Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#61

Post by presentation »

levidos wrote: post #53
hattmall wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ukra…

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.

I’ve been using Kagi for many months and similarly to the others, I actually haven’t found myself exceeding the low-sounding prepaid cap often. Weird

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#62

Post by Jochim »

1123581321 wrote: post #29
fafzv wrote: post #10

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…

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.

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.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#63

Post by KomoD »

pzmarzly wrote: post #8
KomoD wrote: post #5

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

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.

> 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

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#64

Post by mtlynch »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #50
mtlynch wrote: post #26

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.

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 i…

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.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#65

Post by freediver »

eipi10_hn wrote: post #60
freediver wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

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?

Early adopter is a flag in the system that you can not lose (thank you for being one). Its perks will always be available to you.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#66

Post by eipi10_hn »

freediver wrote: post #65
eipi10_hn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Early adopter is a flag in the system that you can not lose (thank you for being one). Its perks will always be available to you.

Oh I see, tks for your explanation.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#67

Post by malikNF »

> 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.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#68

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

freediver wrote: post #56
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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?

Perhaps the changes made in the announcement we're all commenting on have improved the situation. I had a few search terms (intentionally niche) that are now showing up as top results where as they didn't in the past. Very happy with the changes.

Now it's just the price holding me back. I just refuse buy metered services. I've had unlimited bandwidth for years despite my usage consistently falling below the cheaper top limited usage download tier. I just don't want to think about usage — it's an unwanted distraction when something is critical to my workflow.

However, $25/mo is just too much for this service. I can see why they need to charge that at the moment due to economies of scale (or lack there-of). However, even $10/mo would be pushing it for this service.

$25/mo is a long way off the mark. Can buy a VPN, support an open source ad blocker, and have money spare to pay for a couple of streaming subscriptions each month.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#69

Post by freediver »

Jochim wrote: post #62
1123581321 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ini…

The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it

Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for donuts you eat in a coffee shop.

AI is no justification, search is just expensive. Google is making about 4 cents worth for every user search. We are selling search at 1.5 cents while building a completely user-centric product. If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#70

Post by [deleted] »

freediver wrote: post #56
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN