I’ve been using Kagi full time and I like it a <i>lot</i>. It’s been worth the price.<p>I expected to like lenses and favoring/blocking specific domains. What I didn’t expect was how much their “Quick Answer” would change how I search.<p>I’ve been “AI hesitant”, in general the chance that an LLM will hallucinate makes these kinds of tools more trouble than they’re worth for me personally. In Kagi’s case, though, the individual facts it states in the quick answers have citations linking to the site it drew that information from.<p>Here’s what I’ve found:<p>- it’s been accurate most of the time, but not 100% (as expected)<p>- citations are pretty accurate most of the time<p>- every so often the citation links to a page that seemingly doesn’t back the claim in the quick answer<p>Unsurprisingly, I don’t trust the AI generated quick answer in isolation, what it does do is let me scan a few paragraphs, find the one that answers my question most specifically, and visit the sites it links to as citations for that piece of the answer. This saves me the time of clicking through the top $N results and scanning each page to find the one that seems to answer my query most directly. It’s like a layer on top of the page rank.<p>I remember using Google the first time and being impressed how the top answers were so much more relevant than Yahoo, it was a huge time saver. Now I find myself wondering if the “quick answer” citations will prove to be a similar jump in accelerating my ability to find the right web page.<p>It also makes me wonder if their own page rank algorithm could incorporate the quick answer output as an input to a site’s rank? That would be an interesting experiment!
Kagi once returned nothing for one of my searches. I didn't anticipate that and decided to go to Bing. Bing returned many results but none of them was relevant. This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.
Kagi now is not only a search engine, the Ultimate plan gives you code, chat and research assistants. For chat you can even choose gpt4 turbo, gpt4, gpt3.5, claude2 or mistral models! On top they also have a fast summarizer. I honestly don’t know a single service that packs that many features for the that price nowadays.
> <i>In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer:</i><p>This is the type of attention to detail that makes me a happy user. Killer feature for me, no more having to type !quick (and yes I set up quick bangs but always seem to forget).<p>I have been really pleased with Kagi, though I do live in perpetual fear that they'll be acquired. Please no. And God help us if Apple acquires them, which seems like a risk given Kagi's great work on search and AI, two things Apple really wants. Don't do it Kagi!
About a month ago I noticed I could no longer use Kagi search from Firefox 78 esr on an aging OSX 10.9.5 laptop I like to use due to a Javascript problem. GitHub's directory view also seemed to stop working on it about the same time with the same tell-tale Javascript error.<p>The latest Firefox ESR I can run on my old laptop doesn't like ??= and some other newer JS syntax. I see this sort of problem in my own daily development and I know with tools like esbuild you can simply specify --target=firefox78 and end up JS that works fine on older yet perfectly working hardware.<p>So what does this have to do with Kagi? Well after a bit of looking around I found <a href="https://kagifeedback.org" rel="nofollow">https://kagifeedback.org</a> and reported the issue [1]. A day or so later Vlad triaged it and it was fixed within the next few days.<p>A month later the problem reappeared in another place[2], Vlad triaged it again and it was promptly fixed.<p>Needless to say I'm very impressed with attention Vlad and people at Kagi give to problems and the effort they spend improving their product.<p>Makes me want to learn Crystal :-)<p>1- <a href="https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-longer-works-on-firefox-esr" rel="nofollow">https://kagifeedback.org/d/2766-kagi-search-interface-no-lon...</a><p>2- <a href="https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-give-js-error-previously-fixed-but-happening-again" rel="nofollow">https://kagifeedback.org/d/3055-kagi-search-on-firefox-esr-g...</a>
Kagi is good, I’ve been an unlimited subscriber for a while. Two low hanging fruit opportunities though:<p>1. Location based or aware searching - it keeps giving me the UK versions of storefronts or the identically-named steakhouse a thousand miles away and not the one I can walk to. Kind of lame, particularly giving me random countries’ versions of sites.
2. The map — maybe this is a setting, but the map always gives me nearly useless results. This is probably tied to geolocation or location aware results.
Whether we like it and use it or not (I love it and use it), I think we can only be super impressed by the productivity of the Kagi team. Look at these dates. It's insane.
I switched full time from Google to Kagi last month and it's been an improvement, or at worst a neutral change. There was a frustrating period of adjustment as I had to learn what Kagi's limitations and quirks were. Google has them too but I've long since learned how to compensate for them. Now I know Kagi's.<p>These integrations with other services and specific data are remarkably useful. Glad to see more! One weak spot of Kagi for me is their local / maps search. It's Apple Maps which is still not as good as Google Maps. But moreso Google Local has become a very strong product with a unique database. Nothing stopping me from using Google for local business info when I need it though.
