means the advertisers own the author. He is not free to write what he wants, he is free to write only that which the almighty advertisers will tolerate being associated with. He will not write things which bite the hands that feed him.
I'm convinced writers like that will never write anything truly genuine. Chances are if you see ads anywhere you're reading self-serving generic clickbait content meant to attract attention and drive up ad impressions. It's not real, it's just "content", a generic square around which ads congregate like parasites.
I configured Reddit as a "Lense" (similar to what Kagi uses for things like searching across Forums, or news). With that, now I have a simple toggle at the top of Kagi which allows me to immediately turn a search into a Reddit search.
I did the same and added a custom bang so I can use it from the address bar directly (!r pointing at https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&l=8 where 8 is the lens id).
Probably least a third of my queries are preceded by an !r now. A third of the rest are now question mark queries that activates their AI fast answer. It's like the google info box on steroids since it can answer any query and it works with lenses to restrict the fast answer to specific domains.
It took me way too long to start using Lenses. I've been a Kagi user for a while now, but lenses never really seemed that useful. The unlock for me is that I'm often looking for 3D models, so I added one for all the usual 3D model suspects (Thangs, Printables, etc).
I've been on Kagi for some months now (six-ish?). Best subscription I carry.
I originally signed up purely out of spite for the SEO scam that is Pinterest (Kagi lets you blacklist domains), but have since been repeatedly pleased with other rankings.
I love that MDN tops the list for DOM ish searches and w3schools is not even in the results.
Using Kagi often makes me forget how awful the Internet can be.
Just entered this query as is, without configuring any lenses, and got a bunch of results from /r/synthdyi. I suppose it's good? I imagine if you use reddit a lot, you should bump its relevancy and add a lens for it, as other folks here described. But from that I see, it does decently even without that - even for topics where there's a lot of garbage contents, like reviews, it returns mostly the legit review sites, even though choosing which one do you trust would be a challenge. If you have your preferences, then bumping the relevance for these sites is easy.
> How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?
I’ve started using their quick answers to sort through the crud. In most cases, it catches and filters out the obviously-bought Reddit recommendations, surfacing bloggers and niche industry publications that did their own lab work.
Really well, I just have Reddit pinned so it’s (almost?) always one of the top results, without having to add “Reddit”. HN is another. Similarly, I have lots of domains that I’ve always hated seeing in results, nuked, so I never see them anymore. Kagi is amazing.
With everyone saying how great the "put down websites with ads is" there are exceptions (few probably)
One of them being vietnamcoracle.com, which is, without a doubt the best travel website for Vietnam (if you like to really go deeper.) None of the content is sponsored, just relevant ads (here you can rent a bike, book a tour etc) and they are discrete in general.
Between him researching new destinations and writing / updating/ replying to comments he just doesn't have a lot of time for the classic "money making job + sideproject".
I just imagine (hope) he's not the only website like that out there.
I don't currently use kagi but would prefer if there was an option to filter by ad type (everyone hates pop ups) and amount.
Anyway just my 2c.
With wolfram and the llm + more users I'm hopeful that in the longer term the price will go down and/or stay at 10$ over the longer term.
Hopefully the defaults handle nuance like you mentioned, but one of the other benefits of Kagi is you can boost/de-boost domains, so you can correct for things even if they're using an overly blunt approach. If enough people do that, it'll also bubble up on the leaderboard: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1
Kagi has a !reddit bang, but it sends you to the terrible reddit search.
I added a custom bang !reddit with "search?q=%s site:reddit.com" as the URL, which just adds site:reddit.com to the search
you guys are living in a dreamworld. I'm totally fine with a site that has "tracking" like Google analytics to help content makers and businesses alike make decisions. And have visited many a site with valuable content that might have been tracking me at the same time. This eliminates tons of valuable content.
I think this is a solid point. Google Analytics is a killer tool for website admins, and using _some_ kind of enhanced logging/parsing tool like this saves a ton of time over building your own solution or manually reviewing logs.
