So, I googled Kagi, found their link… Not only is it required to create an account to use their service, they want a credit card to bill as well! Hard pass.

What would you prefer? Anonymous payments? And regardless of payment method, how would you avoid creating an account to tie the payment to?

Payment via digital gift cards sold on Amazon, e.g. Mullvad

Granted, this would probably be a very miniscule amount of their users.

That's not how businesses process payment. Any responsible finance department will call a hard no on that. (And from a consumer side, asking to pay with a gift card is usually a huge red flag that a scam is incoming)

I believe they mean a gift card for their service, as in they should offer gift cards. Not send us $50 worth of Google Play gift cards.

https://www.amazon.com/Mullvad-VPN-Devices-Protect-Security/...

Yep

This Valentine's Day, give someone the true gift of love, a search.

Yes, as a paid service who directly sells their primary product rather than a data mining, anti-privacy homunculus whose most famous product is merely a means to an end, an account and payment is required. This is strictly better than Google.

Your goals are mutually exclusive.

DuckDuckGo is 100% privacy focused, free, and doesn’t require an account or credit card to use.

They are privacy focused in as much as they don't track you themselves, they just hand you off to Microsoft to be tracked.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...

Their founder is also on record as "down ranking misinformation", which is not a judgment call I want my search engine making. Relevance and truth are two different things.

> Their founder is also on record as "down ranking misinformation"

https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...

Also here, straight from the horse's mouth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247856

The sketchy and indirect way they engage with this criticism put me off of ever trusting DDG.

Thanks!

If you are into self-hosting, I hear Searx is pretty good. Been thinking on setting that up on my personal server so I can just stop relying on companies

The problem is DuckDuckGo is very USA and English focused. I've switched to it myself long ago, but it's very frustrating when I search for things and it brings up American shops higher than anything else. I'm not going to 5,000km to go shopping. You move out of English it's even worse. For general tech searching it's on par with Google. But if you are looking for things locally I often find the need to switch back to Google.

It has a location toggle at the top of the results page. It works fine for me, and I’m not from an English-speaking country.

Yes, and it's not as good.

Are you sure about the credit card? I signed up without one. There is a free option.

Cool. Continue using Google then.

Interesting - haven't heard of Kagi before but I looked them up and I can definitely see how a subscription-funded search engine leads to a better incentive structure. But can you provide qualitative examples of how your experience has been better than on Google?

- Result relevance seems on par with Google about five years ago. Very rare that I need to go past page 1.

- Advanced search operators actually work. When you quote something it actually searches for that exact string, when you minus something it actually excludes it.

- Categorization in the search results; for instance all of the low signal listicles can be segregated into their own section.

- Image search that is not intentionally nerfed that will just give you the image directly

- The ability to up and down rank specific sites from your results (something you can't feasibly do without an account anyways)

- DDG-like bang searches, with the ability to add custom sites

- The obvious one: no ads or tracking or perverse incentives

Agree with this, 100%.

Have been using Kagi since the invite phase. The moment they opened up and switched to subscription, I immediately subscribed (you'll run out of the free quota in ~3-4h - 50 searches per month).

Paying 10$/mo for something you do hundreds of times a day, and getting consistently better results than Google, Bing or DDG, doesn't seem too much to me. I happily gave up D+ subscription to have Kagi instead. It's very rare for me to have to scroll past for the first 5 results with Kagi. With the other search engines, nowadays I can't find anything relevant in the first page.

And they have an actual RoadMap: https://kagifeedback.org/roadmap

Honestly, It's the same price as copilot, which is imho one of my biggest tools in my coding arsenal currently.

I don't think it should be priced as high. I think they should add other services maybe w/ their own prices, like a photonmail competitor, and api's so people can build things off their tech but pay per query, etc.

I think they could at least have tiers like 100/month 1, 400 searches for $2.99, 1000 for $5.99, unlimited for 8.99. They'd reach a bigger audience, which would likely mean more dollars overall. If I were them, I'd also create a mobile app that's completely free, just to get people hooked on the results while using mobile, or maybe have some privacy-based ads in the app, though the actual search results would have none, and remove that for paid accounts.

Kagi has been a delightful experience for me for two months. Don't think I'm ever going back.

They said something like this after I exhausted my daily search allowance during the beta: go search somewhere else. I mean who are these disrespectful little pricks/snotty kids? :DDD

Im thinking on going with Searx instead. I don't want to pay money, and I already have a server I use for a variety of reasons. I get why most wouldn't want to do that...self hosting isn't for everybody. But I would prefer it to paying someone else or having my data sold

Yep. Let those below argue over “they want a credit card!” as if that isn’t exactly what people have been begging for. I gladly pay for Kagi and people who are now complaining because it doesn’t have some esoteric payment method were never looking to have the problem solved in the first place.

I’m not sure what these people are searching for but I want to pay for a search engine that doesn’t show ads and doesn’t track me. A credit card comes with the territory for mass adoption.