They've got a few things going for them. no paid ads, obviously they seem to have generally better results with less spam a pretty useful API (FastGPT and Universal Summarizer in addition to...
They've got a few things going for them.
no paid ads, obviously
they seem to have generally better results with less spam
a pretty useful API (FastGPT and Universal Summarizer in addition to regular search results)
lenses -- much better results by focusing in on a particular topic
site blocking -- no more quora, pintrest for me
site ... bonusing? -- i can elevate the rankings of sites that I like
There is a setting where you can deprioritize or even fully block all results from websites that you dislike. Imagine being able to just fully block quora, nypost and dailymail. It's so nice.
There is a setting where you can deprioritize or even fully block all results from websites that you dislike.
Imagine being able to just fully block quora, nypost and dailymail. It's so nice.
Many sites are not biased per se but just garbage. I’m looking at you, Pinterest. And some sites are biased but also so ridiculously over the top that there is no value in reading them, eg...
Many sites are not biased per se but just garbage. I’m looking at you, Pinterest.
And some sites are biased but also so ridiculously over the top that there is no value in reading them, eg infowars, theblaze, etc. I’m not in any real danger of being in an echo chamber by removing what amount to political fan fiction from my search results.
And then there are paywalled sites that I have no intention of paying for.
Unfortunately, I think Google search results already have us in an echo chamber. They artificially boost some sites above others and generally funnel people into just a few sites that seem to...
Unfortunately, I think Google search results already have us in an echo chamber. They artificially boost some sites above others and generally funnel people into just a few sites that seem to perpetually monopolize the search page.
In my personal experience, Google regularly downplays or outright ignores some of my search terms — sometimes even if I put quotes around them — in order to direct me to more popular (but less relevant) results. On the whole, the internet feels like a ghost town to me compared to what it was 15–20 years ago (even though it's hard to imagine how that could possibly be the case) because Google represses traffic to obscure websites.
So deprioritizing the results that Google prefers to show you may actually reduce the echo chamber effect, depending on how you do it.
Not everything has to be a channel for anyone to funnel their views into you. Ultimately, you have created you "echo chamber" the moment you've submitted your search query. That's what the search...
Not everything has to be a channel for anyone to funnel their views into you. Ultimately, you have created you "echo chamber" the moment you've submitted your search query. That's what the search engine is for in the first place: to weed out stuff you are not interested in.
The first thing that occurred to me was how nice it would be to block sites that I've learned exist because they scrape other sites and dump the data into a page or article. The programming ones...
The first thing that occurred to me was how nice it would be to block sites that I've learned exist because they scrape other sites and dump the data into a page or article.
The programming ones scan GitHub and give back possibly broken code with zero context. The more general ones have a table of contents at the top which links to a paragraph or two copied from who knows where.
The most recent of those was a result from searching if something was toxic to cats, I think it was tomatoes. Some sections said no, others said maybe or yes, sometimes with almost the same phrasing contradicted right afterwards.
I hate those site scrapers, but sometimes I don't notice where a site is from and click on it anyway. I'm not actually sure this is a good fix for that, but wanting to block a site from search results isn't always because of a dislike which will lead to an echo chamber.
if you want an echo chamber you will find a way to make one some way or another. Personally, I would use such a feature purely for consistent top but low quality results (quora) or consistent spam...
if you want an echo chamber you will find a way to make one some way or another.
Personally, I would use such a feature purely for consistent top but low quality results (quora) or consistent spam sites. Others may use it to block FoxNews or CNN or whatnot, but that's their purview and they probably weren't clicking on such links to begin with.
If removing shit like daily mail counts as "building an echo chamber", I guess I'm in favor of echo chambers. I'm serious. Not listening to utter shit is not a negative thing. I have better things...
If removing shit like daily mail counts as "building an echo chamber", I guess I'm in favor of echo chambers.
I'm serious. Not listening to utter shit is not a negative thing. I have better things to do with my time than give brain platform to stuff like that.
Absolutely. Still I get the feeling that anyone using a paid search engine probably already knows how to do so should they desire. It is something that we're eventually going to have to better...
Absolutely. Still I get the feeling that anyone using a paid search engine probably already knows how to do so should they desire.
It is something that we're eventually going to have to better address as a society.
This is exciting. I was considering a family plan the other day, but I realized the limit on searches wasn't feasible once I analyzed the traffic my family is putting through Google right now....
This is exciting. I was considering a family plan the other day, but I realized the limit on searches wasn't feasible once I analyzed the traffic my family is putting through Google right now. I'll have to see if my wife has any interest in trying a non-free search option, but it does sound like a great idea to me since Google has been so fucking useless lately.
To people who use Kagi, can you tell us what exactly makes you consider it better than other search engines? I assume there's more reasons than just a lack of ads. So I'm curious what exactly...
To people who use Kagi, can you tell us what exactly makes you consider it better than other search engines? I assume there's more reasons than just a lack of ads. So I'm curious what exactly makes you prefer Kagi over other options.
I have been using Kagi for a couple of months now. I also heard of it through Tildes and never want to go back. It is definitly worth 10$ and still worth 25$ for me. It is a professional,...
Exemplary
I have been using Kagi for a couple of months now. I also heard of it through Tildes and never want to go back. It is definitly worth 10$ and still worth 25$ for me.
It is a professional, customizable search engine. Not only are the results better, searching things in quotes actually works as you would expect it.
Furthermore, you can blacklist any page you never want to see. I use this feature very extensivly. For example blocking all of these AI generated sites that pop up. Or these stackoverflow/github "wrapper" sites with no added value. 'Newspapers' that are not neutral.
You can configure sites to be globally ranked higher or lower.
It shows you how ad/tracker ridden each page is
It does not only not show ADs, it also does not collect your queries and sells them to other companies for profiling/tracking (this is imo more important than no ads)
You can also search certain categories. 'Programming', 'Research' for example and then only see related sites instead of a food blog with clever SEO. This is sometimes helpful when certain coding related terms mean something different in the common sense.
It can summarize websites and even video I think.
Its very fast and has its own chatgpt like feature, coupled with the indexed data they scrape and collect.
They have their own search engine and combine it with google/bing results, so its not just adfree/trackerfree google/bing overlay.
You dont store your whole digital life into one big company that sells your data to anyone asking for it.
I went a few times to Google when I couldnt find what I was searching for, but Googles results were worse in those cases.
The only thing that Google currently can do better is anything related to shops/locations in your area, as Kagi does not seem to have the data and Google offers a whole suite to register and manage your shop to be listed at google.
At times Googling things kind of made me irrationally angry, as the results were so off to what I was searching for. It didnt understand me and gave odd, out of context answers. It felt like talking to wall, or my ex.
The ability to block domains from showing up in results is pretty great. No more StackOverflow scraper sites clogging programming searches or useless Pinterest pages dominating image search. It...
The ability to block domains from showing up in results is pretty great. No more StackOverflow scraper sites clogging programming searches or useless Pinterest pages dominating image search.
It also lets you prioritize or pin some domains over others (popular one is pinning MDN docs for web dev searches), and it has "lenses" which lets you better specify exactly what you're searching for (examples include forums, PDFs, programming, news, and recipes) to cut down on irrelevant results.
The other thing that can be nice is that "listicles" like fill the first few pages of Google search results a lot of the time can optionally be bundled into a separate section which is easily ignored if they're not what you're looking for.
@lux provided a lot more detail than I can come up with... but I'd like to add/reinforce that the results I've been getting from Kagi in the ~4 months (and 3,615 total queries) I've been using it...
@lux provided a lot more detail than I can come up with... but I'd like to add/reinforce that the results I've been getting from Kagi in the ~4 months (and 3,615 total queries) I've been using it have been utterly fantastic. I've used DDG for a very long time, and I'd found myself needing to !g more and more in the last couple years... but even Google has been getting really bad at showing me what I'm actually looking for, and now just outright ignores you when you try to refine and specify your query. But I've only felt the need to try Google or DDG a handful of times in the last few months when I couldn't find what I was looking for on Kagi.... and in those cases, Google and DDG also didn't help. Kagi really has been that fantastic, even in some obscure and specific subjects that I wouldn't have expected their index to be complete enough to handle yet.
I'd also like to add that while people here keep talking about the lack of ads, I want to de-emphasize the ads themselves and bring more attention to the clarity of the business model: Give money, receive services. It's straightforward. You don't need to worry about how they're paying for the free stuff they give you. The price is right there on the sticker.
Glad to see this, I've been continuing to use Kagi and will not go back to Google, DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc. All the alternatives I have tried (whether privacy-focused, ad-infested, etc) have...
Glad to see this, I've been continuing to use Kagi and will not go back to Google, DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc. All the alternatives I have tried (whether privacy-focused, ad-infested, etc) have been much worse at results and have less options for customization. With Kagi I get relevant results on the first page nearly every time, a fast UI, and in general an overall great experience that I have not seen replicated any product, private OR open source.
I think one of the downsides of Kagi was some users having a worry about hitting their quota. With this change, that worry is all but gone which I think makes the service more attractive.
My only concern is whether such a change is sustainable, but Kagi has been pretty open any time they've changed their plans and why they make those changes- so offering unlimited tells me they have some confidence in their current position- Kagi will likely continue to make changes based on their performance- so if they see a downturn in users or an upward cost of search for themselves, it's hard to think the unlimited options may always be available, just hoping they haven't "offered too much too quickly" and then have to backtrack to save themselves at some point.
I was one of those on the fence due to the quota. I first tried Kagi some time ago and qualified for the "early founder" bonus of 1500 searches on the $10 plan, but after tracking my searches for...
I was one of those on the fence due to the quota. I first tried Kagi some time ago and qualified for the "early founder" bonus of 1500 searches on the $10 plan, but after tracking my searches for a few days I realized I'd easily fly way past that every month, so doing searches took on this new mental baggage of questioning whether I really needed to look this up, or is this really the ideal way to craft my query so I won't have to refine it and burn more searches if the results weren't great. I loved the search engine but dreaded using it.
I actually resubscribed again yesterday out of frustration with DDG and Google, figuring I'd get some catharsis by using up my 1500 before going back off it again, but after seeing this announcement it felt like an automatic no-brainer to immediately pay for the whole year. Such a relief I can use it without all the quota anxiety at last.
I feel the same way. I don’t even think I would exceed the 300 searches on the cheaper plan. But the fact that it’s a limited resource changes the way I think about it. Even if it was for 10...
I feel the same way. I don’t even think I would exceed the 300 searches on the cheaper plan. But the fact that it’s a limited resource changes the way I think about it. Even if it was for 10 million searches each month, it would still change my mental process. Wherever I can in my life, I try and do “unlimited” things, even with strings attached. It often doesn’t make financial sense, but it’s better simply because I don’t have to think about it.
I felt the same anxiety at first but after a couple of months it doesn't bother me much and it appears to have nudged me to get better search habits. Now I will spend a few seconds thinking what I...
I felt the same anxiety at first but after a couple of months it doesn't bother me much and it appears to have nudged me to get better search habits. Now I will spend a few seconds thinking what I actually need to look for, applying the proper lenses or bangs. Before I could easily waste a lot of time just searching for useless crap or redefining queries over and over without much thought. Still seems weird to actually pay for a restriction like that, but I feel the benefits and so far I haven't exceeded my 300 searches.
Kagi is introducing unlimited searches for $10 per month with their Professional plan to thank users for their support. They have improved efficiency allowing lower prices and want more people to enjoy ad-free search. The Ultimate plan gives early access to new tools being developed and remains the best way to support Kagi's mission. Family plans now have unlimited searches for $20 or $14 per month. Users expressed excitement that Kagi uses funds in a way they agree with, prioritizing members over data collection like other search engines. Kagi aims to be sustainable without relying on funding or data sales, and welcomes user collaboration and investment to deepen involvement in their journey.
Haha you beat me to this! Really happy I don't have to use the 'g' bang anymore. Might split it with a friend to bring down the cost even more. What's $5 like -- half an avocado toast? ;)
Haha you beat me to this!
Really happy I don't have to use the 'g' bang anymore. Might split it with a friend to bring down the cost even more. What's $5 like -- half an avocado toast? ;)
It's not just that Google is harvesting and brokering my data for a far higher price than the value it's giving these days, it's that it's also stealing my time for advertising. I just picked up...
It's not just that Google is harvesting and brokering my data for a far higher price than the value it's giving these days, it's that it's also stealing my time for advertising.
I just picked up the couples' unlimited plan for myself and my spouse, and I have to say that Kagi paid for itself on the first day.
If I value my time at the corporate consulting rate of $150/hour, finding a place to work in an airport as the first search result, rather than spending 15 minutes weeding through SEO and sponsored items (as displayed in a side-by-side comparison with Google and Brave (Bing) searches) sold me on the proposition.
Been using Kagi for some months now and surprisingly I can still get by with 300 searches a month. Still, it is amazing to follow the innovation going on and it feels like they have new...
Been using Kagi for some months now and surprisingly I can still get by with 300 searches a month. Still, it is amazing to follow the innovation going on and it feels like they have new improvements coming every week.
What it boils to for me is really that Kagi is a company with a business model built around making a good product for its customers. While we may have enjoyed decades of free online services, but ultimately companies like Google and Facebook is not in the business of making a good product for its customers, but for its advertisers. And that has really starting to show in recent years with quality going way down. Google even had something similar to Kagi's Lense feature some years ago, but of course that worked against their goal to please advertisers, so that disappeared. We haven't seen much innovation in terms of search quality for the users in many years, and with how everything seems to be about pleasing advertisers, I don't see how real innovation can come out of that "free" business model. Kagi shows that it is possible to go against the trend of enshittifacion of everything online.
I really don't understand people who pay for search engines,it's like there is no way I would pay for paywalled Google/bing. I would rather donate to any opensource search engine ( Marginalia,...
I really don't understand people who pay for search engines,it's like there is no way I would pay for paywalled Google/bing.
I would rather donate to any opensource search engine ( Marginalia, wiby, stract or alexandria.org) rather than having Search engine subscription.
Of all the software subscriptions out there, search ranks pretty highly on my list of things that is appropriate to use a subscription model for. It has recurring costs and high quality search...
Of all the software subscriptions out there, search ranks pretty highly on my list of things that is appropriate to use a subscription model for. It has recurring costs and high quality search saves me a lot of time.
There are plenty of things I’m happy to exchange money for that I could theoretically get for free, search just happens to be one of them.
I don't use Kagi but I can see the appeal depending on the quality of the results. Even without taking ads into account, Google is practically useless these days. A lot of searches will bring up...
I don't use Kagi but I can see the appeal depending on the quality of the results. Even without taking ads into account, Google is practically useless these days. A lot of searches will bring up articles, listicles and SEO-boosted results that barely relate to the topic at hand. Even basic searches can be frustrating because it will bring up the most recent news articles. I've had to filter out specific names in the past because I'd be inundated with articles about that person.
The biggest issue though is when you're looking for topics that wouldn't be found on "niche" or more academia-focused engines. Topics that would be more on the surface web on news sites, but still get pushed down by other results pushed to the top by SEO boosting or just being more recent.
As an example: just last night, I was trying to jog my memory about a YouTuber doing a livestream of an abandoned house and stumbling upon a body. I never saw the video, but remembered it was mentioned around the time Logan Paul got a lot of flack for a similar video. I have yet to find the incident. My results on Google brought up an incident from last year with an abandoned church, a guy finding a car in a lake with a body in it, and countless YouTube videos.
On Duck Duck Go, for some reason, "YouTube livestream finds body in house" brought up some new scandal about a politician's leaked sex tapes as the top result (maybe because it's the House of Representatives??). And also, alien corpses in Mexico? Adding "dead" before body just makes the majority of results relate to aliens.
So, yeah. This is an admittedly odd example to use, but a lot of my basic searches are for jogging my memory about events which just wouldn't be on the more niche parts of the internet that the ones you mentioned would crawl. (On that note, I tried entering that string in Stract since the others are more overtly focused on niche or old web sites. It brought up results completely unrelated to the topic, just based on if it has the individual words such as "in" or "YouTube" or "house".)
I think you misunderstood me, My point is Why would you pay for something while free alternatives exist? The same thing is happening at twitter as elon want to replace the free social media model...
I think you misunderstood me, My point is Why would you pay for something while free alternatives exist?
The same thing is happening at twitter as elon want to replace the free social media model with subscription .
"Free" products are reliant on advertising as a revenue source. Advertising is an inherently corrosive monetization method. In the pursuit of growth, profits, whatever - you will always corrode...
"Free" products are reliant on advertising as a revenue source. Advertising is an inherently corrosive monetization method. In the pursuit of growth, profits, whatever - you will always corrode the core value of your product in favor of advertising. You can see this in the experience you have on Google today compared to the past.
None of the mentioned alternatives in my original comment use advertising, matter of fact the website you are using right now is free without advertisements .
None of the mentioned alternatives in my original comment use advertising, matter of fact the website you are using right now is free without advertisements .
It doesn't seem like a fair comparison. A web-scale search engine is much more expensive to run than Tildes. It sounds like you're saying that advertising is bad and subscriptions are bad, which...
It doesn't seem like a fair comparison. A web-scale search engine is much more expensive to run than Tildes.
It sounds like you're saying that advertising is bad and subscriptions are bad, which leaves what? State funding? Donations only?
But they clearly don't work as main daily-driver search engines. Even Marginalia's homepage says it shouldn't be used as one. Also, Kagi incorporates Marginalia results into its index
But they clearly don't work as main daily-driver search engines. Even Marginalia's homepage says it shouldn't be used as one.
Also, Kagi incorporates Marginalia results into its index
Google is an advertising company. Just because you don't see ads on the homepage doesn't mean they don't utilize advertising. Once you actually get to the search results, they do have...
Google is an advertising company. Just because you don't see ads on the homepage doesn't mean they don't utilize advertising. Once you actually get to the search results, they do have advertisements or sponsored results. Bing does the same.
There's also the data collection aspect to the free ones too, and how they use them to assemble a profile on you and how that can further be used in ways that aren't necessarily favorable to you.
You mentioned Google and Bing in your original comment as well. But I'll chalk it up as an unfavorable interpretation on my part of what you intended to say.
You mentioned Google and Bing in your original comment as well. But I'll chalk it up as an unfavorable interpretation on my part of what you intended to say.
Based on your response, I think it's you who misunderstood unkz. They search so much that they believe the benefits of having less ads, less spam, and less bloat to the results they get on...
Based on your response, I think it's you who misunderstood unkz. They search so much that they believe the benefits of having less ads, less spam, and less bloat to the results they get on searches is worth 10 dollars a month to them. Their cost/benefit analysis is different than yours.
For me it's a mindset of wanting to support a company that, by virtue of earning revenue driectly through customer subscriptions, has a strong incentive to make product decisions that are aligned...
For me it's a mindset of wanting to support a company that, by virtue of earning revenue driectly through customer subscriptions, has a strong incentive to make product decisions that are aligned with the best interests of those customers. That's as opposed to free ad-supported alternatives that have incentives more aligned with their advertisers.
I also hate ads in general. It's why I pay for YouTube Premium, Pandora Plus, and a bunch of podcasts that offer ad-free feeds on Patreon despite the "free" ad-supported alternatives existing. I'd much rather pay for products and services with my wallet than with my time and privacy.
Additionally, my subjective experience is that the quality of the free search alternatives has fallen off a cliff lately, with CEO blogspam becoming a real problem. I don't feel that pain nearly as much with Kagi, even before you consider the ability to promote, demote, and block results from specific domains, making it a superior product worth paying for in general. Some handy AI features are icing on the cake. I mean I pay for Netflix and watch maybe 4 to 6 hours on there total in a good month, so shelling out a few bucks less than that for something I use every day providing me value in both my work and personal lives seems obvious.
I'll give it a try for a month. I don't like that it's for-profit and only a few components are open source, but the other options are pretty dire and I'm not willing to deal with the horrors of...
I'll give it a try for a month. I don't like that it's for-profit and only a few components are open source, but the other options are pretty dire and I'm not willing to deal with the horrors of Searx for my principles. Paying for search does feel weird, but their other goals are so well-aligned with my own that I might as well put my money where my mouth is.
I'd love to see Mozilla do their own spin on this or partner with Kagi or something, but I'm guessing they'd be too afraid of jeopardizing their deal with Google and the startup costs seem beyond them right now.
Sounds interesting. Will try the free trail later. Although I'm not a heavy user of searches, i do use Google for local searches , tried DDG - results now I think about could be a bit odd, Ecosia...
Sounds interesting. Will try the free trail later. Although I'm not a heavy user of searches, i do use Google for local searches , tried DDG - results now I think about could be a bit odd, Ecosia does seem to lack relevant results. Thanks for bring up a interesting option 😃
Eh, 108 dollars a year is a lot. Granted, maybe I would change my mind if the search results end up being better than Brave Search+DDG. I haven’t tried Startpage and SearX and these 2 also get...
Eh, 108 dollars a year is a lot.
Granted, maybe I would change my mind if the search results end up being better than Brave Search+DDG. I haven’t tried Startpage and SearX and these 2 also get recommended around. I think all of them except SearX are just reskinned Google/Bing Search.
It’s ok to not be interested, but I’m sure there are several other services you use across all those devices that you have to log in to. Good news about Kagi is it doesn’t store personal...
It’s ok to not be interested, but I’m sure there are several other services you use across all those devices that you have to log in to.
Good news about Kagi is it doesn’t store personal information (aside from your email) so there’s little risk in them using incredibly long session durations (which they do). Use the browser plugin and you can skip signin in Private windows as well.
I’m intrigued to know what you find objectionable in it. I don’t typically read privacy policies in-depth, but I went ahead and gave it a look and didn’t see anything that jumped out as...
I’m intrigued to know what you find objectionable in it. I don’t typically read privacy policies in-depth, but I went ahead and gave it a look and didn’t see anything that jumped out as immediately concerning. I might just be lacking context from not reading enough others though.
Is there a search engine with a privacy policy you prefer? I’d be interested in checking it out (assuming the search quality is good).
Under Settings/Account there's a session link that automagically logs you in if you click it. Maybe you could save that somewhere that syncs or is available to all your devices to save some hassle.
Under Settings/Account there's a session link that automagically logs you in if you click it. Maybe you could save that somewhere that syncs or is available to all your devices to save some hassle.
I was thinking more along the lines of a password manager or something that you already keep in sync. If you don't already have a mechanism to do that then it sounds like you certainly do have a...
I was thinking more along the lines of a password manager or something that you already keep in sync. If you don't already have a mechanism to do that then it sounds like you certainly do have a lot of juggling around on your hands.
Is that how the user profiles work? I'd have thought they would let you use your account (and customized settings) from anywhere. The family plan would then be a set of profiles, each with it's...
Is that how the user profiles work? I'd have thought they would let you use your account (and customized settings) from anywhere. The family plan would then be a set of profiles, each with it's own options, that can log in across limitless devices.
Once you log in on a given browser, you're done basically forever though unless you delete all your cookies. Given the time I've wasted trying to find good results on...
Once you log in on a given browser, you're done basically forever though unless you delete all your cookies. Given the time I've wasted trying to find good results on Google/Bing/DDG/Brave/whatever, I'm pretty sure I could log into Kagi once on every browser released since Mosaic on every computer I've ever owned and still have time to spare. 😅
I don’t understand the juggling part. What is there to juggle? You set it to once, login, and set it as default. I probably have as many devices and browsers as you. Personally I gladly spent the...
I don’t understand the juggling part. What is there to juggle? You set it to once, login, and set it as default.
I probably have as many devices and browsers as you. Personally I gladly spent the time setting up Kagi since it saves me so much time and grievance to use it.
Hey if you don’t like the service or trust the company then don’t use it, I think that’s probably your best argument. From the perspective of someone that really likes it, the trouble of setting...
Hey if you don’t like the service or trust the company then don’t use it, I think that’s probably your best argument.
From the perspective of someone that really likes it, the trouble of setting it up even across all devices and browsers was really no trouble at all.
I’ve been a duck duck go user for a few years now. Can someone advise how Kagi is so much better?
They've got a few things going for them.
There is a setting where you can deprioritize or even fully block all results from websites that you dislike.
Imagine being able to just fully block quora, nypost and dailymail. It's so nice.
Doesn't this carry a risk of building yourself an echo chamber?
Many sites are not biased per se but just garbage. I’m looking at you, Pinterest.
And some sites are biased but also so ridiculously over the top that there is no value in reading them, eg infowars, theblaze, etc. I’m not in any real danger of being in an echo chamber by removing what amount to political fan fiction from my search results.
And then there are paywalled sites that I have no intention of paying for.
Unfortunately, I think Google search results already have us in an echo chamber. They artificially boost some sites above others and generally funnel people into just a few sites that seem to perpetually monopolize the search page.
In my personal experience, Google regularly downplays or outright ignores some of my search terms — sometimes even if I put quotes around them — in order to direct me to more popular (but less relevant) results. On the whole, the internet feels like a ghost town to me compared to what it was 15–20 years ago (even though it's hard to imagine how that could possibly be the case) because Google represses traffic to obscure websites.
So deprioritizing the results that Google prefers to show you may actually reduce the echo chamber effect, depending on how you do it.
Not everything has to be a channel for anyone to funnel their views into you. Ultimately, you have created you "echo chamber" the moment you've submitted your search query. That's what the search engine is for in the first place: to weed out stuff you are not interested in.
I'd agree but with different sites. If failing to add aggressive white noise (at best) is an echo chamber then I'll happily construct it.
The first thing that occurred to me was how nice it would be to block sites that I've learned exist because they scrape other sites and dump the data into a page or article.
The programming ones scan GitHub and give back possibly broken code with zero context. The more general ones have a table of contents at the top which links to a paragraph or two copied from who knows where.
The most recent of those was a result from searching if something was toxic to cats, I think it was tomatoes. Some sections said no, others said maybe or yes, sometimes with almost the same phrasing contradicted right afterwards.
I hate those site scrapers, but sometimes I don't notice where a site is from and click on it anyway. I'm not actually sure this is a good fix for that, but wanting to block a site from search results isn't always because of a dislike which will lead to an echo chamber.
if you want an echo chamber you will find a way to make one some way or another.
Personally, I would use such a feature purely for consistent top but low quality results (quora) or consistent spam sites. Others may use it to block FoxNews or CNN or whatnot, but that's their purview and they probably weren't clicking on such links to begin with.
If removing shit like daily mail counts as "building an echo chamber", I guess I'm in favor of echo chambers.
I'm serious. Not listening to utter shit is not a negative thing. I have better things to do with my time than give brain platform to stuff like that.
Absolutely. Still I get the feeling that anyone using a paid search engine probably already knows how to do so should they desire.
It is something that we're eventually going to have to better address as a society.
Blocking the dailymail? It's pure junk.
No there is not a risk of that.
Fair enough on that point. Even me, a filthy American, knows the daily mail is no better than a tabloid.
The Daily Mail is literally a tabloid.
You mean racist right wing tabloid
This is exciting. I was considering a family plan the other day, but I realized the limit on searches wasn't feasible once I analyzed the traffic my family is putting through Google right now. I'll have to see if my wife has any interest in trying a non-free search option, but it does sound like a great idea to me since Google has been so fucking useless lately.
To people who use Kagi, can you tell us what exactly makes you consider it better than other search engines? I assume there's more reasons than just a lack of ads. So I'm curious what exactly makes you prefer Kagi over other options.
I have been using Kagi for a couple of months now. I also heard of it through Tildes and never want to go back. It is definitly worth 10$ and still worth 25$ for me.
It is a professional, customizable search engine. Not only are the results better, searching things in quotes actually works as you would expect it.
Furthermore, you can blacklist any page you never want to see. I use this feature very extensivly. For example blocking all of these AI generated sites that pop up. Or these stackoverflow/github "wrapper" sites with no added value. 'Newspapers' that are not neutral.
You can configure sites to be globally ranked higher or lower.
It shows you how ad/tracker ridden each page is
It does not only not show ADs, it also does not collect your queries and sells them to other companies for profiling/tracking (this is imo more important than no ads)
You can also search certain categories. 'Programming', 'Research' for example and then only see related sites instead of a food blog with clever SEO. This is sometimes helpful when certain coding related terms mean something different in the common sense.
It can summarize websites and even video I think.
Its very fast and has its own chatgpt like feature, coupled with the indexed data they scrape and collect.
They have their own search engine and combine it with google/bing results, so its not just adfree/trackerfree google/bing overlay.
You dont store your whole digital life into one big company that sells your data to anyone asking for it.
I went a few times to Google when I couldnt find what I was searching for, but Googles results were worse in those cases.
The only thing that Google currently can do better is anything related to shops/locations in your area, as Kagi does not seem to have the data and Google offers a whole suite to register and manage your shop to be listed at google.
At times Googling things kind of made me irrationally angry, as the results were so off to what I was searching for. It didnt understand me and gave odd, out of context answers. It felt like talking to wall, or my ex.
The ability to block domains from showing up in results is pretty great. No more StackOverflow scraper sites clogging programming searches or useless Pinterest pages dominating image search.
It also lets you prioritize or pin some domains over others (popular one is pinning MDN docs for web dev searches), and it has "lenses" which lets you better specify exactly what you're searching for (examples include forums, PDFs, programming, news, and recipes) to cut down on irrelevant results.
The other thing that can be nice is that "listicles" like fill the first few pages of Google search results a lot of the time can optionally be bundled into a separate section which is easily ignored if they're not what you're looking for.
@lux provided a lot more detail than I can come up with... but I'd like to add/reinforce that the results I've been getting from Kagi in the ~4 months (and 3,615 total queries) I've been using it have been utterly fantastic. I've used DDG for a very long time, and I'd found myself needing to !g more and more in the last couple years... but even Google has been getting really bad at showing me what I'm actually looking for, and now just outright ignores you when you try to refine and specify your query. But I've only felt the need to try Google or DDG a handful of times in the last few months when I couldn't find what I was looking for on Kagi.... and in those cases, Google and DDG also didn't help. Kagi really has been that fantastic, even in some obscure and specific subjects that I wouldn't have expected their index to be complete enough to handle yet.
I'd also like to add that while people here keep talking about the lack of ads, I want to de-emphasize the ads themselves and bring more attention to the clarity of the business model: Give money, receive services. It's straightforward. You don't need to worry about how they're paying for the free stuff they give you. The price is right there on the sticker.
One example, there is a feature called "lenses" to search only programming related sites or only recipe sites.
Here you go, someone summarized it in this comment.
Glad to see this, I've been continuing to use Kagi and will not go back to Google, DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc. All the alternatives I have tried (whether privacy-focused, ad-infested, etc) have been much worse at results and have less options for customization. With Kagi I get relevant results on the first page nearly every time, a fast UI, and in general an overall great experience that I have not seen replicated any product, private OR open source.
I think one of the downsides of Kagi was some users having a worry about hitting their quota. With this change, that worry is all but gone which I think makes the service more attractive.
My only concern is whether such a change is sustainable, but Kagi has been pretty open any time they've changed their plans and why they make those changes- so offering unlimited tells me they have some confidence in their current position- Kagi will likely continue to make changes based on their performance- so if they see a downturn in users or an upward cost of search for themselves, it's hard to think the unlimited options may always be available, just hoping they haven't "offered too much too quickly" and then have to backtrack to save themselves at some point.
