And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around.

I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.

(Other standard lenses include

- Forums

- Fediverse forums

- Usenet/archive

and I think 7 others.)

From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

Even if they got 100 million active paying users it’d still be a tiny fraction of overall search traffic.

In the beginning, Kagi was mostly just API calls to Google and Bing AFAIK. Their results were still better for some reason, probably because they didn't have to consider how valuable the ads on garbage site were before throwing the site out of my results.

But I fear that if a large search engine copied some of Kagi's filters/lenses for non-commercial blogs & forums then SEO agencies would dedicate immense resources to polluting them.

People will target Kagi because it's packed to the brim with people who have $5-10/month to spend on a search engine, and likely have $5-10/month to spend on other things too.

If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.

Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc.

We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.

You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.

If they do become bad then at least I have had a fantastic search engine for another few years of my life like I had from 2002 until 2009 ish.

And also, already at this point, they and marginalia has proven that it isn't impossible to enter the search engine marked even now. This was long considered impossible, at least here on HN.

That because there's a chance Kagi will become bad, there's no point in using it now and thus we should stick to Google, which is already bad? That doesn't make sense.

The same line of thought can be applied to anything. We don't know what will happen in the future, therefore we can't be sure that things won't go bad. Is there even a way to have such a guarantee?

Assuming I don't want to use Google (because it's bad) and I won't use Kagi or Perplexity or others (because they might become bad), what's the realistic solution? Roll my own search engine? I don't have resources and I don't trust the future me to maintain it.

Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking

... but also:

- more modern

- more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot)

- blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower)

- with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes

- no tracking

If I were a rich man, I would probably keep my subscription just to support a Google competitor. Alas, I'm not, and so I'll be going back to Google.

Did you try blocking the problematic sites and if it didn't work, did you file support requests?

I didn't on support requests, either, perhaps I should. I have before, and the team did a great job at addressing what wasn't working.

While these situations could be a pg-style astroturf submarine, or they could be satisfied customers (the best kind of advertising), I wouldn't necessarily say fishy (you can look at the satisfied users' previous contributions to make that judgment yourself! :)).

Personally, I've not used Kagi, but I hear positive things from people I trust that use it. So I'll likely try it in the future.

Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.

Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google.

Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.

I am definitely not a bot.

I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).

The alternative is Searx and I may try it sometimes, but so far Kagi is cheap and very efficient for me (C++ coding and other languages).

They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.

Or at least I thought so?

But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.

If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it?

The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.

I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.

I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.

I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned.

Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.

And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.

I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then

Kagi is pretty clear about how they do what they do: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... You're half right, except that Google is not a vertical that they leverage for their index. Their solution works for me, but I'm also a techy. Anecdotally, my partner uses it, and she is not a techy.

> Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.

The only way this statement applies (to me) is if you can optimize for Kagi. The only way I can think of to do that is organically, but admittedly I haven't put much effort into it because the magic of Kagi's flavor of search is that it puts me in near proximity to information density and sources that I already trust. The real proving grounds for Kagi are a decade out.

>Kagi is known for delivering a unique flavor of high-quality search results, sourced from our own web index (internally named "Teclis") and news index (internally named "TinyGem").

The marketing at least is pretty good -- I haven't seen this many committed devotees since the iPhone was announced.

But here on the ground, I can type a few queries and reveal that Kagi is the same shit as Google. Perhaps you are seeing some manually adjusted queries?

P.S. there are lots of other concerns about Kagi too, I'm just talking about the search https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Here on the ground in Norway I just say "lucky you" if Google serves the same results as Kagi.

My experience is Google expands my search terms beyond recognition and I am absolutely and utterly fed up with starting to read an article about a problem I searched for, getting a result from a trustworthy site, starting to read only to realize Google secretly behind my back expanded my search from "unpopular-ancient-javascript-framework-from-2021" to "currently-popular-js-framework-with-kinda-similar-name".

My time is valuable. Not having to babysit my search engine is something I happily pay for.

Could probably get my employer to pay for it too.

If Google by some miracle has you in an experimental group where they don't mess with your queries, or if you have time to babysit it - more power to you.

I am only saying Kagi is just as shitty as Google for my queries and certainly is using their index based off the 30 or so searches I made. I am not in a technical niche however, so maybe they're using something different for that or you saw a manually-adjusted query?

But for the regular, everyday people queries, yeah 100% it's just google bro.

Let me also clarify: I am absolutely not denying that Kagi uses Googles index.

I am just pointing out that for some reason when I search with Google I get lots and lots of results for things I didn't search for. For a while I kept them away by sprinkling doublequotes everywhere but the last few years, no amount of double quotes or even the verbatim operator works anymore.

With Kagi however not only does doublequotes work (for now at least), - I usually don't even need to apply them, my queries work just like they used to do in "old" Google back in 2009.

That is what I pay Kagi for.

I can be totally open that for what I know the reason might be as simple as the fact that Kagis API access gets results directly from Googles search API without passing through what I think of as a "search broadening" function and without applying A/B testing experiments to the results that come back.

I don't care. I get my results.

And if someone come along and present a better alternative that uses only their own independent index, I'll be inclined to pay even more just because I'd love to see it. (I was a marginalia supporter for months and might become again in the future.)