I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
What put me off is the AI stuff, I found out Kagi is an AI company.
Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
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Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#42That's some super steep pricing
I'm always surprised how cheap software engineers can be when purchasing products created by other software engineers, specifically designed around their needs.
No matter where you live on earth, if you're a software engineer $10/month is nothing. I seriously don't think you would notice if someone was quietly stealing $10 a month from you.
And yet that $10 a month would pay for a product that nearly all of us in this community wish existed.
But the biggest irony for me, is that all software engineers get paid what they do because someone on the other side of their business is willing to pay a lot more for what ever service you're ultimately helping to build. If everyone was this cheap about software, software engineers would be making minimum wage.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#43I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
What put me off is the AI stuff, I found out Kagi is an AI company.
I feel it synergizes well with their search, especially the quick answer summary of the results. Using it it feels more search than AI to me.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#44I recently heard of SearXNG and I use it instead now. Where I live $10 is a lot of money, more than it's worth to me especially considering I use LLMs a lot now instead. I find I search a lot less now.
And I like the way SearXNG is self-hosted. You can configure and prioritise a lot. And it can even search torrent sites etc.
I used to think Kagi had their own index but as far as I've heard most of it is actually meta results from other engines, just re-ordered.
The only thing I miss is an integration with ChatGPT, that would be amazing.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
To illustrate how good kagi is, here's the things it's not as good at (for me): 1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today 2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index. 3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info…
In the old days, I could search for something niche on Google and get blogs/enthusiast websites. Does Kagi do that, or will I only get commercial results like modern Google?
It does. They also have filters you can apply to your query to further restrict the results for things like small web (blogs and niche forums, using the Marginalia index AFAIK) and forums (Reddit and so forth), so that you don’t have to resort to appending “Reddit” to your searches.
Kagi is basically $20/month to time travel back to 2014-era Google with extra features. It’s fantastic and well worth it. I can’t recommend it enough.
Edit: Upon checking my billing it’s $10/mo, not $20. All the better!
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#46I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
To illustrate how good kagi is, here's the things it's not as good at (for me): 1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today 2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index. 3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info…
Kagi also doesn't support TV show/movie cast queries where it lists the photos of the cast and the name of their characters.
It's pretty much the only thing I still use Google for.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What put me off is the AI stuff, I found out Kagi is an AI company.
I feel it synergizes well with their search, especially the quick answer summary of the results. Using it it feels more search than AI to me.
Yeah I don’t want to pay them to develop AI stuff.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#48That's some super steep pricing
It only feels that way because search has been free essentially forever. But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain! Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same t…
> Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web?
It was fairly common to use the web before people used Google, or even Altavista.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#49I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
I love that you can pin, raise or lower results from specific websites. They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins. It's wonderful. Trust me too, it's worth it. ~850 searches a month here.
> They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins.
That sounds really interesting, have to check those out! I've only used that feature minimally so far.
Re: Introducing Kagi Search's New Design
#50I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
I've had Kagi for several months now and have no desire to go back. Brave is horrible, DDG is bad, and Google is bad AND Google. I decided it was time to trim subscriptions a few months ago and chose to ditch ChatGPT and keep Kagi.