I had a very very hard time to make the jump to Kagi passing the steps of "paying", and "setting kagi as my default browser" because of inertia, and also Fear Uncertainty and Doubt of change.
But once I did it, that was very great, and a source of joy in my life. No regret at all.
I signed up for the 100 search free trial, and in that, Kagi was as good as, or better than, Google.
I then began also to use the filtering Kagi offers, and that simple feature makes a big difference.
I'm currently on the starter package (5 USD/month for 300).
Kagi also provide an Onion service - but of course you do have to be logged in, so your searches can be logged and be known as coming from you in particular (as you provided payment method), which is the downside of paying.
Much as anonymous payment systems are abused, they have utility for ordinary people.
I know the feeling. I made the switch a few months ago, and haven't regretted it at all.
It's funny in a way the reluctance people have to part with relatively small amounts of money like $5 or $10 a month for something so core. Given the amount of complaining online about being the product instead of the customer, you'd think more people would jump at the chance to establish the proper relationship with their primary source of information on the internet for the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee or a fast-food meal.
Just that alone is easily worth the cost, not to mention the drastically better search results, and the ability to customize things intentionally, based on what you actually want, versus what Google thinks you should want, or more like what their actual customers, the advertisers, think you should want.
My problem with Kagi is the AI junk. I get that people want it, but I do not, and I don't want to pay for it. In other words, if there is no "zero AI" plan that is cheaper than the equivalent one with AI, then count me out.
And it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so.
That said, a lot of people want it, so I hold no grudge that they do it. It certainly is reasonable use of AI compared to others.
> it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so
Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan? Are you saying you’d feel better if they charged you $9 and turned off quick answers? (Which are totally optional to use.)
I find it difficult to trust these (recurring) Kagi is so much better comments. Because a) no one I personally know ever mentions it and b) everyone seems satisfied with Google.
That might be because Kagi currently has "only" 43,508 members, according to their live stats. That number might be too low for you to be able to expect someone in your personal circle to already be using and talking about it.
The number being this low isn't a bad thing, though. Kagi is already profitable and the number is growing, that's all that matters for now. There's a free tier that gets you 100 free searches (I'm testing it myself right now, haven't used it enough to really have an opinion on it yet).
Regarding your point b: Heavily disagree. Even ignoring HN's seeming love for Kagi, surely you must have noticed the narrative about how AI is fixing search? People asking ChatGPT or Bing instead of googling things? Why would they do that if they were satisfied with Google? Also, Google search quality worsening has been a common news headline for years now.
They recently gave out some 3-month free trial vouchers for users to give to friends. I have a spare one that I’d be happy to share with you if you’d like. Though I don’t know the best way to get it to you since I don’t think HN has DM functionality. Username is dperrin.01 on Signal if you’d like it.
I feel bad mentioning Kagi so much. But it’s a better product and I also want other people to use it so that it sticks around.
Honestly it was odd to read an article about leaving Google search as if it was a momentous thing. $10/month or whatever is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve introduced it to a small number of friends who do more research-oriented search (programming, law, building code, etc.) and the response has been positive. Paying for search is a difficult hurdle even for me as Google is just so deeply ingrained. Those who reached a tipping point with Google recently, thanks in large part to the terrible AI answers, are the ones who’ve stuck it out with Kagi. If you’re going to try it I recommend sticking with it for a week or so before fussing with any settings.
Are you implying people are shilling for it? You can look at my account here to check I've been around for more than a decade and I'm one of those praising Kagi whenever I can because it's a much, much improved experience than I was having with Google until I switched.
It's been over 18 months I'm a paying customer and have absolutely no regrets, I cannot stand Google search anymore after being used to Kagi's results and tools.
I recently switched to Kagi and it didn’t take me very long to get accustomed to it, surprisingly. Which is probably a good thing, since mostly “It Just Works.” Also I found it surprising that I apparently do like 400-500 searches a month.
Id consider using their browser too if it worked with Private Relay, but alas.
I was concerned that I would still be semi-reliant on Google Search for things like local business opening hours etc. While it's true that Kagi doesn't return that stuff at the top of a search (I'm outside the US so YMMV), in practice it's been a non-issue because the top result—rather than an ad or some AI nonsense—is just that business' website. So at most it's one extra click.
I don't think I've deliberately done a Google search since I signed up, apart from to check that the !g option works as expected with the Safari extension (c'mon Apple, support custom search engines already)
That's actually one of the main reasons I don't join... Where I live, many shops, bars and restaurants have opening hours in Google but don't even have an actual website.
