I trust the non-ad-based company that I'm paying for quality results more than Google, that's for sure.

Edit: but I'm glad Google is noticing their results are getting to be shit.

Kagi is head and shoulder better at finding things that are useful. Google is going the way of AOL.

How do they plan to monetize it? How many people will pay for Search? Will they have an ad-supported version? If so how would their direction be any different when they face the same problems?

It’s a monthly subscription that apparently a lot of people are willing to pay for, feels like an honest business which is shocking in tech.

We don't know if they're profitable doing this. One day, they might go kaput as well.

at least they said they are

In the early days a user could go into their setting, see the cost per search, and the total cost of their use per month, compared to what they paid. I threw some extra money their way when I was my use exceeded what I paid. But that was before they changed up their pricing structure.

How much is "a lot"? The HN bubble doesn't count.

>20,000

https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

Nearly 24k paying users and ~400k searches per day

https://kagi.com/stats

I’ve subscribed just yesterday. Cannot be happier.

This comment convinced me to subscribe to Kagi. I've been hearing so much about Kagi on HN that it's time to see what all the hubbub is about.

If you end a sentence with a question mark an LLM will attempt to answer your question. It's great.

There is so much Kagi references on HN that I’m slowly beginning to feel sus about it.

I’m not saying this is happening (I’m not saying anyone is a shill). It’s just making me feel a little “hmm” about it.

It's not just hacker news! They were up in arms about some actual analysis of search quality here: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

Another common response is

>Your table is wrong. I tried these queries on Kagi and got Good results for the queries [but phrase much more strongly]

I'm not sure why people feel so strongly about Kagi but, all of these kinds of responses so far have come from Kagi users. No one has gotten good results for the tire, transistor, or snow queries (note, again, that this is not a query looking for a daily forecast, as clearly implied by the "winter 2023" in the query), nor are the results for the other queries very good if you don't have an ad blocker. I suppose it's possible that the next person who tells me this actually has good results, but that seems fairly unlikely given the zero percent correctness rate so far.

For example, one user claimed that the results were all good, but they pinned GitHub results and only ran the queries for which you'd get a good result on GitHub. This is actually worse than you get if you use Google or Bing and write good queries since you'll get noise in your results when GitHub is the wrong place to search. Of course you make a similar claim that Bing is amazing is you write non-naive queries, so it's curious that so many Kagi users are angrily writing me about this and no Google or Bing users. Kagi appears to have tapped into the same vein that Tesla and Apple have managed to tap into, where users become incensed that someone is criticizing something they love and then write nonsensical defenses of their favorite product, which bodes well for Kagi. I've gotten comments like this from not just one Kagi user, but many.

I'm not really a fan of this person's dismissive attitude, they're trying to avoid dealing with domain rank adjustments, understandably so the results are comparable, but the adjustments are part of the value add.

The testing methodology is also odd, looking specifically for yt-dlp when asking for "download youtube video", when the web based downloaders that most of the big engines turn up on top make more sense for the average user, both due to not having to install a command line tool and due to not necessarily being on a device the tool can be installed on. I've often used the top Kagi result, and it has worked fine, yet has been labeled as scammy by the evaluator. IIRC that site also ranks high in Google's results. For adblock they expect specifically ublock origin, and consider ABP to not count despite it also being a very popular blocker.

Them complaining about why it's only Kagi users reaching out to him also seems unnecessarily aggressive, eg I've found their article through you, in the context of Kagi, so if I were to comment, it'd obviously be in that context.

However, how likely is this article to be brought up in the context of Bing, Google, ChatGPT or DDG, where there are many more carefully thought out and less dismissive comparisons and discussions out there?

fwiw I agree with you that the evaluation criteria here are not ones that I particularly care about - I'm generally pretty happy with AI-first and then expanding to search engines if I can't get what I want there. My main intent was to note that Kagi users are just genuinely that enthusiastic, since GP at least lightly implied there might be some astroturfing going on.

I think it's just that search engine quality comes up often, and through the recent very popular Kagi threads, a lot of HN users have ended up at least giving it a try.

In a sense it's targeted advertising, since HN users are very likely to be power users who care about a paid search engine for one reason or another. But it's still organic in the sense that the articles posted are ultimately just the regular search engine discourse or otherwise not content specifically crafted for the purpose of advertisement.

Well you're right. I'm a shill for kagi. The experience has totally converted me. However, I'm not affiliated so I'm an organic shill - healthier and less toxic.

I feel it’s much more that people on HN are able to evaluate that Kagi is much better than Google, and really want other people to see that. Unfortunately, shitty search results are usually good enough for most people, so it’s hard to justify the switch.

