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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#341

Post by coldpie »

harshitaneja wrote: post #126

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had…

This has also been my experience. The search quality is no better. When I ask people directly what they like about Kagi, it's all about the customization stuff (custom search operators; denylisting domains; etc). I do see the appeal of that, but I don't personally care enough about those features to pay for it.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#342

Post by coldpie »

scroot wrote: post #108
dickiedyce wrote: post #94

I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow. What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.

I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable

Could either of you provide some specific search terms (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search box) that provides better results on Kagi than on Google?

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#343

Post by coldpie »

praisewhitey wrote: post #324

>I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th It's the first result on Duckduckgo.

It's the first result on Google for me, too.

Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#344

Post by jq-r »

Ezhik wrote: post #76
mubou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing . I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead. D…

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud... For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

You can use https://google.com/ncr which doesn't redirect to a country.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#345

Post by MartinGAugustin »

seth_at_kagi wrote: post #167
jrmg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago. I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email off…

Hey, Engineer from Kagi here. This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew. With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in t…

[dead]

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#346

Post by nottorp »

GlacierFox wrote: post #323
mulmen wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much can a bana- er, sandwich cost? I just checked McDonalds in my hometown in Idaho. A Big Mac is $5.99 for just the sandwich and $10.68 for a meal. A Double Quarter Pounder is $8.29 for just a sandwich. McDonalds is definitely on the cheap side so $10.00 seems like a reasonable estimate of “sandwich money”. No need to invoke tech bros or silicon valley. Certainly no need to invent a motive.

[flagged]

They're also unaware that there is a whole world outside the US :)

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#347

Post by TexanFeller »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #289
idiotsecant wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 dollars is like, a sandwich. Access to your search engine for a month is less useful than a sandwich?

Kagi isn't competing against no access to a search engine, it's competing against Google, DDG, etc etc which are free (or more specifically, you could say ads are the cost). Kagi needs to not just be worth $10, but also worth ($10 - ads) more than the alternatives.

It is EASILY worth that. It’s a tool that I use constantly every day for work and at home. I literally never fall back to using Google anymore. Google results turned to doggie doo years ago and getting what I need at the top of the list again is worth every penny. Kagi is like Google from 10 years ago if they had kept optimizing it for quality instead of enshitifying it to increase revenue.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#348

Post by freedomben »

jrmg wrote: post #269
freedomben wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever written software? Especially to manage payments? This is a very plausible bug around a corner case. Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers that they're also trying to win back, or maybe sometimes bugs happen.

As far as I remember, this ‘try us again for 30 days’ promotion was explicitly for previous subscribers, so I would not say this was a corner case.

Ah, if that's true that does make this a little less excusable. I still don't think it's nefarious, but I do think it's a pretty bad and embarrasing bug on Kagi's part.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#349

Post by infecto »

bmacho wrote: post #244
realo wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment from an actual human being, sir, more than anything else, would be by itself a reason for me to switch to Kagi everywhere. Fortunately I already switched to Kagi everywhere...

Huh? They are scamming someone, > I do understand how this may be unexpected. is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place. How does this make you want to be their user?

I realize Kagi is loved here, heck I use it myself but this pattern does come off at best lazy engineering and at worst scammy. Their marketing email pitches it off as no strings attached but there is a case where it will auto charge you at the end.

I think some of the ton is a little aggressive but it does seem like something that a lot of other companies would maybe get called out for.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#350

Post by tumdum_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #339
tumdum_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be more worried about Meta doing piracy than individuals: https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...

Why? They've gave it back to society in form of Llama models; it's a great and strongly positive development.

So copyright matters only sometimes? If that’s so, I bet anyone who consumed pirated content has had some positive impact on the society because of it.
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