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Back to Kagi

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Re: Back to Kagi

#221

Post by inigyou »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #191
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.

What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen peo…

It's a deslopping filter in between you and the slop. It's not perfect but it's honestly refreshing.

Re: Back to Kagi

#222

Post by miek »

j1elo wrote: post #138
201984 wrote: 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…

That's such a shocking dispersion between telecom and dining out, I figured an LLM could help here. Gemini says "It's Spain"

Re: Back to Kagi

#223

Post by cindyllm »

inigyou wrote: post #221
crossroadsguy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen peo…

It's a deslopping filter in between you and the slop. It's not perfect but it's honestly refreshing.

[dead]

Re: Back to Kagi

#224

Post by Hackbraten »

rpdillon wrote: post #97
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #56

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.

I think that ship has sailed [0].

If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)

Re: Back to Kagi

#225

Post by SyneRyder »

canpan wrote: post #214
SyneRyder wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I am trying this. I noticed I only browse a subset of sites a lot. Also HN works wonders for finding links. But how do you get around all those bot measures/cloudflare nowadays? It seems only google IPs get a special pass.

Yep, discovering that you only need a subset of sites is the key. In my case, I still had my entire Firefox browsing history in its SQLite cache, so I tried to index every page I'd ever visited, and had a list of the domains I actually visit. It's the same insight Brave Search had - they used to be a metasearch engine, but they built their own index until they could serve 99% of queries directly, even though their index was vastly smaller than Google or Bing.

I struggle with indexing too. I don't do any crawling, just indexing from sitemap.xml files or URLs I add to the queue manually. Also I'm indexing from my own residential PC, not a hosted VPS. Something that helped me was Cloudflare's new crawler API. For all the sites where Cloudflare blocks you, just use their API instead:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...

https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...

Also for a quick index bootstrap, the Curlie database can be useful. It's the old DMOZ directory, the open Yahoo competitor, with 1.4 Million websites. A lot of the links are now very outdated, but it can be useful, and it's less than 500MB when converted to an SQLite database.

Re: Back to Kagi

#226

Post by chrisweekly »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #189
chrisweekly wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

(eyeroll) "somewhere in the EU" is still fairly broad

Re: Back to Kagi

#227

Post by column »

hgoel wrote: post #164

I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit tr…

> no sudden UI changes

they did change https://kagi.com/summarizer recently and I was taken aback

Re: Back to Kagi

#228

Post by tuoret »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #210
tuoret wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason. Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have…

Author of said extension here. I've been getting some reports of this happening in a few countries, namely Australia and the US so far. See https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issu... .

Well that's disappointing but not entirely surprising I guess. Probably won't be too long before they make that worldwide.

Re: Back to Kagi

#229

Post by Pavilion2095 »

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…

$10 is nothing when it's $10, but everything is a $10 subscription these days - and you end up spending a lot of money.

Re: Back to Kagi

#230

Post by r721 »

tuoret wrote: post #205
hgoel wrote: post #164

I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit tr…

> With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason. Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have…

>Is this a thing now?

Here's a thread where it's being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747

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