I'm a happy Kagi user. It's not ground breaking or anything I'd even recommend to most people. It's a slightly worse Google search, with substantially better power usability. Normal, every day searches could be done on either Google or Kagi and the Google results are slightly better especially with regard to geo based critera. I don't have to specify "Name of City" in Google nearly as often as I do in Kagi.

However, when I'm trying to find some archaic technical solutions that I know is out there on the web somewhere, Google just can't really do the job any more at all. Exact search doesn't even work! Kagi's filters DO work, and the ability to black list stackoverflow scrapers cuts out a lot of the useless noise. It's at those times when Kagi earns its place.

I talk about it here, but I first stumbled across it on Mastodon. I think it’s more that the type of users Mastodon and HN attracts are the same type of people to pay for a search engine and be excited about a search engine.

I have long hated that “free with ads” is the first and only business model anyone thinks can work on the internet, so I want to support companies that are willing to push back against that. Ads in search create a conflict of interest that I don’t like. Ads in most products create a conflict of interest I don’t like.

I pay for YouTube Premium for a similar ideological reason. I want to support the business model that doesn’t rely on showing me ads. In a perfect world, this would mean that the features and algorithms of YouTube would change to prioritize me as a user, rather than pushing constant consumption, but with Google its baby steps.

There's no lasting "paid, without ads" model.

There's only "free, with ads" and "paid, with ads eventually".

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P000079nP9wSAE/ho...

There's no lasting pizza either, because tomorrow it has been eaten. So you should never buy a pizza or any other food, because after a while it has literally turned to shit.

free with ads seems to be lasting business model

I finally took this advice a couple of weeks ago. It's been great. Zero regrets.

I prefer not having my full search history linked to my personal info and payment details, but that's just me.

> I prefer not having my full search history linked to my personal info and payment details, but that's just me.

From Kagi Settings page, search history toggle:

Save My Search History

Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.

I encourage readers to think through the privacy practice implications of firms that may see your information "first party", and firms that make their money leveraging your information among third parties and the entire adtech ecosystem.

That's exactly what a honeypot would write.

[delayed]

> they (say) don't store your history

They don't show your history.

> the ad profile Google builds on you is probably more damaging to your privacy than a photo of the entire contents of your wallet.

I can take measures to prevent Google from linking together a full profile. It sucks that it's necessary, but once you log in it's effectively game over. And your payment info has enough stable identifiers that it's trivial to link you to pretty much anything else you've paid for.

---

The core misconception here seems to be the idea that there is such a thing as a honest for-profit corporation.

Kagi explicitly promises not to store your history[1] and then takes your money based on that promise. If they do store your history, then they are committing fraud on a grand scale.

[1] https://kagi.com/privacy

I see lots of promises, but very little proof. While, again, running a business model that massively increases the inherent risk compared to the competition.

One of the best things about paid business model for search is that it aligns incentives and decreases the risk of data mining as the business makes money through subscriptions, without any need for ads/selling data.

Doing one doesn't prevent them from doing the other. It gives them more data about you to sell, while limiting the dataset to gullible rich people who think that you can capitalism yourself out of the problems of capitalism (the prime advertising target demographic).

But what is the incentive?

Money?

You are the one claiming that Kagi is somehow special, trustworthy, and immune to the same influences that drags down everyone else.

Like all the companies that realized that quietly selling highly targetable user data is more profitable than their actual services? See all the "DNA analysis" companies selling data left and right

> I can take measures to prevent Google from linking together a full profile

> I see lots of promises, but very little proof

Yet you trust google and any company that might do business with google? This view is some sort of mind game you're playing alone.

Who said anything about trusting Google in the first place?

My point is that Kagi's business model requires more trust in Kagi than Google's requires in Google.

How would you go about proving such a thing?

Evert VPN app promises privacy but actually they don't honour that promise

That's why I said it's an equation, a balance, if you will. Sounds like you are all the way over on one side. We need the Stallman's of the world but most people are not that committed to a single issue.

> The core misconception here seems to be the idea that there is such a thing as a honest for-profit corporation.

And I would say there's degrees. Even if all companies eventually slouch into a google-like organization, at least you can jump on the bandwagon until that happens and find another when it does. And maybe none of the wagons are headed to a strict privacy, user controlled data, and free-software utopia, but maybe not all of them are headed to Gomorrah.

I thought the same thing at first. Then I realized Google already has this info about me and more. So I just split up my searches between Google, DDG, and Kagi.