About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.

This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.

What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

    but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.

I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."

This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.

It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)

As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.

Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.

Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)

I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.

I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.

Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least:

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.

https://kagi.com/changelog

I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow.

What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.

I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!

My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill. So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it. It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.

After using Kagi for two years now, I can't go back to Google or Bing. On principle, I pay for the Ultimate package because I desperately want there to be something besides Google and Bing.

> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary

This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.

No, thanks, I'll stick to qwant: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...

Of all the arguments, the “but it’s expensive” one is the one I really fail to parse. Search is probably the tool we all use day in and day out - it’s critical to everything we do both at work and at home. Paying for it is only a mind stretch because we’re so used to “free” but really, it’s nothing. Two coffees for a search that isn’t full of shit is an absolute no-brainer in my opinion.

I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly. My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.

> no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark)

TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.

I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.

Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.

Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.

The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).

The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")

That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.

>I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th

It's the first result on Duckduckgo.

I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.

I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.

[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.

I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.

I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same.

There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.

I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.

But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.

I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.

[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.

I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.

I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.

I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.

Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.

I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock).

Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.

Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.

I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?

Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad. Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.

Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.

Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.

And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!

Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead.

Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.

Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?

Recently converted 2 coworkers to Kagi, their minds we're blown when I was sharing screen and had no ads and relevant search results.

I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan.

Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.

I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.

The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.

I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.

The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice.

I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.

For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?

I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either.

That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)

I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.

      #!/bin/sh
      0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073

The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|

99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm. It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.

I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.

I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).

I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.

I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.

Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.

Fwiw, give a searxng instance a try.

I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service

Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results.

Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi

25$ a month user here and quite happy with just how quiet results are, equally so with the Assistant output when I've used it.

I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.

That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.

I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing.

Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).

Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:

- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia

and news.ycombinator.com :) of course

Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.

It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.

I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.

I tried Kagi and Brave. I get similar results on both but Brave is cheaper and AI answers.

For those who tried both: Kagi or Perplexity?

I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...

I have at least one kagi 3 month trial link. If anyone wants it, reply below :)

> A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result.

Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)

Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result

Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?

Kagi rules for search, and they also have the best AI front end in my opinion.

did this guy sell his apple stock and joined early on kagi private equity?

I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page.

But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.

Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.

No

I wish there was a discounted plan that didn't include "AI" - if the search is good, that's all I'm looking for in a search engine.

Just go for metaGer instead. Non-profit and based in Germany.

does kagi censor offensive results?

I have been using it for a few years now and can't live without it. They really nailed it.

another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.

Some nice features that may not be obvious:

- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"

They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.

Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.

Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.

I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.

The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.

searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.

Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).

So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.

Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".

But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.

I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.

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