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

Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

dannb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 220 posts

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#191

Post by JohnFen »

ketzo wrote: post #54

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…

> But it seems hard to make money at that scale and with a non-advertising business model.

I don't think that seems hard at all, really. Companies do it all the time. What it makes hard is becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) everyone's goal.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#192

Post by JohnFen »

Urgo wrote: post #41

Been using Duck Duck Go for maybe three or so years now? It's very rare I fallback to google other then for google maps (!gm). I do make heavy use of ChatGPT and Bard though. I wish there was more example results then just "best headphones", "steve jobs", and "python exceptions". I'm interested, but not interested enough to sign up. Maybe its just me, but all the marketing and comments are why to switch away from goo…

Kagi has a free tier. Maybe just give it a shot and see if it works better for you?

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#193

Post by JohnFen »

wolverine876 wrote: post #75
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses a huge aspect: It's customizable. I frequently know I'm looking for say, a learn.microsoft.com page. So if I boost that domain, and one of the results is on that site, it moves towards the top of the page. My results are explicitly better for me because I am able to tell the search engine what I want to see.

In most search engines, including Google and DDG, you could input, site:learn.microsoft.com It restricts results to that domain.

Sure, but what's more helpful than that is being able to blacklist sites from the results and being able to say that certain sites should be given greater weight, which Kagi allows.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#195

Post by upghost »

TisButMe wrote: post #158
theshrike79 wrote: post #142

Is Kagi really that good or is their Astroturfing game just next level? I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it - and we're still talking about a $10/month search engine. Something that has been historically free at all times.

I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :) I…

Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#196

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search).

But it's web search that works well. My experience is that Google is awful, DDG is reasonable, and Kagi is good. Search is very important to me, and if I have to pay to be able to have a good search engine, I'm OK with that.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#197

Post by juunpp »

wutwutwat wrote: post #151
juunpp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VPN doesn't know what I search for, it "only" knows what host I connect to and all the associated metadata.

Unless they MITM you and whatever app you’re using doesn’t do cert pinning, or they don’t have a legit root cert that they can sign completely valid certs with

To MITM me they'd need the intermediate or root certs of whatever I am connecting to? I don't see how even pinning the cert would help if the chain is invalid to begin with.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#198

Post by simpaticoder »

TisButMe wrote: post #189
simpaticoder wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read your privacy agreement, I don't see where the threat is existential if you are in breach. I think that the knowledge of engineers of the judicial system, both criminal and civil, is very naive. You can sue anyone over anything at any time - you don't need valid grounds. It also doesn't mean that if you win it matters. Your privacy policy has lots of feel-good language that actually doesn't mean anything -…

If you think we should word the privacy policy differently, please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org with the specifics - we have changed it in the past through exactly this process. It has been written by engineers, mostly for engineers at the beginning. I'm sure we can improve the wording to make it more binding, we're not trying to squirrel away from it. If you have enough legal knowledge to harden it, w…

>please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org

To do so requires a kagi user account, which I don't have and don't want. It also requires knowing your issue organizational schema to find privacy policy related "bugs" and "features". If you are serious about taking feedback, consider taking the content of this thread to BE that feedback, and do the work of adding it into your bug tracker yourself, with links back to this thread.

And also, I am not a lawyer, and neither are you, so I'd consider hiring one to revise the policy with an eye toward increasing your liability for the right reasons.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#199

Post by juunpp »

wolverine876 wrote: post #69
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…

What is their privacy policy?

It doesn't matter.

Re: Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest

#200

Post by wutwutwat »

hnben wrote: post #167
wutwutwat wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they MITM you and whatever app you’re using doesn’t do cert pinning, or they don’t have a legit root cert that they can sign completely valid certs with

> Unless they MITM you how high would you estimate the odds of this actually happening for lets say mullvad?

How would I know? There’s always a VPN new kid on the block everyone shills for. Used to be that ProtonVPN was our savior now it’s nobody even knows it exists.

Point is unless you control every hop in the chain you can’t know it’s safe

Post reply on HN