131–140 of 220 posts
Oh, I didn't know it was time for HN's biweekly Kagi post. Those are invaluable, I use them as a personal reminder for me to water my cactus.
I mean, when people are writing unpaid ads for a service just because it's so much better... maybe you should try it. (Fastmail too, the other "pay for quality" product often brought up here.)
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> Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
Do they provide "personalized results" like google claims? That would seem to imply they -must- attach searches to your account, wouldn't it?
AFAIK the personalized results are not based on your search history, rather a personalized list of blocked, lowered, raised, or pinned domains. I think some people share their lists, not unlike PiHole.
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In most search engines, including Google and DDG, you could input, site:learn.microsoft.com It restricts results to that domain.
Sure, but that's time consuming and often too specific: Kagi lets me push sites I trust results from higher without limiting the search to a specific single site. It also explicitly looks to rank blogs by individuals higher than corporate websites, so it's more likely to surface that niche how-to by someone else who has been there.
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> 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 poc…
Well the other risk you have trusting all your personal data to some organization is the longevity of said organization. Your data may be protected as long as their business model aligns with that but it's never guaranteed to stay that way. One of the best historic examples is MySpace. MySpace started out fine and slowly as it declined and eventually dwindled to nothing, it started selling off massive amounts of prev…
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They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account”. So you essentially have to make the same leap of faith as you would with a commercial VPN.
Yes, although if you think about it a bit: With a VPN you're hoping there's no logs at all, and it's pretty easy for a VPN vendor - entirely by accident - to keep some logs around. And then a search warrant lands, they look around, find the logs, and the promise is broken. And it's entirely possible for that to happen by accident. So if I pay for a commercial VPN that claims they don't keep logs, I'm gambling on thei…
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Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.
A fair call, but to quote their privacy policy: > Unlike "free" search engines, we do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account. So if you trust them to do what they say, then yes, that pretty much solves the issue. If not, well...
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If Kagi keeps charging, it will never be popular. They could lower their price to $0.99 a year with the same result. And that's a good thing.
It's unlikely they can make a profit doing that. Servers, devs, etc cost money. This way they keep the audience smaller and can make money as well. It's a business, so you do what you gotta do.
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."
Ten dollars a month!? Ha ha ha, no.
So, one meta-layer of discussion up: do we think the recent surge of Kagi discussion on HN is indicative of a real wave? Or is “picking a different search engine” gonna be something only 1% of users ever do again? I honestly think that even if Kagi does remain pretty niche ( serve that niche (so far… mostly HN-user-types, I would bet). But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business…
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."
In my experience outside the niche of tech related content Kagi performed significantly worse than Google. Especially for content that was region specific and not just text natch based, like "children clothing stores in Boston"
The other day I pointlessly attempted to craft queries (in Dutch) where "second hand" didn't mean "cars". It hilariously dropped surrounding words and tried to hard sell me a used car.
The engine didn't do a lot of miles, it was only used by an old lady on Saturday to do shopping.