I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
To illustrate how good kagi is, here's the things it's not as good at (for me):
1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today
2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index.
3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info explicitly stated, otherwise "best restaurants" returns a list of restaurants in Poland for example. Sort of inherent to the privacy thing though.
Everything else, all the normal queries work as well or better for me than Google.
I am a huge fan of Kagi, been using it for 6+ months now as my “main” search engine. However, I find that queries in my native language (Swedish) results in way less accurate results than if the query was in English.
I would still recommend it to anyone, it’s heaps better than anything else.
In the old days, I could search for something niche on Google and get blogs/enthusiast websites. Does Kagi do that, or will I only get commercial results like modern Google?
I've had Kagi for several months now and have no desire to go back. Brave is horrible, DDG is bad, and Google is bad AND Google. I decided it was time to trim subscriptions a few months ago and chose to ditch ChatGPT and keep Kagi.
Yep. Last month, I finally hit the $5/mo plan limit of 300 searches per month & upgraded to the $10/mo unlimited plan. Totally worth it not to waste my time sifting through garbage SEO sites on Google or half-assed DuckDuckGo search results.
I love that you can pin, raise or lower results from specific websites. They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins. It's wonderful. Trust me too, it's worth it. ~850 searches a month here.
It's still around, but their search results are lackluster; I was constantly having to rerun the same query in Google to find what I knew was out there. Kagi's search results are way better -- close enough to how good Google used to be 10-15yrs ago that I'm willing to pay $10/mo for it.
I really like Kagi and this is probably Apple’s fault but the requirement to install a safari extension which then hijacks your default search is very janky and is my #1 complaint.
Any reason it can’t just be added as a search engine?
Even on other browsers, you need an extension if you want search in private browsing mode to work, since the private tabs/windows don't have access to your Kagi signin cookie. I generally just use DuckDuckGo when I open a private window, though, to avoid needing another extension.
I've been using Kagi for 6 months and I honestly don't know how they do it, it's amazing and it makes me want to vomit every time I see Google or DuckDuckGo, Bing etc.
One important thing people rarely mention is that it is so fast. It's so much faster than Google to show results, makes it for a much smoother searching flow.
I recently heard of SearXNG and I use it instead now. Where I live $10 is a lot of money, more than it's worth to me especially considering I use LLMs a lot now instead. I find I search a lot less now.
And I like the way SearXNG is self-hosted. You can configure and prioritise a lot. And it can even search torrent sites etc.
I used to think Kagi had their own index but as far as I've heard most of it is actually meta results from other engines, just re-ordered.
The only thing I miss is an integration with ChatGPT, that would be amazing.
I used to use open SearXNG instances, but the results still have all the inapplicable garbage in them that I can't filter out. And the results are often incredibly slow. I switched to Kagi because it gave me better results from the get go, and I can customize to block all results from things like YouTube or various poor GitHub/StackOverflow content clones.
Where did you find hosting for SearXNG that costs less than $10/month? I have my own server and I can barely get a public reverse proxy to bypass CGNAT for that price.
Also, SearXNG isn't very easy to add custom "always block these domains" lists last I looked.
They do have their own index which is used to detect how many ads the website has etc and for small web / blog searches, but they use meta results to have more results.
Also, they do have integration with multiple LLMs - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral and their own
I've been using Kagi since June of 2022, daily. I had to use Google the other day because I was on someone else's PC and in that moment I was reminded just how awful Google's search has become. You genuinely see how you're the product when you use Google these days.
It only feels that way because search has been free essentially forever.
But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain!
Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's steep.
If you had two pubs next to each other, one selling the best beer in the world for $1 a pint and the other giving away free low quality beer, the one giving away free beer would have an enormous line and the other a few people inside. You just can't argue with free when it comes to most people. People will drive for hours to get a free hot dog. People have got it in their head that things on the computer screen have to be free and you can't easily take that out of their heads.
No, it feels that way because music is a monthly service, any media is a monthly service cost, backups are monthly service cost, news are a monthly service cost, VPN is a monthly service cost, internet is of course a monthly service cost, password management is a monthly service cost, anti-malware/AV is a monthly service cost, ...this list just goes on and on.
And they want $10/month for unlimited searches full well and knowing $5/300 isn't even a reasonable bracket for half of us.
