I have used Kagi for a few years now, worth the cash

While I'm no longer a customer, using Kagi showed me just how much the Google experience can be improved. The $10/month is tiny for the quality of life improvement.

I ended up building my own search instead - whoever controls your search results also controls how you find information and what you see, so I felt I needed to start building my own index. If you don't want to go down that rabbit hole and don't mind Kagi's politics, $10/month is a small price to pay to get a better search experience.

You made your own index, or just your own frontend? Do you have an advice on methodology?

I did both, but my index is tiny.

I started with a metasearch, since that's (mostly) all Kagi is. I send prepaid-API calls to Brave, Mojeek, Marginalia & Yep for every query, and get about 200 results back on every search. The cost is far less than I paid Kagi. My first version was a single PHP file written by Claude Sonnet 3.6 (!), any modern AI would one-shot something dramatically better. Obviously you can iterate & improve it over time yourself. Grouping the results by domain and ranking by how many search engines return the same page/domain will get you ~60% of the ranking quality.

Over the years I added more ranking signals and had Claude build a ranking optimizer. I provide "golden queries" ranked as I would prefer, and the optimizer runs experiments to optimize the weights for each ranking signal. It isn't perfect, especially since I only use on-page signals. But it has been good enough that I don't miss Google.

My own index is just a couple of SQLite databases. It is ridiculous how far you can get with SQLite, FTS Full Text Search & its built-in BM25. Each webpage takes up 10KB of index storage on average, once trimmed down to just the indexable text. I never clear my Firefox history, so I went through my history cache to find which sites I actually visit, then made a command line indexer to run on my laptop and index them in the mornings. Most sites offer a sitemap or RSS file, so you don't need to worry about crawling the site. My tiny index doesn't answer every query, and that's what the metasearch is for. But surprisingly often, that tiny subset of the internet does have the answer I need, and it saves me a paid search API fee every time it does.

My system is held together with duct-tape and hope, so for most people it's easier just to use Kagi (or Uruky.com). If you do want to build it out, the blog at marginalia.nu has far more useful technical details than anything I can offer. But if you do go down the rabbit hole, I think you'll start questioning how a giant enterprise like Google can manage to screw up search so much.

Do you worry that your methodologies will get you stuck in a local maxima (or minima?). By using combined output of metasearch and perhaps missing overlooked gems?

I treat my Firefox History the same way though the way I use it is a bit different right now. I would like to harness it like yours, but first I think I need to pipe it into ArchiveBox or something

Fastmail and Kagi. You won't look back.

I use Kagi and have considered moving to Fastmail.

Aside from the obvious larger issues with Gmail (privacy, trusting that Google won't just deactivate your account, etc), is there anything in the day-to-day usage of Fastmail that you find to be an improvement over Gmail, in the same way that Kagi is an improvement over Google search?

I don't feel like I'm a huge email user, but for me the privacy and lack of trust with Google was enough. Losing access to an email account at the whim of some Google algorithm, with nobody to contact about it is just a problem I don't need.

One thing i like with fastmail is the masked emails & its integration with 1password. It's really nice to have a separate masked email per account, and with 1password browser extension generating them when signing up is trivially easy.

This massively improves your security.

You can keep the actual email that you use to log into fastmail completely secret and never use it anywhere which makes it harder for people to attack your fastmail account.

In addition to the reasons you stated:

- Bring-your-own domain name with lots of useful features for aliases and routing messages around based on that

- Real human customer service, and with agents that actually want to help you to boot

- Everything follows common standards (IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV), no need to deal with Google/Apple-specific weird stuff

- Masked email

- 60 GB storage per seat

- Actually usable and good web UI

I've been using Fastmail for a few years with my own domain, and it's great. I can't speak to Gmail and if they have this feature, but I use custom aliases with any company or service I do business with (for example, I'll do southwestairlines112026@[domain].net). When the company is hacked and my email address is leaked, or if the company decides to not respect the "Unsubscribe" button, I disable that alias and force it to do a bounce back. This is a feature I only recently discovered and love it.

One thing that stands out is IMAP access. While the fastmail web application is good, it also works great with thunderbird. Gmail on the other hand seems to apply some heavy throttling to IMAP access - folder operations, moving items, and calendar updates are much slower with thunderbird + gmail than thunderbird + fastmail.

yes, kagi is great, but the larger point of search is dying, and therefore the web will die, is still there.

kagi, for example, has "Quick Answer" mode, which means if you append "?" to whatever your asking about, it will generate a summary (sort of an on-demand AI injection), which is great for the user experience (nobody is shoving AI down your throat).

but the problem remains: am i really going to scour web results, or am i going to throw in a "?" and get my answer in less than 3 seconds? i find myself using this more and more, despite deliberately trying not to, the convenience of is just addictive like that.

the result for web site operators is the same: my click never arrived, the ads they served didn't reach anyone, and they are disincentivized to even run a site.

i'm not sure what's going to happen, but it's not looking great. the web was meant to democratize information. the current generation of LLMs/search/chats are reversing this, siloing the truth within the same 5 oligarchs of data.

I recently switched to Kagi after years of using ddg and have been very happy with it. You get 100 free searches. Before I made the leap, I spent a period of time with Firefox set up to use kagi if I typed `k <query>`. I found myself using kagi for the vast majority of my searches pretty quickly, the signal:noise ratio is substancially better, especially for technical subjects.

> The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent

I've found myself paying for more and more products that I used to get for free. Given how expensive running a search engine is ad revenue is necessary for a free product. Advertisers pay more if they are getting clicks and conversions... Obviously this ends up impacting search results. Additionally, the tradition SEO model went from bad to worse with LLMs.

Anyways, up until very recently I would've agreed with you, but ultimately this was a pretty easy expense to justify after a short trial.

Just as a counter, I tried Kagi and was unimpressed. I didn’t get any better results than normal google stuff, I couldn’t see what would be worth paying for.

Kagi is great. My first search felt just like when google was new and SEO didn't exist.

I switched to Kagi about 6 months ago. Can't see myself ever going back to Google/DDG. Feels like what I remember Google being 15 years ago.

I don't see why it's "abhorrent". In fact, paying for a useful service that somebody else provides is common sense.

I've been a happy customer of Kagi since 2022, and for me it's well worth the money. It gets better results than Google or DuckDuckGo, and I trust the results more because they're not pay-to-play like Google.

Using Kagi for about 3 months now. Very pleased with it. You know get 50 search free without even making an account, so worth a try.

its less the paying for a sub, and more that the whole financial backing of the internet (advertising) is reaching a point where its just too much.