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Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

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Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#121

Post by carlosjobim »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #68

I like Kagi , I do. I like the ranking, I like how I can search for controversial people and not have my intended search target censored by obfuscation. Kagi just gives me the data. That’s great! I pay the 5 a month but I run out mid month which makes me not use it and breaks the habit and worry. I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small thi…

> I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month.

Just because Proton is a great deal doesn't make Kagi a worse deal. This kind of logic never made sense to me. The products have nothing in common, so why the comparison?

Then, also think about why you're worrying about spending $10 per month on a product that you think is great? Is that an amount of money that has any impact on your current life situation? I think a lot of people can't break the habit that everything on a computer has to be free.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#122

Post by iainmerrick »

civilitty wrote: post #94
mderazon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Chatgpt / Bard and similar (Perplexity) has replaced 85 percent of Google searches so I feel Kagi will be a step backwards in this regard Perhaps better than Google, but the whole paradigm shifted

Kagi has FastGPT and the AI assistant mode (available via several bangs like !fast, !expert, and !code). Though the latter is beta and only available to Ultimate subscribers

One thing I like about Kagi's FastGPT is that it always includes citations in the output. This emphasises that I'm still doing a search, just with a fancier interface, not consulting an all-knowing oracle.

When I ask an AI tricky questions, the responses usually point me in the right direction without fully solving the problem, so those citation links are really useful.

With Bard in particular, I find it often gives a confident but incorrect answer. When I point this out, it apologises then gives another incorrect answer, and so on.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#123

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

jve wrote: post #78
llamaInSouth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Google search started declining dramatically in quality when they took away the Plus Operator ... which was probably around that time You would think a mega company would think more long term then that

"doublequote" word to make it required.

Even this isn’t reliable anymore. I had a double quote word that was being spellchecked. Even the ‘-‘ operator would still include words i explicitly avoid. This isn’t all the time but it happens frequently enough to be annoying.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#124

Post by dwighttk »

aryonoco wrote: post #17

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you…

Sounds nice…

I just don’t use search enough to want to pay. Perhaps that is because it is not so great though.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#125

Post by hprotagonist »

chrisandchris wrote: post #48
aryonoco wrote: post #17

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you…

Similar here. I didn't know Kagi until, as I remember, there was an article here on HN. I thought too why should I pay for search? Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results - now Pinterest, Stackshare and all those AI-generated content filler sites are gone from my search results. Search results are great and it's just worth it. The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is…

So far i haven’t been able to blacklist pinterest from image results, however — has that been added?

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#126

Post by hprotagonist »

sph wrote: post #67
widenrun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it reminds me of this: "Drift to low performance is a gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance." -- From the book "Thinking in Systems".

A very fancy way of saying that the best way to boil a frog is to heat it slowly.

until they jump out.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#128

Post by raffraffraff »

chrisandchris wrote: post #48
aryonoco wrote: post #17

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you…

Similar here. I didn't know Kagi until, as I remember, there was an article here on HN. I thought too why should I pay for search? Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results - now Pinterest, Stackshare and all those AI-generated content filler sites are gone from my search results. Search results are great and it's just worth it. The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is…

Some other stuff works better at Google, like "train from Heathrow to London" gives you the next 4 trains right there in the results. In fact it can give accurate results, link ups, walking estimates between bus routes, where the official transport app or website sucks (like Dublin buses). Oh and shop opening hours, cinema times etc.

Kagi has gotten better at directly providing answers (like 15lbs in kg) but it's still lagging.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#129

Post by plutokras »

aryonoco wrote: post #17

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you…

I tried out Kagi, but then I asked myself: “why pay for it if it's only marginally better than Google?”. Then I realized Kagi has won. The sentiment about non-Google search engines used to be something like “XY is slightly worse than Google, but it respects your privacy, why not use it instead”?. The trade-off is no more. So I am customer since then. Love the domain ranking system.

I hope they will continue to focus on their core product and don't branch out to do something else.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#130

Post by SushiHippie »

strogonoff wrote: post #45

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting…

Fun fact the LLM features are not expensive to them compared to their search product. Per search they pay at least 2ct.
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