Stats are released about these as well so you can easily copy heavy used fiters [0].
Small Web: results that favor noncommercial domains and topics.
This only works as long as Kagi is a niche. The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO. Otherwise, they would have to change their methodologies every once in a while to completely flip the ecosystem.
With Kagi as I understand it, the customer is the user since it’s a premium product that isn’t selling ads. There’s really no good reason for them not to just nuke bad actors.
I also hope that domains which get blocked by lots of people will get reviewed for global downranking, but I don't think that's happening yet?
I wonder if kagi's going to have to charge for listings some day, instead of users paying in, if they intend to grow substantially.
Thankfully when I come across a irrelevant domain in Kagi I can just remove it from any future search results completely. If enough people do that, it may show up on the "most commonly removed" list inviting others to also ax it.
I rarely ever have an issue with spam on Kagi just by largely using the standard filters, and I'm confident this will remain the case.
And unrelated but I really like that I can redirect all reddit urls in search results to old.reddit.com, twitter to nitter etc. very helpful in searching on mobile.
They are the biggest search engine; every SEO trick, every spam attack is spearheaded against them. But also being the biggest and the inevitable, they can afford to blunt their search tool somehow in order to show more lucrative sort-of-hits and sell more ads. A moral hazard to do such a thing is always present fr any market-dominating player.
Kagi, in comparison, is tiny, and almost nobody cares to attack their algorithms. Back in 1990s, when Macs were a small minority in the PC-dominated world, they were the safest desktop machines, because almost nobody cared to write malware for them. Now that Macs are a sizable segment of computers in hands of important people, they are targeted by malware all right.
Sure, but also they're ignoring extremely basic issues. "every SEO trick" is one thing, "just copy the SO content and still get ranked on the first page" is them not caring. We can worry about them dealing with the complex issues after they address the low hanging fruit.
Google isn't incentivized to be a good search engine.
They are incentivized to be just good enough that you don't go elsewhere while increasing the number of ads / paid results.
Once I actually grab a full time job again I wouldn't mind grabbing my own subscription here to try it out. I'm curious if 300 searches/month is truly enough for me, though. And what would happen if I go over that rate. Am I simply unable to search more for that month?
Still I ended up subscribing, and after properly testing, I can recommend. The service is good, the blacklist feature is essential to me now; is just that the free tier is shit.
Also you can enable browsing history and use bookmarks to autofill stuff without having to use a search engine.
On top of that, this is during a month without any job (where I'd search even more on the clock). I hear it's 1.5 cents per query over but I can imagine doing 600+ searches once I'm employed again.
Per month?
My current Kagi searches from 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches. For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.
> 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches
1256 / 23 (days between today and Jan 3rd) = 54.6 searches on average per day.
Some days higher, some lower. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to get the search right, so you do 5-10 searches in one minute maybe. Doesn't seem farfetched to me.
Whereas Kagi reminds me of the 'old' google search. The results are meaningful and relevant, not diluted with pages of generic article results. They also offer a lot of great customisation options like being able to block or boost certain sites in results. They have some built in lists for common filler sites. I can't comment on the AI variation but I hear that's progressing well.
I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just thought I'd share my anecdotal experience.