That said, I am still quite opposed to js that tracks users across the internet for advertisement purposes. I do use ad blockers despite the fact they block a lot of less-harmful tracking by default, which I don't love, but it's too much work to differentiate between. (At least adblock users are the minority of internet users in general, so hopefully Analytics users still get enough data to be helpful for their purposes.)
Honestly, I don't care to visit those businesses. Their sort of maximize-engagement attitude is the exact opposite of what I want.
I'd much rather get information from an individual or small group who is intrinsically motivated and is not just looking for the lowest bar of quality that won't make folks immediately bounce.
I also want to note that just putting Google Analytics on there doesn't kill the site's ranking. There are some sites that are just infested, and those are what get dramatically downranked.
I have been using Kagi for quite a while. When I’m looking for code stuff at work, I will get results from Reddit that come to the top or close to the top. It doesn’t throw all of Reddit away, even when I’m not specially looking for Reddit.
I just tried your search, without even adding “Reddit” on the end. At the very top was a “Discussions” section, which had a tile for Reddit. The first result was also Reddit, with a few discussions nested under it. The the gearspace forum, followed by YouTube, then it bunches up a bunch of those 10 ten lists that pollute Google all into a section that is easy to use or skip, then sweetwater music, and then funny enough, your comment here on HN. It keeps going, but yeah… Reddit isn’t deranked to the point of not being used, Kagi sees the value in discussion forums when looking for the “best” something.
I think quite well. I've been using kagi for a couple months and I'm super happy with it, esp for programming-adjacent searches. You should give it a try! (not an investor, just a happy user).
In case your in the bath, poked holes in the bar of soap and want to oscillate the bubbles in to midi notes so you can code your new cloud platform with Velato?
It's OK. One thing it does is rope "reddit" into the "Forums" Lens, which on face seems good but I search mostly for car stuff and forums are a trove there.
I’ve spent money on things because I had to, I’ve spent money because I wanted to. I have rarely spent money on something because the idea just sounded good and been so consistently pleased with what I received for my investment. It’s not free, but Kagi is a small investment for a vastly improved (and customizable) search experience.
But how will you live with yourself when every search for library documentation or a programming language doesn't flood the first page with expertsexchange, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, favtutor, freecodecamp, and a pile of other tissue-thin content covered with popups?
Hahahaha also sooo true.
Little Sergei Brin interned at his startup.
And how Apple Steve job and him had the many
discussions about search engine before search
engines were a thing. Wolfram practically invented
search. U will see on the follow up blog post
Please refrain from such inane, low-effort comments, regardless of how annoying Wolfram is. If you want to contribute to the discussion, say something about how this will impact Kagi.
Hahahahahahaha sooooo trrruuuueeeeeeee
Let’s upload also a 2 GB paper with lots
Of graphics and Mma code on ArXiv because
everyone on ArXiv is looking forward to it
I'm excited for this. I've found Kagi to be very useful having widgets like this, in addition to the search results being good. I still have DDG as my search engine for ephemeral searches[1] on my phone and I'm getting sick of it. I don't know if I'd say the result quality has been getting worse, it's just not good and hasn't been for years.
Kagi on the other hand feels like an ideal subscription service. It feels like what Google search wanted to become.
[1] To force me not to leave open tabs I don't really care about, my default browser is FireFox Focus, which is strictly "incognito" mode, which means I'd have to manually log in to Kagi every time I did a search.
On mobile incognito you'd need to access that session link and go from there. You cannot just use the address/search bar, as mobile browsers like Chrome do not include a config to put the link.
You can get something somewhat similar to Firefox Focus in regular Firefox for Android by enabling the option to open in Private tabs by default and turning on tab auto-closing. That's what I did for a while when there were indications that Firefox Focus was about to be abandoned (which never actually happened).
Even better though, now that Add Ons are opened up on Firefox for Android you can install Cookie AutoDelete. Then you just use regular tabs and can keep your Kagi cookies (and any other sites you regularly log into) but have it nuke every other site.
There is also a Kagi Add On. It didn't do pretty much anything when I first installed it last year but it might work these days.
Oh, and finally, there is the Kagi Session Link you can use that embeds a token in the URL so that you can more easily use it for something like a search provider in Incognito/Private tabs.
Imo ddg's mission is incompatible with today's web. The mission is simply to serve you regular Google/bing search, but without tracking and they do that well, but it is missing the absolute trash fire that those results are currently (yes, they have moved somewhat from that but clearly they are still heavily reliant on Google ranking). Kagi on the other hand, I spend 5$ a month on search that doesn't track me AND gives me great results. The open-source stuff (think of me when a bang now gives you https directly :D) is just the cherry on top.
> [1] To force me not to leave open tabs I don't really care about, my default browser is FireFox Focus, which is strictly "incognito" mode, which means I'd have to manually log in to Kagi every time I did a search.
I strongly recommend the Tab Wrangler extension. I set it to close any tabs that have not been visited in the last 6 hours. Of all the methods I've tried to deal with too many tabs, this has been the most effective.
On my phone, my solution has been working well for a few years.
FF Focus is my go-to browser, so most things I look up or do on the web vanish.
I have a second browser (Vanadium) with ~20 tabs open in different groups which I keep open perpetually. Things like my bank's site, my healthcare portal, other things I want to be able to stay logged into. Then there's one group for different articles I'm reading; these I close once I've exhausted the conversation and opened all the links I'm interested in.
(My desktop computer is a different matter entirely.)
So.... this is about a pay-subscription search engine called 'Kagi' out of Palo Alto, founded 2018.
Made me think and have to do some digging for the 'Kagi' out of Berkeley founded in the 90s where you could register your shareware purchases in the days before PayPal. Which seems to have been largely scrubbed from history outside of some WayBack snapshots.
Is that a bug? I interpret it as from midnight 2016-04-04 to the first time which has the date 2019-01-31. That includes the full day of 2016-04-04 but nothing from 2019-01-31. This is contrasted with the opposite direction which is midnight 2019-01-31 going backwards, thus not including 2019-01-31 and all the way up till the first time which is 2016-04-04 non-inclusive.
Both show 1032 days. Do space missions depend on such fuzzy defined time stamps as (calendar?) months? I think time dilation would be a much more serious factor.
I’ve been a paying Kagi customer for a few months now. It has reconciled me with search. Result quality is great, and the tools like fastgpt and the summarizer are precious.
I was a bit reluctant but I don’t regret doing it.
It feels like a glass of water on a hot day, when you didn't even realize you were thirsty. Suddenly you can find things again.
Recently I've been adding ? to a number of queries, to play with its knowledge graph and answering capabilities. It's been remarkably useful at surfacing information.
The feature to block sites is very very helpful. It is so much easier now to find small suppliers, get rid of all the blogspam. I can even block legit merchant sites that just aren't good and that I don't want to see clogging up my results.
I think it was Scott Galloway who said that advertisement is a tax on the stupid and poor. It’s been true for news for a long time. It’s becoming, with Kagi, true for search.
I like Kagi, and this integration seems useful, but I'm wary of search engines showing "widgets". That is often a slippery slope that incentivizes them to add more features to keep me on their site, instead of leading me towards what I'm looking for.
A search engine should show web results based on my query. That's it. Some summaries and highlights are useful, but show them in the sidebar, and make them optional.
If I need a calculator, I have plenty to choose from, including the Wolphram Alpha site.
If I need an answer to a question, LLMs do a good job at that.
Please don't make the common mistake of making your search engine "useful". My average session on your site should last seconds, which is the time it takes me to see the results, and click on the most relevant one. If you achieve that, you're doing a great job.
If I am paying for a product and a 90% majority of its features I don't care about and only care about 10% of it working really well I'm going to feel like I'm overpaying since I only use and care about 10% of the product, but pay for 100% of it.
