Another happy Kagi subscriber here. It's been 1.5 years now, and I've never looked back.
Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#32I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.
Not only is kagi private, but it is also genuinely a much better experience than Google or DDG. However, Brave Search is great if you want something free.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#33https://search.brave.com/ Feels like Google Search from 2008.
So many people sleep on Brave search. I agree, it's like Google from 08. It just searches for what you ask for. You can disable AI overviews. It's quick. Has a nice UI. It's free lol
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#34I gladly pay for Kagi because the experience is so much better that it’s worth it to me.
The value of Kagi is hard to overstate. You have to actually use it and try out the features.
Some things that I wish were different about Kagi:
I wish Kagi Ultimate LLM credits could be shared with the whole family, rather than each person having to sign up for an ultimate level account. That costs an additional $162/year per person, which makes no sense for my younger kids (even though their Research Agent and image generation would be great for my kids). This is actually the reason I’ve been hesitant to setup a family plan at all.
I wish I could use Kagi LLM routing as a generic LLM provider outside of Kagi Assistant. (I don’t really care that they charge ~4x the markup of openrouter; I just want one place to pay the bill and that it includes search is nice).
Alternatively, I wish Kagi would support BYOK.
I wish Kagi API search would simply draw down from the same bucket as LLM credits. I really don’t understand why they are splitting it up like this. I just want to give my local LLM harness a search tool hooked up to my $270/year account.
I wish clicking on the top left Kagi logo on Kagi News would just go back to the Kagi home page.
I wish Gmail hadn’t routed Kagi emails to junk, because I missed the Kagi early adopter free tshirt.
I wish Kagi would implement an Apple TV video app that I could use in place of the abomination that is YouTube.
I wish there were guides in Kagi help or the feature pages themselves that included lots of community examples of how to actually use Kagi features. Like I want the Kagi Redirect Rules for more than just routing Reddit to old Reddit.
There is a lot more. But I think this list is a ringing endorsement of Kagi. Objections betray interest. I use it constantly and can’t wait for it to get better.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#35What is bubblification?
Aside from a gratifying term, perhaps the absence of thumbnails, icons, or whatever you call those favicon buggers that distract from the important part of the search results?
I see this comment has made someone angry, but it may be the most plausible answer anyway. DuckDuckGo over-affiliates results with user-IPs, which is why I often don't use it. Not because of 'privacy', but because when I search for a specific subject, 99% percent of the time, I do not want localized results, eg when I search how to replace a valve on my vehicle, I am searching for instructions, not local mechanics, which comprises a significant portion of results I get from ddg, along with a few hotels, and restaurants which have nothing to do with my objective.
But I am not sure the comment is being downvoted for irrelevance or any other rational purpose.And ddg is not going to disable the IP bubbling for the lite version
Furthermore, I think we need a modified Godwin's law, to describe the inevitability of any discussion on HN regarding search engines to eventually turn into an ad for Kagi. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I think most people are not ready for a paid search engine.
But at least no one is saying "just use AI". That would be bad.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#36Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1] This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction. I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.…
Interesting. I'll give Ecosia/Qwant a go than as I'm not really interested in opting-out of a bubble.
Edit: hum, sadly, Qwant integration to Firefox seems to be broken at the moment.
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#37Why not simply go to DDG settings and disable AI if you dislike it ? (There they will also tell you about https://noai.duckduckgo.com )
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#38Another vote for Kagi from me. Been using it for 3 years now and not looked back. When you accidentally use Google to search, or use a browser with defaults, you will notice really how crap Google/Bing are!
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#39What is bubblification?
I think it's when the search engine starts answering with links "tailored" by your usage, effectively trapping you into a bubble. But I also never heard the "bubbling" verb.
Exactly. DuckDuckGo used to advertise themselves as a way to escape Google's search bubble[0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140720050529/http://dontbubble...
Re: Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?
#40We need it - I’d use 3 search engines. It’s not like MMOs or social media where 1 winner takes all. I think people want more search options, cloud, email, and so-on. I once tried to index the web with local Mistral 7b. Here’s what I did: 1. Copy/pasted an English dictionary and removed the definitions, so I just had an Array of about 500k words. 2. Wrote a simple loop to iterate over the words, with the instruction t…
Wouldn't you do better say indexing Wikipedia, then what it links directly, then what those link directly? As you note, you got into an adult content 'bubble'. Going to random sites doesn't mean that site is good in anyway. Wikipedia, or some other proxy for quality at least gives you a good baseline. If you're aiming to index all of the web, you should have the same endpoint, but in the meantime my way, you are inde…
My crawling approach did hit Wikipedia several times, and crawled a number of pages, but not the entire site at once.
With either approach, we would both eventually end up with all the websites - that being a surprisingly small number (~1 billion of which we only ever access ~1000).
I got in an adult content bubble from starting with "A" ("Adult") and would have hit another one presumably at "X". But "B" had quite a few too, lol.
Most of the words were bubbles - where it spent a decent amount of time on each one and I wondered if it would ever move on or was stuck. There are just a lot of backlinks and tangents for every word you can think of.
Another fun thing about this experiment is you will find a lot more international websites that no other search engine will find - some weird personal sites and some surprisingly good forums.
But yeah, you could enter anywhere - Wikipedia, or some other random Array of words. It doesn't have to be a dictionary.