Back to Kagi
blog.melashri.net44 points by speckx 32 minutes ago
44 points by speckx 32 minutes ago
I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.
Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.
I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.
I might try it again sometime.
I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.
Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.
Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.
With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.
They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.
I think the market segmentation is:
- Seeking documents: search engine
- Seeking answers: LLM
I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.
The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.
Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
How'd you solve the Arabic issue?
(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel
Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.
For a price of two cups of coffee.
Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs
html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript