Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users • Hacker News Board

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#211

Post by freediver » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:33 AM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #200

elxx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi doesn't charge you for bangs. (Disclaimer: Happy paying Kagi user here, just FYI)

Oh really? I just commented about how this misconception made me change my behavior. Wish that was more clear, or that I had higher reading comprehension.

In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the user whenever we can.

Redirecting a bang costs us basically nothing, so it does not count as a search.

Also reloading the same search within a short time (~2 minutes, for example coming back in browser after clicking through a search result) does not count as an additional search as we served cached results.

Another tip: We have decent documentation (that is also open source and editable) and you can access it quickly from Kagi with the !help bang, for example

!help how are searches counted

will land you on

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#212

Post by jackson1442 » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:33 AM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #130

abtinf wrote: post #105

Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive. That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month, then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the limits. I will simply say that I cannot imagine going back to being a “user” of a “search provider” over being a paying Kagi customer. It is the single most critical service I worry about losing. If they octupled the price to…

> That it should be unlimited. Isn't that what their $25/mo plan gives you?

Yep. They’re trying to drop the price as well—users on an annual Legacy Professional plan have been given unlimited searches again (which is the $10/mo pricing). Really hoping this is sustainable because Kagi is night-and-day for me compared to google and ddg.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#213

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #198

_delirium wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs Lately I’ve moved to doing this at the browser level instead of via a search engine. It’s not a huge speed difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go directly. Firefox makes it easy to do: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-addr…

Same. I never hit the limits of my Kagi plan, but it motivated me to add Firefox @searches for things like PyPI, where I know exactly what I want.

[deleted]

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#214

Post by freediver » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

radicality wrote: post #204

freediver wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals. I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here). > I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, Yes, we are :) > if so, how they would be able to actually reach them Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my family…

Hi. Thanks for the great service! Any chance you would consider adding cryptocurrency payments as an option? You would load up the account with these prepaid credits, and then use whatever plan you want until the credits run out. This is how I pay for Mullvad and works well for me. I think would be nice as I see kagi is aiming to be privacy-forward. And it’s nice knowing that such a payment is a one-off and won’t for…

We have a discussion on our forum [1] about this. Input welcome!

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#215

Post by freediver » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #59

surprised not to see ehow, wikihow, etc

Could be because they do not surface in the results much to begin with.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#216

Post by tmpX7dMeXU » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:47 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #33

lolinder wrote: post #6

This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's what makes their results so much better than Google's: where Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains as you go!

Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.

Yeah. Engineers hate when something isn’t a technical feat. The best innovations are usually software people working with the right people from other disciplines to make a thought out CRUD app.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#217

Post by deepspace » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

abtinf wrote: post #105

Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive. That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month, then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the limits. I will simply say that I cannot imagine going back to being a “user” of a “search provider” over being a paying Kagi customer. It is the single most critical service I worry about losing. If they octupled the price to…

Funny story: Earlier this week, my Kagi results when to shit. If I made the slightest spelling mistake in a query, it would return nothing. Often it would just return nothing for a query where google would return millions of results.

It got so bad that I started getting in the habit of typing 'g' in front of searches to go straight to google, but then I was hit with the usual google issues of SEO sites, spam sites and low-quality results.

I wanted to cry in frustration because my wonderful Kagi experience was suddenly gone, and was furiously typing up a support ticket when I noticed that the "verbatim" choice was somehow permanently selected, after I tried it a few days ago.

Lessons learned:

1. Kagi really is hugely superior to google as a daily search engine

2. "Verbatim" should not be a sticky choice, or at least Kagi should enclose "verbatim" results (or lack thereof) in a bright pink frame or something.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#218

Post by GhostWhisperer » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:52 AM UTC

this page is so galvanising – to see those domains on the top list of blocked domains pushed me to subscribe to kagi, nice hack marketing dep.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#219

Post by internetter » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #164

jrflowers wrote: post #134

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?

Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (e…

> Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users

Like me! I use it to get outfit & interior design inspiration. Haven't found nothing quite like it

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#220

Post by internetter » Sat, Aug 05, 2023, 4:59 AM UTC

freediver wrote: post #169

arealaccount wrote: post #110

Tried out a few searches that I’ve recently struggled with on both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially if I can get a license through work. I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.

> I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers. SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.

Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Cool.

I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For research I certainly search like a professional, but don't have the income stream to compensate.