Is it easy to launch a Google search from Kagi if you need this kind of functionality?
I subscribe to Kagi but I keep using other search engines for some specific searches. It’s really easy to do using “bangs”, or configuring them in your browser directly.
For local businesses I always search on Google instead, that’s the main topic in which it is clearly superior still.
Sure, they censor as well to their usual audience. However, The quality of search respectively is actually quite good. I usually get at least 4 relevant results, whereas google is 0.
The caveat is US based searches google still works best in, like 'where is restaurant or business'.
But for general material, google lost me 2y ago. I grew tired of the dumb games and bad irrelevant garbage shoveled instead of search results.
I feel like Google is using a lossy backend for searching now. Sometimes I'll search some rare phrase that I know must exist somewhere, and Yandex (and often Bing) will turn up exact matches from some random blogs/forums, while Google will return zero results. If it's some kind of LLM-style memory it'd explain why Google can't find some rare terms. Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
There have been several posts on HN about Google no longer indexing the entire internet. My understanding is that AI generated content has become so common that Google has become selective about which content it will index. If low traffic sites don't put effort into getting their content indexed then it won't appear in Google results.
> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
It can't be quite that, given that I've searched for exact phrases I knew exist on StackOverflow, and that Google no longer brings them up, but other search engines do.
> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
Google's poor search results drove me away years ago, so I wouldn't know if they changed this since then, but one of the many things that drove me away was that Google search refused to admit when it had no results and would instead just start including blatantly irrelevant results.
The primary source of frustration of Google being terrible at search these days is its penchant for ignoring search terms you use or giving you results for words that are spelled similar to what you searched for.
Google has an extreme bias towards giving you search results based on the most commonly available search results for a query that sorta-kinda-maybe sounds like yours.
That has nothing to so with personalization being turned on or off.
The case I recently ran into was trying to find information on the format of resource entries for New Executables (which is the executable file format for the Win16 era). Precious few of the results were even about NE in the first place; like half of them were on the ELF format (the Unixen file format), which doesn't even have a concept of a resource table, so you have to throw away most of the search string for the result to be even plausibly related.
You have not been able to trust any single search engine for a long time since all of them have their biases, their quirks, their blind sides, their errors and other reasons for not relying on them as sole search engine. This also goes for Kagi which so many around here tend to push with the same fervour they push Apple. Just because you pay for something does not make it good, just because you paid more than the person next to you does not mean you get the better product.
What then, you ask? Well, that is for you to decide. Choose a few search engines - real ones which create their own index, not only re-badged versions of Google or Bing - and use those in a round-robin schedule or search whatever you want in all of them. Use a meta-search engine like SearxNG [1] which submits your query to a select set of engines and shows the results from all in a single page (this is what I have been using for many years). Install YaCy [2] and create your own index for sites you frequent. Pick and choose, don't rely on a single source. This has been true for as long as web search engines exist.
When I read these stories complaining about Big Tech failing them I never perceive the problem as what the author is claiming it to be: e.g.,changes to Google search.
Instead, for whatever reason, I perceive the problem as the author's reliance on and even "trust" in Big Tech.
(Granted, the Google worship here makes sense considering he is working at "Android Police")
For example, the author's chosen title refers to "my search engine" rather than "a search engine".
Maybe I am just the wrong audience for these stories. Born into a world with companies making physical products and selling them for money instead of a world with intermediaries "selling" intangible "products" that are comprised of public information and performing unwanted surveillance on the "buyers".
Search is effectively an openly solved problem, not something privately held onto by a few with secret technology.
I haven't missed a single aspect of Google search having switched to Duckduckgo 2 years ago. As others have commented here, where search fails often LLMs step up.
The "Google is getting worse" trope is popular with a certain anti-mainstream segment but there's almost never examples of how something is wrong or bad or worse. This article has a few examples so I googled them myself:
- "release year modern love roadrunners" -> 1976 (not 1995 as claimed). This article was posted 5 hours ago. Why am I getting the correct results then? For the record, the search "roadrunner modern lovers" (as per the screenshot) also says 1976;
- "brian jonestown massacre anenome" -> lots of links including a video and lyrics (article claims was unknown or no details)
I really don't know why there's so much reality-bending to make this story true.
Google results are customized based on location, profile, ad settings, what random experiments you happen to get enrolled in, etc. Reality is indeed being bent, but only inside the personal search bubbles that you, the author, and every Google user lives in.
