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Back to Kagi

blog.melashri.net

171–180 of 264 posts

Re: Back to Kagi

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK using the bangs (e.g. !g) do not consume your search quota, so you can do it via that as well.

Re: Back to Kagi

#172
post #138
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices? In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying: * €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan. * €10/mo for 500…

which corner is that, where you live?

Re: Back to Kagi

#173
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but you make up a small percentage of sales for US tech companies comparatively.

Re: Back to Kagi

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.

My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me.

I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either.

If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription.

The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it.

I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).

Re: Back to Kagi

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.

The search engine is a lot more than the index. And they have their own index

Re: Back to Kagi

#176
post #130
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.

Even in the US, which is already very HCoL, I think you seriously underestimate the number of households who've either never had who have cut household Internet. Lots of households where everyone's Internet access is on smartphones via MNVO mobile carriers, typically on $10-$20/mo/line plans with 5-25GB/mo/line.

Re: Back to Kagi

#177
Kagi is great. The search gives you the actual thing you are looking for, but also their translate tool is very nifty, and their LLM assistants are actually better for my purposes than Anthropic or whatever. I have tried the same models via openrouter, but can’t get as good responses, so there’s something very clever they do with their harness. I use their Orion -browser and its summarise -function, which is very good. I am happy to pay for all this, it feels like they actually want to serve you good products, not just steal shit from you and scam you.

I have recently started using searXNG, which is ok, and somehow better than mpst for image searches, but not quite as good as Kagi.

Re: Back to Kagi

#178
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…

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...

I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too.

For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else.

Re: Back to Kagi

#179
I stopped paying for Kagi after ~2 years. Search quality worsened over time; my brother and I would trade screenshots/complaints of irrelevant results for basic keywords. International searches were even more fruitless.

Also, I felt Kagi had too many projects going on. Their whimsical engineer-daycare-esque blogposts did not inspire confidence.

Re: Back to Kagi

#180
Kagi is awesome. Highly recommend it. And Orion as well.

The combo of NextDNS + Kagi + occasional VPN (currently on Windscribe since they had a deal through Kagi and seem to have the most real vs fake VPN endpoints) is super seamless and easy

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