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Back to Kagi

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Re: Back to Kagi

#141

Post by sanderjd »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #137
sanderjd wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it isn't both, what I'm saying is that the thesis of the newer Google competitors is that the problem is mostly that Google has chosen to suck, so they can do a lot better just by choosing to not suck. But I think that thesis is wrong, that it is mostly that the web sucks now, and that these search engines are ultimately likely to be unsatisfying because they can't actually solve that underlying proble…

I think the counterargument would be that the web sucks in large part because of the way it’s been shaped by Google. Most of the hyperwordy blogspam is driven by sites trying to optimize their SEO for Google. So websites like Kagi could potentially push the underlying web in a positive direction

I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO.

And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.

And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.

IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.

(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)

Re: Back to Kagi

#142

Post by ycombinator_acc »

201984 wrote: post #106
SadTrombone wrote: post #49

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a…

People not from North America and Western Europe exist.

Re: Back to Kagi

#143

Post by freediver »

everfrustrated wrote: post #115
OleksandrC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).

I would love a Kagi MCP to give my agents a better web search tool but they don't seem interested. I would pay for this.

https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

Re: Back to Kagi

#144

Post by Gud »

201984 wrote: post #130
Gud wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your examples are things many people are no longer doing because they can't afford them.

People are no longer buying internet to use google, nor buying gas for cars? The others I understand, I'm cutting back on them too.

Yes, people are driving less when gas prices are high.

Re: Back to Kagi

#145

Post by mrsssnake »

hyperionultra wrote: post #3

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.

Re: Back to Kagi

#146

Post by flakiness »

SadTrombone wrote: post #49

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.

Re: Back to Kagi

#147

Post by northhex »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #14
poetril wrote: post #5

I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as p…

I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.

Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.

Re: Back to Kagi

#148

Post by equinumerous »

progval wrote: post #90
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it. Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.

> Kagi of course reviews it They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)

I had the same experience. I don't know why they haven't invested more in this feature. Heck, if they classified every site in their index as "AI/not AI" using machine learning, and had a large allowlist of "known-good" sites, that would take care of most of the problem (I am aware of the drawbacks of text-only AI classification, but they could use other indicators, like the site's publication date, domain name, domain registry date, etc.). I think for right now, the "state-of-the-art" for non-AI search is going to entail maintaining large whitelists/blacklists of websites that are crowd-sources by users (e.g. what you can find in some GitHub repositories). I was hoping that's what SlopStop was going to be, but it is not nearly as effective as it needs to be.

Re: Back to Kagi

#149

Post by benhurmarcel »

armoredkitten wrote: post #131
SadTrombone wrote: post #49

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.

I do the same thing, I only use Kagi when the result I want isn’t obvious, so the cheap plan is plenty. It’s easy to do with the browser’s shortcuts.

Re: Back to Kagi

#150

Post by kefabean »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #78
coldpie wrote: post #75

I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.

Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr? Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good. You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.

If ARPU for Google Search is estimated to be around $50-$80 per internet user and potentially way more in certain geographies, there could be significant financial savings to be had by switching to Kagi depending on where you sit.
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