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I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…
On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.
Yeah +1 on Google Search becoming shit lately. I shifted to DDG for a while but settled on Brave Search for now. Their new AI summarizer is quite good and I like how they club Discussion posts together.
DDG was great a few years ago and has steadily become shitter and shitter with time. Its still my default but I find myself banging to others more and more.
Well Mullvad can only offer that because they require you to be on their VPN. How would Kagi enforce their payment plan without an account?
Mullvad can offer that because they generate you a one time access token that’s good until a certain time for a set number of simultaneous clients.
Kagi could do a simpler version - an access token that’s good until a certain number of searches. In fact, they have that mostly built - the link they tell you to use in private sessions is literally it.
Add to that anonymized payment options, and you got yourself a hard to track design.
I've been using it for about a year and a half, on the unlimited plan. I pay for the year up front for the discount. There's no way I'm willingly going to stop using Kagi. I'm a developer and perform about 2500 searches a month.
The ability to adjust the ranking of domains and the lenses save me a ton of time. No other engine comes close to the productivity.
You can easily talk to the developers and founder, too. I've had many of my suggestions actually implemented. It's great when you pay for the service and they are in it for you, not your data.
Ah a fellow discord member
My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I've paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it's great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi's results pages are very light. It's also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I'm de-ranking certain sites so they're pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.
There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.
Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google's API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.
I've found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn't handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.
Just FYI: They ditched the Bing API completely ca 2 months ago. See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1685-no-tears-shed-after-losing-bing
I actually do remember hearing about this somewhere, but even though I have their blog/updates in my RSS reader, they never officially mentioned this before this user brought it up—maybe in their Discord server? Thanks for pointing this out! I can imagine they really wanted to get away from Bing after the price surge, as that was only a signal of more to come. Duckduckgo seems to be paying for that with the massive increase in ads.
However, it is still disconcerting the degree to which Kagi is hugely reliant on Google. Doesn't change any of the positive aspects about Kagi, though.
Have you tried brave search? Why do you choose mojeek over that?
I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2
Pros for Brave Search:
Cons for Brave Search:
Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don't even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it's cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the "smaller web" and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html
Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I've had with them. I just don't have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.
Lastly, I've learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don't use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html
Yeah I might try out Mojeek. I use brave for my searches and do !s [query] to get startpage results for my images
If you're using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit "Add [Search Engine]". And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.
So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.
It's especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it's also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you're using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn't really something you can do (yet).
I have not tried it, but I'm not a fan of logging into a search engine or providing an email. Mullvad, by comparison, just gives you an account number.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-does-kagi-search-require-an-email-address
I've been using it since last year. It's always been much better than the mostly unusable ones Google has given me for years now. It's the best $10 I spend. It saves me time.
I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.
The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.
I have not properly tested it, however I had a look at their sample queries. One of which was Steve Jobs, the main thing I noticed was that three of the top 5-10 results were the Wikipedia page for Steve jobs but in different languages. I appreciate that Google isn’t great but it’s not bad enough to serve you the same page three times. I personally use searxng.
I was chatting about it yesterday here in this thread
I use the 10/month plan with a $5.0 soft limit and a $10 hard limit, though I have yet to exceed my plan quota at all.
I have used it since hearing about it on HN a couple months ago during one of the DDG controversies.
Its completely replaced my search engine. I use it on my work machines, personal machines and phone for all searching.
Most searches are probably work related ie: Systems Admin, "Devops" (depending on your definition of the term), Security etc etc but also random thoughts. Heck today i was searching for flounder lights on it.
I generally find I have to refine searches less often, and rarely do I need to use bangs to pipe a search to DDG. I have had co-workers mention in recent months that they are always amazed that I will find very relevant sources fairly quickly, often ones that they cant get a front page hit on even when looking for it because i mentioned it. Though that may speak more to how I structure searches already since Kagi is fairly new to me.
I use the filters/lenses quite often. The recipes one is awesome for a lot of the cooking/smoking I do. Programming is solid too.
I would NOT reccomend this for general use yet unless it has a specific value add, such as with me and work. For example my wife still uses DDG (because i put her on it) and probably google on work devices or something. Its fine for her and thus for me. I would only reccomend it if you happen to work in a specific field that has a TON of crap sourcing/junk articles that are SEO gamed (ie: Tech) or you specifically align with the privacy ideology.
the account thing is only for stripe for billing for now, they go have a greyed out and unchecked box enable query history. I have seen it mentioned you can use a totally fake email to sign up (since it doesnt necessarily require verification) though the owner has recommended against it for obvious reasons. Adding crypto options brings baggage, I think he just tied it to stripe to the ease of billing/use.
My trials of it always seem outstanding, but the price with search limits has thus far discouraged me from signing up every time I think to do so. $5 for 10k searches (or some number that I wouldn’t have to think about as a human user searching for things) would get me over the fence. Even the family plan with up to 2 users seems stingy.
I tested it a bit a few months back, when the trial was still a bit more generous. Results are generally good (often better, but sometimes worse than Google's) and the custom filtering/weighting of search results is really cool. That said, for me the difference isn't nearly large enough to justify the price compared to just continuing to use Google with uBlock Origin. Especially considering a big part of their costs are third party API integrations for AI summarization, weather, maps etc (IIRC from some of their comments on HN), most of which I don't actually need or want. Maybe if I could pay like $3-5 without having to worry about going over some search limit and suddenly having to pay per search...
Most of the price goes to search engine API costs like Google
FYI: I'm not affiliated with Kagi, even though my opinion seem very biased
Been using Kagi for so long. Currently I'm using their unlimited plan. It's really helped me with my research because kagi can summarize pdf directly on the search result. You can also ask about pdf like what chatgpt premium version did.
I went from $10 to $25 because I want to support them for making this beautiful simple search.
My partner and I have been using the family plan for a couple months now and have been extremely happy with it. It's replaced all search on desktop and mobile.
We're usually searching for programming and devops related information, world and political news, and then local businesses and contractors, that sort of stuff.
I was considering it (having previously tested the now defunct Neeva) but the to me limited amount of searches is really stopping me from giving it a go.
I’ve been a Kagi user since launch, and it has completely replaced everything for me except image searches. It’s the best $10 I spend each month.
Same experience here. I tried Kagi when I got a new job and I thought that having a good search engine would be beneficial to me. It is indeed the best search engine I've ever used and I won't stop using it.
The issues because there are some: it's a bit expensive (but I gain at least 1 hour every day as I am not struggling with shitty results from Google), and the "privacy" of your searches cannot be proved once and for all even if they swear they don't store anything.
I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.
The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.
Haven't used it, but according to their Privacy & Terms they started using FastGPT which is a dealbreaker for me. I'll stick to SearX which allows more curation.
they started using FastGPT which is a dealbreaker for me.
Care to elaborate on why? I haven't being keeping up with all the AIs, and a 3 second search isn't returning anything nefarious.
Accuracy. They are known to hallucinate. Sifting through various sources to verify information is already time consuming task without AI created nonsense that is impossible to source check.
FWIW, the AI features are not used to provide search results; they are all on-demand and triggered by the user (via Quick Answer, or Universal Summarizer, or the "discuss this site" feature).
The founder is well aware of the problems with AI and that is taken into account when deciding how to use it in Kagi.
See this link: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
Generative AI is a hot topic, but the technology still has flaws. Critics of AI warn that “[AI] will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge”.
From an information retrieval point of view, relevant to our context of a search engine, we should acknowledge the two main limitations of the current generation of AI.
Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details (confabulating). This can easily mislead people who are not approaching LLMs pragmatically. (This is a product of auto-regressive nature of these models where the output is predicted one token at a time, and once it strays away from the “correct” path, for which the probablity grows exponentially with the length of the output, it is “doomed” to the end of output, without the ability to plan ahead or correct itself).
LLMs are not intelligent in the human sense. They have no understanding of the actual physical world. They do not have their own genuine opinions, emotions, or sense of self. We must avoid attributing human-like qualities to these systems or thinking of them as having human-level abilities. They are limited AI technologies. (In a way, they are similar to how a wheel can get us from point A to point B, sometimes much more efficiently than human body can, but it lacks the ability to plan and the agility of human body to get us everywhere a human body can)
These limitations required us to pause and reflect on the impact on search experience, before incoporating this new technology for our customers. As a result, we came up with an AI integration philosophy that is guided by these principles:
AI should be used in closed, defined context relevant to search (don’t make a therapist inside the search engine, for example) AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it (similar to how we use JavaScript in Kagi, where search still works perfectly fine when JS is disabled in the browser) AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)
That is better than most other cases, but far from perfect. It can still be wrong and that's even more harmul in "Quick Answer, or Universal Summarizer" as people are more liekly to trust it's result instead of double checking with another source.
I really like how it looks and how it performs, but I can't justify the price.
I'm actually in my first month as a paying subscriber. I've tried their 100 queries trial and was pretty happy with the results. However, with my current search profile I definitely need the $10 subsription, if not more. I'm honestly not sure their new pricing model makes sense at all. It seems way to expensive for the average person or poweruser alike.
I'll decide whether I stay a customer after this month, when I have a better impression of all the features and shortcomings of the service.
To me kagi will always be the DRM supplier and shareware payments processor company.
I'm an active subscriber of their service and have had no issues. The results are good, very rarely do I query through Google anymore.
I use Startpage You can also use any good SearchXNG instance I think etsi(dot)me uses Ai unlike Startpage Kagi is a good search engine but it comes with a price