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Back to Kagi

blog.melashri.net

181–190 of 264 posts

Re: Back to Kagi

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.

Over the last 2 months I’ve started to hit AI limits. I don’t feel like I’m using it more than before, but my usage went from $1-2/month to $9.50… where I’m actively avoiding usage to not hit my $10 limit halfway through the month.

Re: Back to Kagi

#182

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.

> Search quality worsened over time

They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.

Re: Back to Kagi

#183
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 tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for. I might try it again sometime.

I’ve found the opposite. Most notably was when I joined an outage call at work. The call had been going for a few hours. They knew the issue, but didn’t have a fix. There were a dozen or two people on the call all searching for options (presumably all using Google). I went to Kagi and found an answer within a couple minutes that we ended up rolling out.

I’m just one person, and that’s just one incident, but it happened pretty early on after I switched to Kagi and had a pretty big impact on my perception of it.

I had been trying to get away from Google for many years, and with other options like DDG, I always felt I needed to go to Google for various searches, but so far I haven’t been back to Google at all in several years now.

Re: Back to Kagi

#184
post #182

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.

> Search quality worsened over time They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.

They have their own indexes.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Re: Back to Kagi

#185
I switched to Kagi 2 years ago and I've enjoyed it ever since. In May I decided that I wanted to give some other options a try, also given that I'm now relying on LLMs for some tasks I used Kagi for. I'm running qwen3.6 on my server and I thought it + a mediocre free search engine would be enough. Well, was I wrong. Almost three months have passed and I can't say anymore that it's just getting used to a different flow. Kagi offers something that I can't find anywhere else at the moment. I resubscribed last Monday :)

Re: Back to Kagi

#186
post #2

How'd you solve the Arabic issue? (the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)

Author here (I didn't submit the post though) Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity. Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too) Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlin…

Could you share the custom CSS you refer to?

Re: Back to Kagi

#187
post #139
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is such a wonderful website https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp This is the broadband page. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...

Thanks for sharing this one, that’s truly a gem that I had no idea existed

Re: Back to Kagi

#188
Kagi, like DDG and a few others around the same/similar ideas, doesn't work as "fully" for certain geographies (I assume many) as fully and wholesomely (as I gather from such posts and comments) it works for certain other geographies (again, I assume not many; for obvious reasons). I gave it a shot, trial and then the Starter pack. In some cases, it turned out to be almost completely futile. Anyway, just like Google Maps, nothing even comes close, for coverage and usability of Internet search, to Google Search for my geography (yes, I asked others as well who tried), sadly.

Since then I've learnt to live with `udm=14` and some occasional/rare uBlock Origin tweaks (earlier I used an about:config setting, which might still work, for anyone looking) - in Firefox.

On Safari (which is kind of my secondary phone browser), I still keep it as it is, and I use it to actually use the quick AI feature when I might want it, which isn't often.

Re: Back to Kagi

#189
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, the currency symbol might throw a hint. Because Americans of course use USD and rest of the world is pressured into using USD on online forums :)

Re: Back to Kagi

#190
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.

These people either don't understand what living in a "world" means or are just too stuck into "but rest of you don't pay" that it will be hard for them grasp anything beyond what's written in stone on those grey surfaces for them. What they also don't understand that a small fraction of paying customers in some of such countries might or will outspend entire country's regular spending in the "paying world". They also don't understand that to achieve that unlike physical goods these companies don't have to open agencies, distributors, warehouses, retail chains etc to "sell".

PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.

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