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Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

kagi.com

11–20 of 228 posts

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#12

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now. We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1] Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is…

Since you seem to be using it – what are your thoughts on the Crystal language? Pleasant? Ready for production?

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#13
post #7

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now. We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1] Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is…

If I can be frank, nothing google has done or is doing with my search data bothers me in the slightest. If it uses my data to help target advertising - so be it. It doesn't bother me either as I use uBlock. So whether I pay or not, the only thing I care about is the quality of my search results. What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience, 10s of 1000s of engineers working on t…

I appreciate the sentiment and I can certainly understand it. This is of course what I thought too in the beginning, but as curiosity and then determination led one thing to another, we learned that things are doable, as much as that sounded as science fiction. Certainly there is evidence in user feedback that, at least for some people, Kagi is decent at what it does.

The fundamental premise that enables it is the focus on the user. It allows truly wonderful things to happen in the product (and we sometimes forget that search is still a product). Aligning the incentives between us and the user (which is also the customer) is really freeing from a product management perspective.

We are still users of Google products - we utilize the paid search API for results and GCP for infrastructure (hello Google!). We think there are some things that can be built with these truly amazing assets, that Google's business model simply does not permit, and we are thankful for the opportunity.

In the meantime we also built our own index which focuses only on noncommercial content and are going to invest more in this direction in the future. We call it "the more humane web".

Another thing is that we do not need to get _very_ far in the market. There is no shareholder pressure, just angry (or happy!) users. This is not, nor will ever be, a Google scale product.

This is a paid search product of premium quality (or so I'd like to believe it is shaping to be) for a tight number of individuals (and families!) who are a little different and want something different for their search experience. Few tens of thousands of subscribers will make Kagi sustainable and I hope we will have what it takes to get there. That is all I can wish for right now.

Thanks for considering!

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#14

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now. We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1] Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is…

Since you seem to be using it – what are your thoughts on the Crystal language? Pleasant? Ready for production?

I know that the team is having lots of fun with Crystal and the performance is truly amazing. It allows us to run the entire setup very economically.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#15
Been using them for about a week, very happy with it.

Regional results (especially since the last update) feel as automatic as google. While I still hope they’ll add my suggestion of a bang for region switches, most queries I do don’t need one, and it properly switches between English and German.

All of the DDG bangs. Seriosuly, search without bangs is nothing I’d ever want to go back to.

Built-In Domain Blacklist. Goodbye Pinterest. Forever.

General results are great. More relevant results than either DDG or Google and a great presentation (like showing snippets from accepted or upvoted SO answers)

And I have not even played around with advanced filters like lenses (which people in their discord seem to love).

Negatives: So far, I’d say only that the widgets are less usable than DDGs.

I had low expectations, but I’m really very positively surprised.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#17

Sounds awesome, I'd gladly pay for a product like this - I signed up for the waitlist :) Cheers devs!

Same here, I can't wait for an alternative with actually useful search results and good filters. Search is one product I use often every day but I'm stuck with either privacy-respecting options that don't yield useful results, Bing-themes or Google, which used to produce decent results but increasingly is just full of search spam. Good luck with this, I'm happy to pay!

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#18

omg they let me apply from/to dates on search results, I'm in love just got my invite after a couple days of signing up, will be trying it out, but so far no stackoverflow/github issue clones, and they allow setting "preferred" and "muted" domains, I might pay whatever they ask I'm keen to know their business plan however. Hope they don't get acquihired for the algorithms, never to offer these features again...

If I tell you you just need to put a - in front of a domain on Google to mute it will you also pay me whatever I want?

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#20
Another happy user here:

The time I save by not having to sift through all the utter nonsense that Google, Bing and even DuckDuckGo showes in my face any given day will easily be worth $10 a month alone and on top it is sanity preserving, privacy respecting and has no ads.

Its kind of like a polished version of https://search.marginalia.nu just with a much larger index.

The best explanation I can give is maybe:

Kagi is to other search engines today what Google was to other search engines 20 years ago: Outstanding quality, better than anything else I have tried - and rapidly improving - no nonsense (again like old Google) and nifty extra features (again like old Google).

(Note: I haven't tested Neeva yet so I cannot say if Kagi is better than them. But compared to all the rest I have tried the last ten years it is in a differen league.)

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