I think we really will need more details here! Could you elaborate a bit? What would I learn if I spent 25 min researching kagi?

Sorry, I'm far from an expert here. They started recently and just went out of closed beta I believe. I've been using it for a few months now.

They have a lot of nice features pulled from Google and DDG:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html

I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.

Would you say Kagi has escaped the Google SEO deterioration? Google has essentially gotten so bad for me that DuckDuckGo, without noticeable improvement, is now on par with Google.

Also a subscriber to Kagi.

In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.

Pinterest gone from image results is worth the entry price alone.

Seconded!

Fyi, it’s pretty simple to add a custom filter to any decent adblocker like uBlock to prevent annoying domains from showing up in search results. I haven’t seen a Pinterest result or Stackoverflow clone in years…

> "you can extremely easily block domains"

I just use ublacklist [1] for that.

I like Kagi by the way, but my problem with it is:

1. major: I value privacy. I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.)

2. minor: The subscription cost is a little too high for my usage volume.

[1] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

> I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.)

You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments (like PrivacyHQ) if remaining anonymous is imperative to you.

Kagi is 100% privacy respecting though, with the data you choose to trust us with (we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data).

Not GP but do you mean Privacy.com? As far as I'm aware it requires truthful personal information to use just like any other financial service.

As such, it can still be used to link a person to their Kagi account which means it's not private or anonymous in any meaningful sense. Additionally the service is only available to US citizens. I would strongly urge Kagi to consider adding cryptocurrency payments - ideally Monero.

This is coming from a paying Kagi customer. I like to put my money where my mouth is but I'm not a fan of the current payment options. I understand that Kagi is a small company in early stages, but I would expect cryptocurrency payments to be available 12 months from now.

You are correct, I thought there was a company called PrivacyHQ that offered anonymous payment cards, but I see now I was wrong. Privacy.com does not fullfill that gap.

It would be good if you can accept Bitcoin payments and do something like Mullvad VPN (use numbers for login).

From my (shallow) understaning, Bitcoin does not offer full anonymity ?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-21/crypto-tr...

> use anonymous payments

Why not Monero, the clearly top choice for anonymous payments?

When we looked into it, it was hard to find a simple API that a USA company can use to allow monthly subscription payments with Monero, similar to how Stripe enables fiat subscriptions.

> "You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments"

Well, that would be an improvement, but all searches will still be linked to 1 account, whereas i can search on other search engines without this privacy issue.

On top of that, privacy laws in the US are... quite bad (even compared to Europe.)

> "we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data"

I appreciate your effort, i might reconsider at some point. Thank you for your reply!

> Well, that would be an improvement, but all searches will still be linked to 1 account, whereas i can search on other search engines without this privacy issue.

We do not log searches or associate them with an account (check our privacy policy). This is because this would only be a liability for us, with no benefit. We are in the business of selling search results, not user data.

> DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them

I'm curious as to where it lacked. DDG works more than well enough for me, but I'm wondering what other people search for where it is not.

I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again.

But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google.

I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.

I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.

I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.

I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for.

Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.

totally agree that for ~5-10% of searches DDG is not as good as google.

When DDG fails, I just re-run the search with "!g" and it goes straight to google and I'm good.

The problem is knowing when it is failing. How can you know what you may be missing? How can you know how much time you are losing by not getting the best results? Etc.

Yeah, I used DDG for about a year. It just became such a pervasive weight I went back to google. Despite the crappy seo it is still less of a pain / faster than ddg - but I know google is not surfacing high quality results from sites I found through it years ago. At this point, the web is far less useful than it was, mainly because you can't find the good sites anymore. I am going to give kagi a spin, since I really wanted to make something non-google work, and google looks like it will never improve. This feels exactly like my back and forth with linux as my daily driver. It took 15 years, but it eventually became the least bad option.

Yeah, the dreaded !g in DDG is an all too familial feeling.

I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.

Non-English queries have usually poor result.

Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since.

For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.

It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response.

If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old.

Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today.

No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.

Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200k employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team.

I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall I beleive we also have superior results to Google.

Kagi is broken and flawed in same ways like humans, and it is what makes it more humane.

If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our resources.

I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach.

To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do.

Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure.

To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...

Good news, reduced price family plans are coming soon (we are aiming January). You'll get three users for $10/mo, four for $12/mo as a base membership. A lot of discussion about it going on right now in our discord server.

I'll be signing up the day those are available!

Most of your arguments regarding resources are in general valid points, but when you are showcasing 3 results as selling points how hard is it to keep them updated. If you're not personally bothered by this showcase -- which is your product advertisment -- you perhaps should be. Going against a trillion dollar company needs a very convincing pitch IMO to average user.

> We are a ten people bootstrapped team.

We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.

You're demanding an awful lot out of a $10/mo product here. And I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's still an as-good-or-better search engine than Google with no ads and a focus on privacy.

The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.

I never once mentioned the price point.

My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin.

You like it. To each his own.

They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search.

Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.

Then you're missing the contradiction. Average user won't pay for search, and paying tech-savvy user may not be convinced. I have nothing against their product - my critique is to improve their product showcase.

I never knew pointing out excuses was a 'dick move' when we are doing the same theoretically (mining web data). In my defense, you could take your opinion elsewhere.

There are startups that index only products and prices, so you could use their API. Maybe it’s a cost issue though.

It doesn't seem like it works all that well either...

Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150.

Something like this would be much better as a result: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone...

For sure it can be improved, but at least it points you in the right direction (/r/HeadphoneAdvice)

Remember we are comparing this to Google where the entire first page for this query is either ads or results full of ads and affiliate links.

No offense again to the product. Please take this as positive criticism

Please don't compare yourself to Google. Most people on HN are well aware that Google search has become a terrible baseline. DDG, appending Reddit to query etc., are workarounds discussed a lot of times on the forum.

I have no beef against Kagi. I wish you guys succeed, but please have a better product argument. At this point, I actually find equally good suggestion on 'headphones' from both DDG & Ecosia. If Kagi needs to win over, it should be doing better vis-a-vis the upcoming search engines, not Google which has been SEO gamed over & over.

Non taken. I mentioned Google as for most people, 'better than Google' is already worth paying for (and for most people Google is also still the "king").

We may differ perhaps on what 'winning' means. For us having thousands of people pay for Kagi despite such strong and free competition is already winning. We do not have ambition for global domination, but are creating a search experience for people that want an alternative that has their best interest in mind. And when we have a product glitch, it is not like we are delibarately not achieving even higher quality - we are constrained by our resources.

Also have in mind that we launched our public beta just 7 months ago, give us a bit of time (Google has been around for 25 years, DDG for 15 years, Ecosia for 14 years) and we may reach your standards of quality. Fact that generally speaking Kagi already brought more innovation to search experience in such short period time than these legacy search engines did in decades (by legacy I mostly mean using legacy business model - ads) means that we are serious about it. Just need a bit of time.

> the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old.

This happens on Google too, all of the time. I think this is a reddit issue, with how they have their meta configured...

Has anyone tried YOU.com? It's my new favorite search engine. Wiping Google from my searches is great.

I keep going back and forth between you and brave. I love the concept of brave's goggles but I wish it was more like point/click and it could automagically pick the best goggle based on keywords etc.

Anyone here use Kagi and Neeva for a similar amount of time? If so, thoughts on comparison?