I was one of those on the fence due to the quota. I first tried Kagi some time ago and qualified for the "early founder" bonus of 1500 searches on the $10 plan, but after tracking my searches for a few days I realized I'd easily fly way past that every month, so doing searches took on this new mental baggage of questioning whether I really needed to look this up, or is this really the ideal way to craft my query so I won't have to refine it and burn more searches if the results weren't great. I loved the search engine but dreaded using it.
I actually resubscribed again yesterday out of frustration with DDG and Google, figuring I'd get some catharsis by using up my 1500 before going back off it again, but after seeing this announcement it felt like an automatic no-brainer to immediately pay for the whole year. Such a relief I can use it without all the quota anxiety at last.
I feel the same way. I don’t even think I would exceed the 300 searches on the cheaper plan. But the fact that it’s a limited resource changes the way I think about it. Even if it was for 10 million searches each month, it would still change my mental process. Wherever I can in my life, I try and do “unlimited” things, even with strings attached. It often doesn’t make financial sense, but it’s better simply because I don’t have to think about it.
I felt the same anxiety at first but after a couple of months it doesn't bother me much and it appears to have nudged me to get better search habits. Now I will spend a few seconds thinking what I actually need to look for, applying the proper lenses or bangs. Before I could easily waste a lot of time just searching for useless crap or redefining queries over and over without much thought. Still seems weird to actually pay for a restriction like that, but I feel the benefits and so far I haven't exceeded my 300 searches.
Universal summarizer:
Haha you beat me to this!
Really happy I don't have to use the 'g' bang anymore. Might split it with a friend to bring down the cost even more. What's $5 like -- half an avocado toast? ;)
It's not just that Google is harvesting and brokering my data for a far higher price than the value it's giving these days, it's that it's also stealing my time for advertising.
I just picked up the couples' unlimited plan for myself and my spouse, and I have to say that Kagi paid for itself on the first day.
If I value my time at the corporate consulting rate of $150/hour, finding a place to work in an airport as the first search result, rather than spending 15 minutes weeding through SEO and sponsored items (as displayed in a side-by-side comparison with Google and Brave (Bing) searches) sold me on the proposition.
Been using Kagi for some months now and surprisingly I can still get by with 300 searches a month. Still, it is amazing to follow the innovation going on and it feels like they have new improvements coming every week.
What it boils to for me is really that Kagi is a company with a business model built around making a good product for its customers. While we may have enjoyed decades of free online services, but ultimately companies like Google and Facebook is not in the business of making a good product for its customers, but for its advertisers. And that has really starting to show in recent years with quality going way down. Google even had something similar to Kagi's Lense feature some years ago, but of course that worked against their goal to please advertisers, so that disappeared. We haven't seen much innovation in terms of search quality for the users in many years, and with how everything seems to be about pleasing advertisers, I don't see how real innovation can come out of that "free" business model. Kagi shows that it is possible to go against the trend of enshittifacion of everything online.
I really don't understand people who pay for search engines,it's like there is no way I would pay for paywalled Google/bing.
I would rather donate to any opensource search engine ( Marginalia, wiby, stract or alexandria.org) rather than having Search engine subscription.
Of all the software subscriptions out there, search ranks pretty highly on my list of things that is appropriate to use a subscription model for. It has recurring costs and high quality search saves me a lot of time.
There are plenty of things I’m happy to exchange money for that I could theoretically get for free, search just happens to be one of them.
I don't use Kagi but I can see the appeal depending on the quality of the results. Even without taking ads into account, Google is practically useless these days. A lot of searches will bring up articles, listicles and SEO-boosted results that barely relate to the topic at hand. Even basic searches can be frustrating because it will bring up the most recent news articles. I've had to filter out specific names in the past because I'd be inundated with articles about that person.
The biggest issue though is when you're looking for topics that wouldn't be found on "niche" or more academia-focused engines. Topics that would be more on the surface web on news sites, but still get pushed down by other results pushed to the top by SEO boosting or just being more recent.
As an example: just last night, I was trying to jog my memory about a YouTuber doing a livestream of an abandoned house and stumbling upon a body. I never saw the video, but remembered it was mentioned around the time Logan Paul got a lot of flack for a similar video. I have yet to find the incident. My results on Google brought up an incident from last year with an abandoned church, a guy finding a car in a lake with a body in it, and countless YouTube videos.
On Duck Duck Go, for some reason, "YouTube livestream finds body in house" brought up some new scandal about a politician's leaked sex tapes as the top result (maybe because it's the House of Representatives??). And also, alien corpses in Mexico? Adding "dead" before body just makes the majority of results relate to aliens.
So, yeah. This is an admittedly odd example to use, but a lot of my basic searches are for jogging my memory about events which just wouldn't be on the more niche parts of the internet that the ones you mentioned would crawl. (On that note, I tried entering that string in Stract since the others are more overtly focused on niche or old web sites. It brought up results completely unrelated to the topic, just based on if it has the individual words such as "in" or "YouTube" or "house".)
When you do the amount of searching I do, I think it’s worth it in time savings.
I think you misunderstood me, My point is Why would you pay for something while free alternatives exist?
The same thing is happening at twitter as elon want to replace the free social media model with subscription .
"Free" products are reliant on advertising as a revenue source. Advertising is an inherently corrosive monetization method. In the pursuit of growth, profits, whatever - you will always corrode the core value of your product in favor of advertising. You can see this in the experience you have on Google today compared to the past.
