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Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

101–110 of 168 posts

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#102
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…

(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…

Why not offer a bare bones subscription, like $2.50 per-month and charge by usage volume every month?

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don…

Most of the above examples of unnecessary searches could be avoided if the UI was designed to help the user avoid unnecessary searches instead of somewhat cloning Google's UX, which is designed around searches being effectively free for them.

Very much this. Probably 75% of my searches are “Just looking something up on Wikipedia” or “Just looking something up on StackOverflow”. If Kagi were to let me search these sites without the cost of a full Google lookup, its plan would work for me once again and I’d return to being a customer.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#105
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.

This is not correct. ISPs cannot see the actual URL being requested. Your DNS provider can see the hostname. The ISP may be able to see the hostname unless encrypted SNI is in place. The ISP can see the IP address you are connecting to.

You seem to know more about this than I do, but my layperson's takeaway from the Snowden revelations is that the NSA records every url we browse. Are you saying that's incorrect?

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#106
post #97

Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now. Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers. For me it has value in two different ways: 1. time saved by arriving at the cor…

Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way.

I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#107
I have 3 questions.

- How is your search in languages other than English and local to countries other than the US and Europe? In particular, I am interested in Russian and Turkish. I remember that previously (a year or two ago) it was not very good. Also, does your GPT based search work for other languages?

- How is phind.com related to kagi? I remember that at some point, I was searching for something on phind and got an error saying that Kagi is out of capacity or something like that.

- What underlying search providers do you currently use?

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. ISPs cannot see the actual URL being requested. Your DNS provider can see the hostname. The ISP may be able to see the hostname unless encrypted SNI is in place. The ISP can see the IP address you are connecting to.

You seem to know more about this than I do, but my layperson's takeaway from the Snowden revelations is that the NSA records every url we browse. Are you saying that's incorrect?

The only way NSA can record the URL without having infiltrated Kagi's datacenter, is for them to have broken the encryption algorithms behind TLS/HTTPS.

If that's the case, nowhere on the regular Internet is safe.

Snowden revealed that NSA has infiltrated all the major industry players (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.), also ISPs. But the only way NSA can know what your plaintext HTTPS URL is either by having access to your PC, or having access to Kagi's servers. Or as I said, that they've cracked encryption schemes everyone assumes to be safe.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#109
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.

How exactly does your search engine where the engine can't see the search term work?

You can POST it, and some privacy oriented web tools do that instead of GET, but the reason, as explained elsewhere, is not to hide it from NSA (GET parameters and POST are equally easy/hard to intercept), but to protect against other persons who has access to ones unencrypted computer (spouse, kids, colleagues).

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#110

How good is Kagi at searching for very very old parts of the web? Sometimes I use google to search in some old date range e.g. between 2000-2005?

They build on top of Google and Bing and adds its own index as well so it should be reasonable, but I haven't tested.

However, I think it should be easier to filter down searches to only show these results as Kagis advanced search operators mostly work reliably (and if they don't you can file a bug).

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