It's steep, and we're all swimming in in these costs.
$5/unlimited would be more reasonable, but it still piles on all these SaaS costs that everyone now uses. Gotta grow grow grow grow you know. Capitalism is great!
I'm always surprised how cheap software engineers can be when purchasing products created by other software engineers, specifically designed around their needs.
No matter where you live on earth, if you're a software engineer $10/month is nothing. I seriously don't think you would notice if someone was quietly stealing $10 a month from you.
And yet that $10 a month would pay for a product that nearly all of us in this community wish existed.
But the biggest irony for me, is that all software engineers get paid what they do because someone on the other side of their business is willing to pay a lot more for what ever service you're ultimately helping to build. If everyone was this cheap about software, software engineers would be making minimum wage.
If you're in the Silicon Valley and spend most of your day on the Internet, $10 for superb search is a no-brainer.
If you're a student / postgrad somewhere in the US, it still likely feels worth the price, even though $10 is already not below the threshold of observability.
If you are, say, somewhere in Thailand, or Uzbekistan, or Botswana, the $10/mo become unironically noticeable: not prohibitive, but you really want to get a lot of value in exchange.
And basically anywhere in the world, if you're a kid, and mom and dad would not buy Kagi for you, you're out of luck.
Every company is legally required to collect sales tax above certain threshold (defined by each jurisdiction). Kagi passed the threshold in most places and now needs to start collecting it.
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1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today
2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index.
3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info explicitly stated, otherwise "best restaurants" returns a list of restaurants in Poland for example. Sort of inherent to the privacy thing though.
Everything else, all the normal queries work as well or better for me than Google.
I would still recommend it to anyone, it’s heaps better than anything else.
It's pretty much the only thing I still use Google for.
That sounds really interesting, have to check those out! I've only used that feature minimally so far.
What happened to Duck Duck Go?
Its still there and still my goto search engine when I'm not on one of my personal devices.
I just prefer Kagi now because I pay for it so I'm their customer not their product. I also like the configuration options Kagi offers.
Any reason it can’t just be added as a search engine?
I guess they took it away. Ridiculous.
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One important thing people rarely mention is that it is so fast. It's so much faster than Google to show results, makes it for a much smoother searching flow.
However, it seems like it isn't added to the select menu yet, but it can be accessed by changing sub_mode to 8 in the url query.
But now that I'm using Kagi with super fast unlimited searches I almost never feel the need to ask one of these AI things anymore.
And I like the way SearXNG is self-hosted. You can configure and prioritise a lot. And it can even search torrent sites etc.
I used to think Kagi had their own index but as far as I've heard most of it is actually meta results from other engines, just re-ordered.
The only thing I miss is an integration with ChatGPT, that would be amazing.
Where did you find hosting for SearXNG that costs less than $10/month? I have my own server and I can barely get a public reverse proxy to bypass CGNAT for that price. Also, SearXNG isn't very easy to add custom "always block these domains" lists last I looked.
Also, they do have integration with multiple LLMs - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral and their own
But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain!
Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's steep.
And they want $10/month for unlimited searches full well and knowing $5/300 isn't even a reasonable bracket for half of us.
It's steep, and we're all swimming in in these costs.
$5/unlimited would be more reasonable, but it still piles on all these SaaS costs that everyone now uses. Gotta grow grow grow grow you know. Capitalism is great!
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It was fairly common to use the web before people used Google, or even Altavista.
No matter where you live on earth, if you're a software engineer $10/month is nothing. I seriously don't think you would notice if someone was quietly stealing $10 a month from you.
And yet that $10 a month would pay for a product that nearly all of us in this community wish existed.
But the biggest irony for me, is that all software engineers get paid what they do because someone on the other side of their business is willing to pay a lot more for what ever service you're ultimately helping to build. If everyone was this cheap about software, software engineers would be making minimum wage.
https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=individual&per...
If you're a student / postgrad somewhere in the US, it still likely feels worth the price, even though $10 is already not below the threshold of observability.
If you are, say, somewhere in Thailand, or Uzbekistan, or Botswana, the $10/mo become unironically noticeable: not prohibitive, but you really want to get a lot of value in exchange.
And basically anywhere in the world, if you're a kid, and mom and dad would not buy Kagi for you, you're out of luck.