Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#11

Post by tentacleuno » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

NeckBeardPrince wrote: post #10

tentacleuno wrote: post #6

I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.

You're paying Kagi for privacy.

Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#12

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

NeckBeardPrince wrote: post #10

tentacleuno wrote: post #6

I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.

You're paying Kagi for privacy.

[deleted]

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#13

Post by tentacleuno » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

titaniumtown wrote: post #9

Honestly, I rather use Bing and get paid for searching. As a student with no income, I rather use something free.

As someone who also brought up the pricing situation[0], I also currently make use of a free search engine (DuckDuckGo). In these circumstances, it seems that socioeconomic disadvantage and privacy do not go hand-in-hand.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852478

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#14

Post by chefandy » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:40 AM UTC

simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. The simple truth is that unless they make themselves explicitly liable to users if they are ever caught doing this, that the irresistable urge to monetize user data will tempt even the most well-meaning firm into sin. The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. IANAL but I believe this can be done if ownership…

> The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm.

Since the userbase consists largely of people who pay them to not act like google, at least for now, it likely would be an existential threat to the firm. They couldn't get much worse in that regard than big free services, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the interim, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and paying out of pocket for a really good service. The results are consistently more useful than Google's and the tooling is much much better. So if they are invasively tracking me and selling my data, you can definitely say "i told you so" but maybe we should call off the firing squad until the verdict has been reached. We currently don't have a trial, charges, a crime, evidence, or even empirically-informed suspicion.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#15

Post by toasteros » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

tentacleuno wrote: post #6

I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.

At the risk of sounding like a kagi marketer/shill/peddler/whatever, if it helps at all, it's actually not just search. Sort of.

Kagi is slowly rolling out some AI-backed features, and will probably work in other areas too. Two of the flagship AI bits right now are Quick Answer and the Universal Summariser.

Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary.

The other tool takes an article and summarises it. I used this on some blog posts of my own and it actually pretty much regurgitated my own thought process. I haven't used it for much else right now, but it's neat. It also has a beta chat feature which allows you to ask questions about an article, although I tried this with a Guardian article and it didn't pick out small details when asked.

And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. So far. I don't know if I'll renew or switch to annual but so far so good, honestly.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#16

Post by justusthane » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter.

The enduring (and incorrect) myth of how fiduciary responsibility works.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#17

Post by archildress » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#18

Post by chx » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

I switched on Oct 3.

I was beginning to see way too much of these weird domain name mirrors of things in Google Search instead of the real things and I was reading Doctorow on Google's enshittification and I said "OK, enough of this".

I guess it's time to move Google Drive and Gmail as well. The latter is probably fastmail but where to put the Google Drive files? It's like 2TB.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#19

Post by Yeri » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

Agreed -- been using Kagi since April 2022, and never looked back.

Tried to convert my wife to use it, but she's too used to Google (and the integration with Maps, local recommendations for cafés and restaurants, etc) that don't work as well in Kagi (yet). But for day to day, proper searching, it's 100% better.

And I can't stress enough how liberating it is to see the top results of the search are actually most likely the most relevant results (and not "they paid more"). Yesterday I had to set up a clean Windows laptop, and had to use Edge to install Chrome (or Firefox) and 1password: it's just pure lying to users: https://media.m.superuser.one/media_attachments/files/111/21... (that top banner with download 1password doesn't actually do anything, the next results, made to look like a real result with the sublinks etc is all lastpass cheating and paying to be in front of 1psw).

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#20

Post by fallat » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

chomp5977 wrote: post #4

simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Looking forward to the inevitable "Kagi sells user data" investigative report. The simple truth is that unless they make themselves explicitly liable to users if they are ever caught doing this, that the irresistable urge to monetize user data will tempt even the most well-meaning firm into sin. The ONLY solution is to make 'sinning' an existential threat to the firm. IANAL but I believe this can be done if ownership…

Yea I also worry about this. At this moment Kagi feels like the best I can do for search. Unfortunately these days I won't be surprised to hear of fuckery from them. It's happened too many times.

It's happened too many times in general by other companies, or Kagi?

All things said, I think Kagi really as the incentives aligned. I'm not a fan of Kagi but I believe the "business is sound" :) Sure, I also believe there's no need for such a business (an extension or whatever would suffice), but that doesn't really matter here nor there.