And if I were a paying customer I'd keep getting more and more weary if I see the focus of the product keeps being this 90% I don't care about.
Readit News
That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine.
How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?
Try it! After you'll be on a site that is just generated content, click backwards in the browser and remove the site from all your future kagi results. That's how search should work (and it should _not_ provide you a top 30 of random AI content).
My favourite feature is the customised down ranking I can do. No Pinterest etc for me.
Personally, if I could own Kagi stock, I would.
It's not just you.
If there are ads on a page, it means the advertisers own the author. He is not free to write what he wants, he is free to write only that which the almighty advertisers will tolerate being associated with. He will not write things which bite the hands that feed him.
I'm convinced writers like that will never write anything truly genuine. Chances are if you see ads anywhere you're reading self-serving generic clickbait content meant to attract attention and drive up ad impressions. It's not real, it's just "content", a generic square around which ads congregate like parasites.
Probably least a third of my queries are preceded by an !r now. A third of the rest are now question mark queries that activates their AI fast answer. It's like the google info box on steroids since it can answer any query and it works with lenses to restrict the fast answer to specific domains.
I originally signed up purely out of spite for the SEO scam that is Pinterest (Kagi lets you blacklist domains), but have since been repeatedly pleased with other rankings.
I love that MDN tops the list for DOM ish searches and w3schools is not even in the results.
Using Kagi often makes me forget how awful the Internet can be.
I’ve started using their quick answers to sort through the crud. In most cases, it catches and filters out the obviously-bought Reddit recommendations, surfacing bloggers and niche industry publications that did their own lab work.
One of them being vietnamcoracle.com, which is, without a doubt the best travel website for Vietnam (if you like to really go deeper.) None of the content is sponsored, just relevant ads (here you can rent a bike, book a tour etc) and they are discrete in general.
Between him researching new destinations and writing / updating/ replying to comments he just doesn't have a lot of time for the classic "money making job + sideproject".
I just imagine (hope) he's not the only website like that out there.
I don't currently use kagi but would prefer if there was an option to filter by ad type (everyone hates pop ups) and amount.
Anyway just my 2c.
With wolfram and the llm + more users I'm hopeful that in the longer term the price will go down and/or stay at 10$ over the longer term.
They aren’t eliminating it, just downranking it. Given Kagi’s search quality, ad and tracking density seems to negatively correlate with site quality.
So on Google you miss out on things that might otherwise be hidden gems because Google wouldn't rank it as highly.
There are tradeoffs on both sides.
That said, I am still quite opposed to js that tracks users across the internet for advertisement purposes. I do use ad blockers despite the fact they block a lot of less-harmful tracking by default, which I don't love, but it's too much work to differentiate between. (At least adblock users are the minority of internet users in general, so hopefully Analytics users still get enough data to be helpful for their purposes.)
I'd much rather get information from an individual or small group who is intrinsically motivated and is not just looking for the lowest bar of quality that won't make folks immediately bounce.
I also want to note that just putting Google Analytics on there doesn't kill the site's ranking. There are some sites that are just infested, and those are what get dramatically downranked.
I just tried your search, without even adding “Reddit” on the end. At the very top was a “Discussions” section, which had a tile for Reddit. The first result was also Reddit, with a few discussions nested under it. The the gearspace forum, followed by YouTube, then it bunches up a bunch of those 10 ten lists that pollute Google all into a section that is easy to use or skip, then sweetwater music, and then funny enough, your comment here on HN. It keeps going, but yeah… Reddit isn’t deranked to the point of not being used, Kagi sees the value in discussion forums when looking for the “best” something.
Do they filter out reddit or just small ma and pa sites with adsense?
best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers+...
best waterproof midi synthesizers https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers&...
Deleted Comment
Feature request: block a domain?
"saab 900 power steering rack -reddit"
still returns a ton of reddit results.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...
You can block specific domains, as well as make them rank lower. And if you ever want to ignore those rules, you can easily do that too!