None of the mentioned alternatives in my original comment use advertising, matter of fact the website you are using right now is free without advertisements .
It doesn't seem like a fair comparison. A web-scale search engine is much more expensive to run than Tildes.
It sounds like you're saying that advertising is bad and subscriptions are bad, which leaves what? State funding? Donations only?
Exactly , donations and grants.
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/88-futo-grant/
But they clearly don't work as main daily-driver search engines. Even Marginalia's homepage says it shouldn't be used as one.
Also, Kagi incorporates Marginalia results into its index
Google is an advertising company. Just because you don't see ads on the homepage doesn't mean they don't utilize advertising. Once you actually get to the search results, they do have advertisements or sponsored results. Bing does the same.
There's also the data collection aspect to the free ones too, and how they use them to assemble a profile on you and how that can further be used in ways that aren't necessarily favorable to you.
You mentioned Google and Bing in your original comment as well. But I'll chalk it up as an unfavorable interpretation on my part of what you intended to say.
Because free alternatives are lower quality and waste more of my time? I don't think I misunderstood you at all.
Based on your response, I think it's you who misunderstood unkz. They search so much that they believe the benefits of having less ads, less spam, and less bloat to the results they get on searches is worth 10 dollars a month to them. Their cost/benefit analysis is different than yours.
Because free isn't always inherently better?
For me it's a mindset of wanting to support a company that, by virtue of earning revenue driectly through customer subscriptions, has a strong incentive to make product decisions that are aligned with the best interests of those customers. That's as opposed to free ad-supported alternatives that have incentives more aligned with their advertisers.
I also hate ads in general. It's why I pay for YouTube Premium, Pandora Plus, and a bunch of podcasts that offer ad-free feeds on Patreon despite the "free" ad-supported alternatives existing. I'd much rather pay for products and services with my wallet than with my time and privacy.
Additionally, my subjective experience is that the quality of the free search alternatives has fallen off a cliff lately, with CEO blogspam becoming a real problem. I don't feel that pain nearly as much with Kagi, even before you consider the ability to promote, demote, and block results from specific domains, making it a superior product worth paying for in general. Some handy AI features are icing on the cake. I mean I pay for Netflix and watch maybe 4 to 6 hours on there total in a good month, so shelling out a few bucks less than that for something I use every day providing me value in both my work and personal lives seems obvious.
That’s convenient, as l blew past 1000 searches on Kagi pretty quickly.
Kagi is literally my favorite search engine, well worth $10 by a wide margin.
I'll give it a try for a month. I don't like that it's for-profit and only a few components are open source, but the other options are pretty dire and I'm not willing to deal with the horrors of Searx for my principles. Paying for search does feel weird, but their other goals are so well-aligned with my own that I might as well put my money where my mouth is.
I'd love to see Mozilla do their own spin on this or partner with Kagi or something, but I'm guessing they'd be too afraid of jeopardizing their deal with Google and the startup costs seem beyond them right now.
Previous discussion - https://tild.es/14q7 - from when Kagi updated to a per search pricing plan.
Sounds interesting. Will try the free trail later. Although I'm not a heavy user of searches, i do use Google for local searches , tried DDG - results now I think about could be a bit odd, Ecosia does seem to lack relevant results. Thanks for bring up a interesting option 😃
Eh, 108 dollars a year is a lot.
Granted, maybe I would change my mind if the search results end up being better than Brave Search+DDG. I haven’t tried Startpage and SearX and these 2 also get recommended around. I think all of them except SearX are just reskinned Google/Bing Search.
It’s ok to not be interested, but I’m sure there are several other services you use across all those devices that you have to log in to.
Good news about Kagi is it doesn’t store personal information (aside from your email) so there’s little risk in them using incredibly long session durations (which they do). Use the browser plugin and you can skip signin in Private windows as well.
I’m intrigued to know what you find objectionable in it. I don’t typically read privacy policies in-depth, but I went ahead and gave it a look and didn’t see anything that jumped out as immediately concerning. I might just be lacking context from not reading enough others though.
Is there a search engine with a privacy policy you prefer? I’d be interested in checking it out (assuming the search quality is good).
Under Settings/Account there's a session link that automagically logs you in if you click it. Maybe you could save that somewhere that syncs or is available to all your devices to save some hassle.
I was thinking more along the lines of a password manager or something that you already keep in sync. If you don't already have a mechanism to do that then it sounds like you certainly do have a lot of juggling around on your hands.
Is that how the user profiles work? I'd have thought they would let you use your account (and customized settings) from anywhere. The family plan would then be a set of profiles, each with it's own options, that can log in across limitless devices.
Once you log in on a given browser, you're done basically forever though unless you delete all your cookies. Given the time I've wasted trying to find good results on Google/Bing/DDG/Brave/whatever, I'm pretty sure I could log into Kagi once on every browser released since Mosaic on every computer I've ever owned and still have time to spare. 😅
Ah, I see. That can get annoying. I'd imagine their cookie to keep you logged in is less intrusive than most. Still, a lot of initial logins.
I don’t understand the juggling part. What is there to juggle? You set it to once, login, and set it as default.
I probably have as many devices and browsers as you. Personally I gladly spent the time setting up Kagi since it saves me so much time and grievance to use it.
Hey if you don’t like the service or trust the company then don’t use it, I think that’s probably your best argument.
From the perspective of someone that really likes it, the trouble of setting it up even across all devices and browsers was really no trouble at all.