Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.

Wow, they have that? That’s what I always wanted from Google and they never delivered. Im sure they had reasons. I really don’t think they want to empower their users, they are even hostile to search users and content creators, amp comes to mind and am glad it dissapeared already. Meanwhile I’be been using duckduck but i’ll give kagi a go.

Worse, Google used to allow you to block sites but removed the feature a long while back: https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-discontinue... .

What happens when you ask it how many Ukrainian generals have died? Does it insist on giving you pages and pages about Russian generals, like Google?

I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it thinks it knows what I want.

No, Kagi (unlike Google and DDG) will just stop providing results, it won't make up others with very tenuous links to your search terms like the others do.

Just tried that. I did have to put "ukrainian generals" into quotes (which makes sense, that's how it's supposed to work) but then it just showed me 5 results total, all of which contained exactly that phrase.

How are the porn results?

Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned.

Kagi is intended to be a paid service when it launches. This is something I actively want. It should make them the opposite of user-hostile. Their users will be the source of their revenue so they will need to provide value or lose them. Login is a necessary part of that. I'm happy to take both that inconvenience and the cost.

And as of now, they are listening to users very attentively. Just a few hours ago I suggested they clarify the defualt "Programming" filter since it only searches q&a sites (i.e Stack Overflow) and they have already changed the name to "Programming Help" to make it more clear.

I used it for awhile and did like it quite a bit - I found myself having a bit of anxiety though worrying if I was going to hit the search limit with my more trivial queries. Google really has us psychologically

Is there a search limit for Kagi during beta? I don't see it documented anywhere, and I've been using it as my primary search engine for a few months and haven't seen any sign of a limit.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some limit to prevent abuse, but it hardly gets in the way of my normal usage.

According to a discussion I had here previously with a Kagi user, when they go out of beta they plan to offer a $10/month plan with a quota of 20 searches per day (and $0.015 per each additional search), and an unlimited plan for $20-30/month. Additionally, every time you change something related to your search query (such as clicking "Images", changing the sort order, applying filters, or blocking a website) counts as an additional search, so you could go through your quota pretty fast.

Apparently all of this is to offset the costs from paying Google and Bing to run searches for them (the site basically takes results from Google and Bing and then combines them together with their own special sauce) but with a pricing model like this it seems like Kagi will remain a niche tool solely used by the wealthy.

Hm, 30 USD/month for good search is not that much - and certainly not "wealthy" territory. Remember that many people pay subscription services they use a lot less (18 USD for Netflix, anyone?).

The main paradigm shift necessary will be to pay at all for something that was "free" and is provided "free" to this day - even if the quality is worse.

Monthly subscription and quotas? While I respect and understand the goal I can’t help but feel like we are paywalling what the web has been for the longest time and should be “out of the box”.

Hostile is such a drastic word to apply to a service that is dedicated to making search better by actually listening to the desires of their users.

They need to support their efforts somehow. Instead of showing ads or selling your data, they are going to charge a fee to use it.

Google uses ads to pay for the service, which is available without logging in. Those ad systems can track you. On the other hand, a paid service (even if it is currently in "free" mode) will likely get rid of ads, but requires some authentication to know you are you.

I'm logged into Google all the time. I do this to get sharing working across Chrome. Others doe the same with Firefox. Some don't, because privacy.

I hear you think logins are 1000x more hostile than paying with your eyeballs. How would you suggest resolving this clearly conflicted view with logging in vs. how the revenue is made on a given site?

It used to be that if you used a paid service, then that service wouldn't throw you to the wolves of internet marketing/tracking companies. That alone made logins 1000 times less hostile.

But that is changing. Internet marketing companies are now teaming up with websites so the websites to their dirty work for them and you end up getting tracked anyway -- but with much higher certainty as to who you are. That means that now, yes, logins are more hostile.

The web continues to get smaller and smaller.

And they also intend to charge $10 per month (and that's just for 20 searches per day, which is a WTF low number). There's no way I'm paying that kind of money.

+1 kagi was the first alternative engine that has passed all of my random tests, mostly weird cameras and python coding searches…

But why would a search engine require an account to use in the first place? Or maybe I took it wrong?

Kagi is probably a lot more usable, right now. Nobody’s trying to game it.

As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.

What’s the story behind Kagi - are they somehow related to Google?

To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.

Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.

This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).

At least Startpage has been serving Google results (via paid API access) for years. There is nothing new about Kagi paying for access to it.

I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in 90% of it's query.

It's substantially better than Google for what I do with it (mostly work-related queries). A few reasons why:

* It blocks all the GitHub and Stack Overflow copycat sites out of the box.

* I can add additional sites to the block list with two clicks.

* It up-ranks (semi-)official documentation like the Python docs or MDN over blog spam sites.

* I can manually up-rank sites (and even pin them to the top of the results) if I'd like to see them more often.

Kagi is awesome because where Google thinks it can guess what you want, Kagi gives you an easy way to tell it what you want.

I already have an extension that's allow me to block, or highlights results on Google or Bing

Kagi's better than Google for me. Proof is that initially I only had it set up as default search on one device but I've progressively switched them all over out of annoyance with crap google results. I haven't yet had to go to google once to finish a search I started on Kagi.

This is probably true for me, if we also say that 50% of the queries are orders of magnitude higher quality on Kagi.

I use Google without AdBlock on my phone daily and it's not quite that different.

I use Google without AdBlock whenever I am in a private browser in addition to going without adblock on both my phone and tablet. I agree, it isn't that much different. At least with search, that is.

Do I have to wait for their invitation to join the beta list before I can try Kagi? The comments here are promising and I tried to take a look for myself but apparently only beta users are allowed in at the moment.

You have to ask for it by submitting a form in their webpage and they send you an invitation to your mail

I think that with current technology, beating google at the scale they run at is impossible. I think with advances it NLP, its possible. But right now, its pie in the sky.

Even my grandparents figured out how to scroll by the ads at the top of Google search. Actively hostile is a bit much.

I don't think my parents would be able to distinguish between the ads and natural listings.