I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries aggregated together.

I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.

DDG is like that. If it can't find any more matches it seems to spam random results.

I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but the pricing tier doesn't sit right with me, it's not that much better than DDG for my purposes. All these monthly subs start to add up. I'd be happier if there was a lifetime tier.

How much would you drop for a lifetime license of a product like this?

A lifetime subscription on a service for a one-time fee has so many perverse incentives I wouldn't trust a company offering this.

> DDG is like that.

DDG and Kagi both use Bing data. That could be the reason

Ok, maybe it’s not that the quality of Kagi results is so high, it’s more that the quality of Google results is so poor. Just not having to deal with all the spam is a winner to me.

Google results were rather like this in the golden age of Google searches. But the bad results can give you an idea of how to tweak your search to get what you're actually looking for.

The modern, more polished Google search can make it literally impossible to find things that exist, because Google tries too hard to provide what it thinks you're looking for.

- Localized search is not a great experience

- Business listing search via maps is not a great experience. Maps and searching on maps are a more important endeavor than browser and email when thinking about the ecosystem.

- AI is definitely important but so far none of those features (afaik) have trickled down to non-ultimate users. From what I have seen, features have been removed from the regular plans.

- Remove reliance on using bing/google searches.

- Search is not a one and done operation.

I mean they could focus on actually building out their own search engine as an example? (i.e. moving further away from using Google and Bing APIs)

It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.

Search quality requires maintenance and continual tuning. It's not a one and done "add more functionality" kind of product.

Fair. I was trying to make the point that they are already dedicating time to continuously tuning based on feedback on their forums.

> I feel like the core search is rock solid as is

Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me the option to manually block sites I don't want in results, but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated spam problem.

I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web search today.

> What changes you have in mind to search functionality?

Reverting the changes from around December that made it next to impossible to search for language-agnostic or English terms in another language.

Also reverting the changes over time that brought them closer to google or DDG and ignoring search terms unless you use verbatim or quote everything.

Kagi used to be about being explicit, but it’s slowly turning into the same "we know what you want to search for, so STFU" that all the other search engines are.

User since December 2021.

I paid for the 1 year plan, because I was excited about a company that was only for search, and provided good search by nature of people paying for it (so no ads and fair ranking)

I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.

They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.

The search quality tanked massively about two months ago, and is now almost as bad as Google.