It's been well known for a long time that Google extensively customizes search results per individual based on dozens of unknown factors. It's entirely possible they get those particular search results right for one person and wrong for someone else, and nobody will ever know why.
Which makes things worse in a way - just like with LLM AIs, you can never be sure that what they give you is actually right unless you already know, so there's much less point in using them at all.
I'm not entirely sure what to say to someone who genuinely hasn't noticed that Google search results have gotten a lot worse in the last 5 years or so, regardless of whether any individual search result was right or wrong.
I feel like we're in year 10+ of this topic coming up to front page of HN with dozens of comments a couple of times a week. I've personally not noticed the degradation but I guess I'm a light google user, mainly just use it get to sites I already know about, I feel like the problem for all these people that are passionate about it is the vast majority of people not on HN are like me.
If a given fact is relatively new, I would expect (and forgive) search results to not necessarily reflect that.
But in this case we're talking about ~40 year old song. The reddit thread mentioned in the article is 10 months old.
I've also checked this logged in and incognito and get consistent (and seemingly correct) answers.
So what are we left with? Is the author in some experiment giving bad results? Were there bad results that got corrected between the time of writing and now? Did some Google search quality engineer see this and correct it?
All of these seem like a stretch. I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that Google has become worse but there are rarely conrete examples. It all just comes down to vibes. And when there are examples (as per this post), it doesn't match my experience. Can I really be that lucky? That seems to stretch credulity.
Probably the most egregious example of bad search results I've personally seen is how an astroturfed propaganda site was the top result for the Armenian genocide for literally years [1].
I had an interesting experience with the google search AI yesterday.
note: nerdy stuff ahead I was playing MTG with my son.
I asked google search a MTG question "Does the commander come in with summoning sickness"
The AI answered NO, but the link below suggested it did.
I accidentally clicked back which means I had to ask the question again if i wanted to look at those links.. so i did
This time the AI answered YES to exactly the same question I just asked a moment ago and got a NO answer for.
It was worded EXACTLY the same way.
This really highlights the lying bullshit factor to AI. You just cant trust it.
Readit News
But once I did it, that was very great, and a source of joy in my life. No regret at all.
I didn't realize Google had gotten so bad. They've been cooking their frogs for a long time
I signed up for the 100 search free trial, and in that, Kagi was as good as, or better than, Google.
I then began also to use the filtering Kagi offers, and that simple feature makes a big difference.
I'm currently on the starter package (5 USD/month for 300).
Kagi also provide an Onion service - but of course you do have to be logged in, so your searches can be logged and be known as coming from you in particular (as you provided payment method), which is the downside of paying.
Much as anonymous payment systems are abused, they have utility for ordinary people.
It's funny in a way the reluctance people have to part with relatively small amounts of money like $5 or $10 a month for something so core. Given the amount of complaining online about being the product instead of the customer, you'd think more people would jump at the chance to establish the proper relationship with their primary source of information on the internet for the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee or a fast-food meal.
Just that alone is easily worth the cost, not to mention the drastically better search results, and the ability to customize things intentionally, based on what you actually want, versus what Google thinks you should want, or more like what their actual customers, the advertisers, think you should want.
And it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so.
That said, a lot of people want it, so I hold no grudge that they do it. It certainly is reasonable use of AI compared to others.
Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan? Are you saying you’d feel better if they charged you $9 and turned off quick answers? (Which are totally optional to use.)
Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan?
Regarding your point b: Heavily disagree. Even ignoring HN's seeming love for Kagi, surely you must have noticed the narrative about how AI is fixing search? People asking ChatGPT or Bing instead of googling things? Why would they do that if they were satisfied with Google? Also, Google search quality worsening has been a common news headline for years now.
It only falls down if you care about taste and quality.
Honestly it was odd to read an article about leaving Google search as if it was a momentous thing. $10/month or whatever is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
It's been over 18 months I'm a paying customer and have absolutely no regrets, I cannot stand Google search anymore after being used to Kagi's results and tools.
Anecdata, and I have yet to switch myself, but Google has gotten noticeably worse over the past few years and I’ve been considering it.
https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-...
Id consider using their browser too if it worked with Private Relay, but alas.
I don't think I've deliberately done a Google search since I signed up, apart from to check that the !g option works as expected with the Safari extension (c'mon Apple, support custom search engines already)
Is it easy to launch a Google search from Kagi if you need this kind of functionality?
