Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kagi Small Web

kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 223 posts

Re: Kagi Small Web

#141

Post by evanjrowley »

olejorgenb wrote: post #110
nubg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both will upload your browser history to the cloud I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of revenue for this. Seems illegal.

I'm 80%+ sure the claim is BS

It's not BS for the people who don't understand the dark patters that guide users to enabling all of this stuff. That's everyone with a Windows PC who didn't bypass the Microsoft account requirement and went with all of the defaults in Microsoft Edge. Everyone using Chrome Enterprise/Education whose Google Workspace admins don't want to get into trouble for not backing up people's stuff (i.e., sharing it all with Google). Same goes for company Windows PCs set up with Microsoft Entra ID. It's everyone with an Android device and a Google account who wants their settings backed up or transfers to a new Android device. It's in the fine print and legalese for all of these products and services.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#142

Post by dawnerd »

malikNF wrote: post #115
ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

I really loved Kagi and was a paid customer for close to two years. But sadly this year I wont be renewing my plan. Kagi made search feel just “right” it was simple, got the job done and had some really simple but cool search features. But over time they started doing way too much, and I kept seeing more and more features that I really didn't want. It felt like I was paying for all this while I just wanted to type so…

I do agree actually but I’m sticking with them. Their mission of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one hand they’re marketing to the anti ai crowd while also joining the ai hype? It’s weird.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#143

Post by w10-1 »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

For needle-in-the-haystack searches, I find longer quotes works really well (in Kagi or google)

Kagi value proposition for me is not the $5 search but the $10 search plus whatever AI chat model you want (I originally did ultimate when I used it for coding). Controllable search and chat satisfies all my one-shot needs.

I can't really blame Kagi for the web getting bad or for the weak market for secondary search. Part of me wonders if they could use the AI search tools now on the market (now getting lots of investment) instead of the human indexes (subject to monopoly control).

Re: Kagi Small Web

#145

Post by dawnerd »

Vexs wrote: post #114
ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

The only thing that seems to have gotten a lot worse is the trend of ai articles- which isn't kagi's fault but it would be nice if they could figure out how to filter them. They all follow the same patter- "specific thing you want" with a table of contents with loads of repeated chapters and unrelated information, spattered with effectively random images.

They’re starting to with their stopslop. Sites that are mostly ai content get flagged and deranked. Still not perfect and I think they only just started working on the backlog of reports so hopefully it holds up helping.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#146

Post by fourside »

searls wrote: post #137
emacdona wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience, Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's "better than Google". "Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites to exclude from my search results are two features that I remain willing to pay for, however.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

I’m confused by this comment. The original comments talk about Kagi not living up to the hype. You say you’ve had the same experience and wish you could get LLMs to use Kagi for web searches?

Re: Kagi Small Web

#147

Post by hadlock »

jstummbillig wrote: post #87
ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

I think it's completely unreasonable to assume that anyone would beat Google at the search game, by outgoogling them. The reason, that Google is not like it was back in the day is that they are fighting a massive, antagonistic industry designed to game Google. The reason that chatGPT et al improves on search is that there's a effective but very expensive compute layer on top, not that they are better at the Google ga…

The good news is that Google search results have degraded so much that competitors like Kagi can compete directly. I moved off Google search completely on all devices ~1 year ago and I don't miss it at all, most of the time I forget I have a kagi subscription.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#148

Post by atmosx »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

Is that possible today? I have no data but I assume the scale of “the web” grew a couple of orders of magnitude compared to 2012.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#149

Post by Falimonda »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

Why have you used it for months now if you're not impressed?

Re: Kagi Small Web

#150

Post by ComputerGuru »

windowliker wrote: post #127
evanjrowley wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... The answer to this is complicated. Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the…

>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud. I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)

So fwiw, browsing history shouldn’t be anywhere near that big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses well, if they were to do it I’m sure they’d do it at regular intervals instead of a years’ worth at a time, etc.

And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn’t be kept a secret.

Post reply on HN