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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#121

Post by jccalhoun »

I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.

I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#122

Post by dingnuts »

coldpie wrote: post #102
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality." This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use. It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you not…

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

one I like to use to demonstrate is "how to fix a leaking faucet"

Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers

Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#123

Post by nsteel »

stranded22 wrote: post #98

I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).

I'd not heard of controld before. I was going to ask what's the benefit over pihole but I think they've got it covered at https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/

> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#124

Post by stenius »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #109
coldpie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites. This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites). For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from: - w3school - GeeksforGeeks - real python - programiz - code academy And only after d…

Here's some stats that kagi publishes on how people are using their blocking and a great place to great started with it as well.

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#125

Post by neogodless »

jrmg wrote: post #119
neogodless wrote: post #110

About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense. This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far. What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I…

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago. I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email off…

I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#126

Post by harshitaneja »

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.

I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#127

Post by wetpaws »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #6

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK". But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue. I haven't perso…

[dead]

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#128

Post by esafak »

jccalhoun wrote: post #121

I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should. I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still…

Imagine a product so bad they have to dole out gift cards to make people use it. Are you saying you can use google through bing and get paid??

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#129

Post by watusername »

sylens wrote: post #104
glenjamin wrote: post #24

I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!

Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works. Not one click but by no means a byzantine process

This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].

If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:

> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).

[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#130

Post by ghc »

senko wrote: post #23
pookieinc wrote: post #13

For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?

I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases. I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)

What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.
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