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- cross-posted to:
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Basically the title.
I’m interested in any opportunity to inprove the way I navigate the internet. What I’ve been for a few years now is DDG, which works fine. Not great, not amazing, just fine. And that’s ok considering how they opperate.
I just heard about kagi and was really cosidering it. Makes sense as a business model (pay so we don’t have to sell you data), seems privacy respecting, and claims to strive for best search results in the market. Some test searches from the trial seem promising.
If you’ve used it for any amount of time, what has your experience been with it? What plan are you using? What are you mostly searching for?
Even you haven’t used it, any thoughts / opinions are welcome.
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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.
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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.
I thought I read in one of their feedback threads that Kagi doesn’t use Bing anymorel, but I could be wrong.
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:
- (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
- Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.
Cons for Brave Search:
- Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
- Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
- Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.
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
query, because@wis 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 have used Kagi for a few weeks now after hearing about it on Lemmy.
At first I wasn’t that impressed for the price. It is really growing on me the more I use it though. Where it really shines is the customizations. Once you rank up and down to your preferences the results are way better than anywhere else.
One way they rank results is based on how much tracking a website has. You can also see the number of trackers, check the archive or do an ai summary of it without even visiting the website. You find a lot of high quality nonprofit information with the commercial high tracking websites filtered out.
I also made custom redirects for sites like reddit and quora for privacy frontends.
I find myself actually using bangs now that I can customize them. You can also add other search engines so they are one click away if you want a second opinion. Lenses are great, I made some custom ones to search the top 10 websites for forums, tech support, news, etc.
When I don’t feel like sifting through a bunch of results the ai summarizes the results. When it doesn’t come up with a good summary it’s because the results don’t have the answer and you saved a bunch of time.
The free trial wasn’t enough time for me to decide if I liked it. I am glad I paid for the $10 plan. However, I seem to do about 3,000 searches a month. I was able to upgrade to unlimited at a prorated amount. $25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
$25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
I justify the cost by relating it to how it helps me at work. I believe Kagi makes me more effective; my boss(es… :( ) and peers notice, and that translates to better performance evaluations and raises. I don’t hide my usage of it from my team, but I don’t think they realize how much of an advantage it gives me. Once you get the rankings and lenses tuned to your workflow, it’s amazing how it lets you cut through the nonsense of the internet.
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 fully agree! Furthermore, I use their Universal Summarize to summarise any web page and FastGPT for GPT related stuff. Both accessible through search bangs 😊
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 was chatting about it yesterday here in this thread
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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.
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I have used it since hearing about it on HN a couple months ago during one of the DDG controversies.
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Its completely replaced my search engine. I use it on my work machines, personal machines and phone for all searching.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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…
If you like google’s engine without all the trackers and other garbage, check out https://startpage.com
I wouldn’t trust Startpage anymore since they were bought by an advertisement company. Better use Whoogle fo get results from Google.
Oh damn, good to know. I’m still kind of newly figuring out better privacy-minded options for myself. Thank you!
Most of the price goes to search engine API costs like Google
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 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.
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I just checked the test results again and it still has the three Wikipedia pages for Steve Jobs. It makes me question how good their results are, but I am glad it works for you :)
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That’s really interesting, I checked it again and the results are much better. I may properly check this out now!
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.
That’s completely understandable.
In my experience when I have tested the summarizer it has done well at summarizing only what is there. It also splits it up and cites the sources.
Most people likely won’t look at the sources, and you are right that is putting a lot of trust in it, especially if they don’t understand how the tech works.
I find it good for saving time on something I just need a quick answer on to solve an immediate problem at hand.
For example the other day I asked it for the rules to Stratego. It listed it all right there and pointed out where there was any disagreement between various versions of the game. The stakes were low if something was wrong, and I saved several minutes trying to piece together and remember all the rules from various sites.
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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.
