Kagi search reached 20k paying members • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#71

Post by ambrose2 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:30 AM UTC

rbits wrote: post #49

Vegenoid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot. If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.

Yeah, no one's going to wear a shirt that says Kagi on it. They'll wear a shirt with the mascot on it though

I definitely would, I generally don’t wear graphic t’s.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#72

Post by depereo » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:30 AM UTC

Amazing, and I've somehow managed to find each and every one of 'em over time in various comment threads, here and elsewhere.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#73

Post by Zetobal » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:31 AM UTC

ahkurtz wrote: post #40

Zetobal wrote: post #9

My results got so much worse since they started using the brave API for search results I had to cancel. Was a great product but I am back on self hosted search.

As a pretty new subscriber, can you tell me a bit more about this? Using bing under the hood is part of what eventually made me leave DDG. And I'm not particularly excited about using brave services. When what this change made and what does it do? What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?

Responded to what changed in another comment for hosted search I use a fork of searxng.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#74

Post by 38 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:31 AM UTC

Kagi needs a free tier.

even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#75

Post by Exoristos » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

And if they had set the subscription cost to, say, $2 a month, they might have had 200,000 "members" by now.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#76

Post by nipperkinfeet » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

Paying for a search engine makes no sense to me. Startpage is just as appealing and free. There is also Yandex, which is identical to Google's old search engine. By the end of 2023, the search quality of Duckduckgo and Bing have dropped. DuckDuckGo is also now directing me to scroll through rubbish on the front page "Explore our features", so I moved to Startpage completely.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#77

Post by layoric » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #57

cwsx wrote: post #21

I switched to them a few months ago, I was previously using duckduckgo (and Google before that). As most of you have probably noticed Google search results have seriously dropped in quality the last few years, but especially in 2023. I'm no longer able to get meaningful results for almost any topic, especially if it's technical, the only results are AI generated (?) / obvious SEO spam websites. It takes me multiple d…

Does it have an option to exclude commercial websites? That'd be quite useful to me. Pretty much every time I try to find information about a product, all I find are sites trying to sell it to me (but I already have it and want to find information about it, damn it!).

Another Kagi user here, yes, the customization of results is way better than any other search engine I've used. Eg, personalization can be manually set to lower or raise weight of results from specific domains. This has become extremely useful to not only filter out bad sites, but increase relevant results when you regularly get information from sites like GitHub etc.

Stats are released about these as well so you can easily copy heavy used fiters [0].

[0] https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#78

Post by freediver » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #67

cdata wrote: post #23

I'm a happy paying customer. Kagi is the first non-Google search engine I've used where I don't feel the need to constantly cross-check the results with Google. For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.

Honestly I think the whole "we are a startup search engine company who decided to spend the time to set up a production chain for t-shirts" is a worse use of resources than the actual money spent.

We are only humans, and we have a mountain to climb. Setting a base camp to pause and reflect on what we already achieved makes climbing that mountain more, not less, likely. Besides, there is no rush. We might as well enjoy the journey.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#79

Post by monk_the_dog » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:33 AM UTC

I am a happy customer, and recently discovered their URL rewrite rules: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html. This lets me automatically rewrite urls so reddit automatically opens in "old" reddit and boost docs open with the latest version of boost. Really feels like this search engine was built for people like me.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#80

Post by lucasban » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:33 AM UTC

fuddle wrote: post #25

_benj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hehe! I see it as great marketing, possibly decreasing churn (although Kagi subscribers seem among the most enthusiastic I've seen around!) and just generally continuing with the tred of goodwill towards users (the opposite of the usual treatment of users from big tech)

The t-shirt doesn't have their name on it. I don't see how it will help spread their brand.

It’s likely to lead to more real world discussions of the product, someone is bound to ask what the shirt is about, or you might feel more motivated to talk about it while wearing it.