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

Try Switching to Kagi

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 493 posts

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#161

Post by rafram »

Ezhik wrote: post #15

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely. It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4". I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me sh…

On a search for "avi to mp4":

- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

Google clearly wins there.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#163

Post by abtinf »

harshitaneja wrote: post #126

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…

What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#164

Post by Terretta »

sixtyj wrote: post #55
foresterre wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago. I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause. I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that…

Thanks. Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.

The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.

Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#165

Post by prophesi »

rafram wrote: post #161
Ezhik wrote: post #15

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely. It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4". I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me sh…

On a search for "avi to mp4": - Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites. - Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites. Google clearly wins there.

Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#166

Post by deng »

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…

Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43308930

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#167

Post by seth_at_kagi »

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…

Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.

This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.

With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#168

Post by emacdona »

Ezhik wrote: post #15

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely. It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4". I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me sh…

> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.

That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).

I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.

Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#169

Post by tempest_ »

noname120 wrote: post #137
mhb wrote: post #101

I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?

I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search

Very likely due to the cost of the maps api.
Post reply on HN