Not affiliated with Kagi in any way, just a very happy user.
Dead Comment
This is interesting. I guess we will soon read a longwinded post about it from the first person perspective.
Deleted Comment
"Kagi" goes first to get under his skin just a little bit.
Deleted Comment
Kagi on the other hand feels like an ideal subscription service. It feels like what Google search wanted to become.
[1] To force me not to leave open tabs I don't really care about, my default browser is FireFox Focus, which is strictly "incognito" mode, which means I'd have to manually log in to Kagi every time I did a search.
[0] https://kagi.com/settings?p=user_details
Even better though, now that Add Ons are opened up on Firefox for Android you can install Cookie AutoDelete. Then you just use regular tabs and can keep your Kagi cookies (and any other sites you regularly log into) but have it nuke every other site.
There is also a Kagi Add On. It didn't do pretty much anything when I first installed it last year but it might work these days.
Oh, and finally, there is the Kagi Session Link you can use that embeds a token in the URL so that you can more easily use it for something like a search provider in Incognito/Private tabs.
Oh that was you, thank you!
I don't understand your answer. Isn't that a good thing? Why are you missing trash on DDG?
I strongly recommend the Tab Wrangler extension. I set it to close any tabs that have not been visited in the last 6 hours. Of all the methods I've tried to deal with too many tabs, this has been the most effective.
FF Focus is my go-to browser, so most things I look up or do on the web vanish.
I have a second browser (Vanadium) with ~20 tabs open in different groups which I keep open perpetually. Things like my bank's site, my healthcare portal, other things I want to be able to stay logged into. Then there's one group for different articles I'm reading; these I close once I've exhausted the conversation and opened all the links I'm interested in.
(My desktop computer is a different matter entirely.)
Made me think and have to do some digging for the 'Kagi' out of Berkeley founded in the 90s where you could register your shareware purchases in the days before PayPal. Which seems to have been largely scrubbed from history outside of some WayBack snapshots.
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#are-you-affiliated-w...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2016-04-04+to+2019-01-3... = 2 years 9 months 27 days
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-31+to+2016-04-0... = 2 years 9 months 26 days
The duration should be identical but is off by one day.
One day a space mission will fail due to this bug.
Reported several times, they never cared.
both show an identical duration of 2 years 9 months 26 days (edit: despite reporting 1032 and 1031 days respectively).
Months are lunar. Days are solar.
Jan 2024 - Nov 2023 example (both cases show "2 months 1 day"):
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-01-31+to+2023-11-2...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-01-30+to+2023-11-2...
Aug 2024 - Jun 2024 example (same bug):
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-08-31+to+2024-06-2...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-08-30+to+2024-06-2...
The same thing doesn't happen from Jul 2024 - May 2024 (results vary by 1 day):
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-07-31+to+2024-05-2...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-07-30+to+2024-05-2...
Date time arithmetic is weird ;)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-31+to+2015-10-2... = 3 years 3 months 10 days
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2015-10-21+to+2019-01-3... = 3 years 3 months 10 days
I was a bit reluctant but I don’t regret doing it.
Really happy to see Wolfram added to it!
Recently I've been adding ? to a number of queries, to play with its knowledge graph and answering capabilities. It's been remarkably useful at surfacing information.
A search engine should show web results based on my query. That's it. Some summaries and highlights are useful, but show them in the sidebar, and make them optional.
If I need a calculator, I have plenty to choose from, including the Wolphram Alpha site.
If I need an answer to a question, LLMs do a good job at that.
Please don't make the common mistake of making your search engine "useful". My average session on your site should last seconds, which is the time it takes me to see the results, and click on the most relevant one. If you achieve that, you're doing a great job.
If I am paying for a product and a 90% majority of its features I don't care about and only care about 10% of it working really well I'm going to feel like I'm overpaying since I only use and care about 10% of the product, but pay for 100% of it.
And if I were a paying customer I'd keep getting more and more weary if I see the focus of the product keeps being this 90% I don't care about.