Kagi Small Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi Small Web

#111

Post by imiric » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

kickdaddy wrote: post #5

Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?

To give a slightly less positive perspective: I trialed Kagi for a few weeks, and while I liked the features and their business model, its search results are no better than from my own Searx instance. Kagi essentially does the same thing as Searx: anonymized API calls to 3rd party search engines. It's just packaged in a friendlier UI, but the experience is not far off.

Plus, Searx supports many more search engines, and I can customize it exactly to my liking.

I wish them well, as they clearly have good intentions and a good product, but I prefer using an equivalent OSS and self-hosted solution over a proprietary SaaS I have to create an account for, even if it's not as polished or featureful.

EDIT: Actually, I'm wrong. Kagi apparently also has their own crawlers and indexes[1]. Still, I'm not finding Searx results to be deficient, so I'm not missing out on much.

One thing that does concern me with Searx, and partially with Kagi, is that those 3rd parties could decide to block these API requests at any point, leaving Searx unusable, and Kagi's results less relevant. I'm not sure this is a sustainable way to build a search engine, but I do appreciate both Kagi's and Searx's stance on ads. Using any mainstream search engine via their own frontends is a frustrating experience at best.

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

Re: Kagi Small Web

#112

Post by Phemist » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:22 PM UTC

palmer_fox wrote: post #93

freediver wrote: post #2

Vlad from Kagi here, thanks for posting. The RSS feed unexpectedly broke (edit: the feed is back up! [3]) just as we published the blog post, in the true spirt of "small web" :) Should be up in 30 minutes which will enable the site to function too (it uses the same feed). This has been a personal pet project of mine and I spent considerable time getting my hands dirty with the code, as the team was busy with other in…

The more I uses Kagi (paid) the more I am feeling sad for the possibility that it might go away if it doesn't get more traction. For me you represent an incredible accomplishment: the first search engine that gives better results than Google, respects privacy, offers customization and so much more. Thank you.

Sometimes I have to use somebody else's laptop, for some reason or other I end up searching for something. I think, why are these results so crap?

I notice google/bing and quickly kick in my muscle memory built up over the years to type duckduckgo.com and do another search.

After this I still am confused why the results are so crap. Then I notice the duck laughing at me and think... shouldnt this be a dog?

And then I start feeling bad for the original user of the device and tell them to do the search themselves and let me know when they get a result

Re: Kagi Small Web

#113

Post by Phemist » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:27 PM UTC

Phemist wrote: post #112

palmer_fox wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I uses Kagi (paid) the more I am feeling sad for the possibility that it might go away if it doesn't get more traction. For me you represent an incredible accomplishment: the first search engine that gives better results than Google, respects privacy, offers customization and so much more. Thank you.

Sometimes I have to use somebody else's laptop, for some reason or other I end up searching for something. I think, why are these results so crap? I notice google/bing and quickly kick in my muscle memory built up over the years to type duckduckgo.com and do another search. After this I still am confused why the results are so crap. Then I notice the duck laughing at me and think... shouldnt this be a dog? And then I…

Just to say: the search engine frog has long been boilt and it is amazing what crap people have to put up with when searching for anything. How jarring the experience of seeing TV commercials is after years of Kodi, is how the experience is of moving back to an ad-supported search engine after now months of Kagi.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#114

Post by benhoyt » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

Thanks for the prominent link to my article! ("The Small Web is Beautiful") I consider that my personal software manifesto, so I'm glad to see it being promoted more widely.

I really like what you're doing with Kagi Small Web -- love that you've taken the initiative to start surfacing all this excellent content. Keep up the good work. I think I'll try out Kagi search...

Re: Kagi Small Web

#115

Post by mindwork » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

This is amazing! Over the last 2 months I've been on a personal journey to browse through small web links. It all started from the "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?" post on HN, and then I found out that somebody put a website with the links from this post organized(https://dm.hn/). I exported all 1651 blog link in to XLS and now every now and then I open up 5-7 just to read random articles and mark it as "viewed". So far I've been through 250 out of 1651!

I wish kagi has something similar, one place where I can see all the links to the personal websites collected via all it's sources

Re: Kagi Small Web

#116

Post by jci » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

Very happy paying Kagi search and Orion browser user here. Just want to send some general good vibes your way. I really love what you guys are doing, and this just adds to that.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#117

Post by unshavedyak » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

Subsector6616 wrote: post #89

unshavedyak wrote: post #48

This sort of stuff makes me really happy to be a Kagi subscriber. Not only do i get value out of Kagi, but this shows me that the money is being used to develop Kagi in a way i agree with. By comparison, Spotify (just picking one of my subs) feels hostile to me. I pay them, but would cancel in a heart beat if i felt i had options. I really appreciate Kagi's development matching what i feel like i'm buying. Thanks Kag…

Music streaming is such a mess. I've tried a ton of services in an attempt to find one that's decent, and have found embarrassing problems for all of them. Spotify: Really hostile, manipulative, and terrible to artists. On my end I hate how commercial the homescreen is, and the CarPlay interface is just a user-hostile to a degree that is frankly unsafe disaster. TIDAL: Pretty good in a lot of ways. They pay their art…

> The Windows apps are terrible (like flat out embarrassing), and the Linux apps are non-existent, but luckily there's a pretty great open source app called Cider that solves that.

This is what blocked me from trying Apple Music as well. Maybe i'll give Cider a look, thanks!

Re: Kagi Small Web

#118

Post by freediver » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

k0k0r0 wrote: post #94

Kagi appearently had a project "expertGPT" (contrast to FastGPT). Does anybody know what happened to that one? On a side note, there is now a - to my best knowledge - completely unrelated product "ExpertGPT" from some totally different company. I am not talking about that one.

Launching Oct 2, as a part of Kagi Assistant. Already in beta with a number of members.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#119

Post by dustincoates » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

civilitty wrote: post #81

dustincoates wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it, though my only complaint is that I usually want sites in English from the US, but if I want to switch to finding sites in French in France, I have to switch regions. Google is much better at localizing me, and so I'll use !g for those.

Have you tried adding a custom bang like !fr? Point it to: https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&r=fr Where `fr` is the region code

Oh, that's a great idea, I never thought of that. Thank you.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#120

Post by skinkestek » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

mhitza wrote: post #42

freediver wrote: post #2

Vlad from Kagi here, thanks for posting. The RSS feed unexpectedly broke (edit: the feed is back up! [3]) just as we published the blog post, in the true spirt of "small web" :) Should be up in 30 minutes which will enable the site to function too (it uses the same feed). This has been a personal pet project of mine and I spent considerable time getting my hands dirty with the code, as the team was busy with other in…

I really enjoy that this feature got released. Adding more visibility to the indie/small web is a great thing. I've complained in the past on HN that any useful personal blog is buried under spammy content in search engines. It would be nice to also be able to just search within the small web, maybe using a lens in the future? Regarding the topic of self promotion, I would disagree with the current rules and I would…

There is already a lens called the non commercial web or something that I suspect overlaps to some degree,but I don't think they are equal and I don't know if I am right.