For local businesses I always search on Google instead, that’s the main topic in which it is clearly superior still.
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I've been using Yandex and Baidu recently.
Sure, they censor as well to their usual audience. However, The quality of search respectively is actually quite good. I usually get at least 4 relevant results, whereas google is 0.
The caveat is US based searches google still works best in, like 'where is restaurant or business'.
But for general material, google lost me 2y ago. I grew tired of the dumb games and bad irrelevant garbage shoveled instead of search results.
It can't be quite that, given that I've searched for exact phrases I knew exist on StackOverflow, and that Google no longer brings them up, but other search engines do.
Google's poor search results drove me away years ago, so I wouldn't know if they changed this since then, but one of the many things that drove me away was that Google search refused to admit when it had no results and would instead just start including blatantly irrelevant results.
They’re superior at finding shops on Maps.
But for common search, they’re mediocre and untrustworthy, hiding real results way down below irrelevant spam.
Who trusts an advertising company with search?
I have a feeling that turning it off is the greatest source of bad search results
Google has an extreme bias towards giving you search results based on the most commonly available search results for a query that sorta-kinda-maybe sounds like yours.
That has nothing to so with personalization being turned on or off.
If I search "flights to australia prices" I'm fine with google using my location for that, otherwise they show worse info
What then, you ask? Well, that is for you to decide. Choose a few search engines - real ones which create their own index, not only re-badged versions of Google or Bing - and use those in a round-robin schedule or search whatever you want in all of them. Use a meta-search engine like SearxNG [1] which submits your query to a select set of engines and shows the results from all in a single page (this is what I have been using for many years). Install YaCy [2] and create your own index for sites you frequent. Pick and choose, don't rely on a single source. This has been true for as long as web search engines exist.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[2] https://yacy.net/
When I read these stories complaining about Big Tech failing them I never perceive the problem as what the author is claiming it to be: e.g.,changes to Google search.
Instead, for whatever reason, I perceive the problem as the author's reliance on and even "trust" in Big Tech.
(Granted, the Google worship here makes sense considering he is working at "Android Police")
For example, the author's chosen title refers to "my search engine" rather than "a search engine".
Maybe I am just the wrong audience for these stories. Born into a world with companies making physical products and selling them for money instead of a world with intermediaries "selling" intangible "products" that are comprised of public information and performing unwanted surveillance on the "buyers".
I haven't missed a single aspect of Google search having switched to Duckduckgo 2 years ago. As others have commented here, where search fails often LLMs step up.
Injecting LLMs is half the reason Google Search is shit.
- "release year modern love roadrunners" -> 1976 (not 1995 as claimed). This article was posted 5 hours ago. Why am I getting the correct results then? For the record, the search "roadrunner modern lovers" (as per the screenshot) also says 1976;
- "brian jonestown massacre anenome" -> lots of links including a video and lyrics (article claims was unknown or no details)
I really don't know why there's so much reality-bending to make this story true.
Which makes things worse in a way - just like with LLM AIs, you can never be sure that what they give you is actually right unless you already know, so there's much less point in using them at all.
I'm not entirely sure what to say to someone who genuinely hasn't noticed that Google search results have gotten a lot worse in the last 5 years or so, regardless of whether any individual search result was right or wrong.
But in this case we're talking about ~40 year old song. The reddit thread mentioned in the article is 10 months old.
I've also checked this logged in and incognito and get consistent (and seemingly correct) answers.
So what are we left with? Is the author in some experiment giving bad results? Were there bad results that got corrected between the time of writing and now? Did some Google search quality engineer see this and correct it?
All of these seem like a stretch. I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that Google has become worse but there are rarely conrete examples. It all just comes down to vibes. And when there are examples (as per this post), it doesn't match my experience. Can I really be that lucky? That seems to stretch credulity.
Probably the most egregious example of bad search results I've personally seen is how an astroturfed propaganda site was the top result for the Armenian genocide for literally years [1].
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...
note: nerdy stuff ahead I was playing MTG with my son.
I asked google search a MTG question "Does the commander come in with summoning sickness"
The AI answered NO, but the link below suggested it did. I accidentally clicked back which means I had to ask the question again if i wanted to look at those links.. so i did
This time the AI answered YES to exactly the same question I just asked a moment ago and got a NO answer for. It was worded EXACTLY the same way.
This really highlights the lying bullshit factor to AI. You just cant trust it.