Kagi has been my go to for some time now. For the past few months I rarely consult others.<p>I’d say toward the end of 2023 we passed the inflection point where Google is now generally worse. In fact these days Google is often worse or at least no better than Bing and DuckDuckGo. Kagi is better than all of them.<p>It seems like the Internet being winner take all is only part of the story. The reality is winner takes all, then turns to shit, then an unbundling occurs.
As an aside, and I said this in a thread yesterday but, what I'm hearing about Kagi (I've not used it yet but I'm signing up today to try it out) and the contrast between the Sora and Gemini 1.5 announcements make me genuinely concerned about the future of Google.<p>Search is so much their golden goose and they've let it languish and now there are real dangers to that product from several flanks. They have Gmail after that but is that enough to keep the coffers full?<p>I had so much hope in Google Workspace as competition to Microsoft 365 but even that is in trouble if you ask me. I've been helping a company migrate from Workspace to M365 and one of their reasons was because they couldn't get any support from Google. Also, Workspace is hard to use. Not that M365 is easy, or that their support is any good but, Google has clear perception problems here.<p>I almost never hear of anyone talking about GCP anymore so I'm guessing they're losing mindshare in addition to market share.<p>Dart and Flutter are wonderful projects but it seems to me that since there's no way to stick ads on them, Google is content to give that department a little money and let them do their thing. But, of course, when some of the aforementioned products start losing more money, great products like Dart and Flutter will certainly be cut.<p>Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe Google's time has come and companies like Kagi can come in and fill the void Google seems hell-bent on leaving behind.
I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time. For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to before, often almost mirroring Google.
Great to see continued improvements. One area where I continue to use google is specific local information, like opening hours, commute timetables. Try these two searches in Google and Kagi to compare:<p>"train from Galway to Dublin"<p>"Ilac shopping centre opening hours"<p>Kagi gives you a bunch of links that might be absolutely trash, if the service provider (eg: rail company) has a shitty website. Google gives you precisely what you're looking for, eg: a table of departure/arrival times for the next 5 trains, with a date picker. It can even handle the atrocious TFI (transport for ireland) car-crash, providing me with the precise info I need to get a bus from one part of Dublin to another. You can't even get that with the official TFI app, and they notoriously block access to their data API (breaking the only decent Play Store app for buses in the city)<p>I'm not sure if this is because Google have a budget for curated content like this, or if they have some magic way to extract that data without making a balls of it.
What do I need from a search engine? Not an LLM chatbot, not any of the auxiliary “smart” stuff. I want customizable results, and to be able to jump into searching quickly and intuitively.<p>(Decent results, sure, but that is subjective.)<p>So, a big reason I was using DDG over Google, despite often subpar results, was bangs. Now I pay for Kagi, and guess what convinced me to subscribe? Bangs indicate caring about power users. How cool would it be if I could set Kagi as default search in any browser and get powerful shortcuts at my fingertips across all devices?<p>Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after (not before). If you don’t do it just right, you’ll just be on Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought.<p>I’m sure I’m in a minority but I swear, if Kagi is not going to make bangs work properly soon, I’m not renewing. If you do emulate DDG, go all the way, otherwise it’s just taunting your users…<p>/rant
Another addition, those on Duobor Family plans can now upgrade individual accounts within the Family to Ultimate.<p>I always wanted to try Ultimate but I was in a Duo account with my wife so it wasn't really possible. Now I can, and trying out all those LLMs is fun!
I wish the maps functionality was better. When I want to find directions to a place, or see how long it will take me, the easiest thing to do it "cmd+L cmd+V" or "highlight --> right-click --> search for ____", but with kagi set as my default search, the UX is terrible. The top results are often for zillow or similar, instead of a map, and when it shows a map, it's many clicks and slow loads to get directions.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while. Unfortunately, its website on mobile is much lower quality than say DDG. One issue I find often is that when I want to edit a previously-entered query in the search box, sliding the text cursor is very hard – it often stops at search box boundary and doesn’t scroll the text inside. Another is that sometimes the search results page freezes after I come back to it from a different tab. When I try to scroll, it refuses to scroll and only briefly shows some white space around the currently-viewed part. I blame all those on some JS that’s too creative for its own good.<p>Aside from that, I wish Safari had a setting to add custom search URLs, so that I can paste my Kagi auth token, instead of having to use xxSearch, which also has some annoyances. Obviously, this part is not Kagi’s fault.<p>I’ve stopped using Kagi on mobile and went back to DDG. It’s still stellar on desktop though.
I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but it was missing a couple things I use on Google. Maybe someone knows if there's a way to achieve the following:<p>1) Sports schedules and scores; i.e. searching "nba" or "nfl"<p>2) Local business hours; i.e. searching "walmart" gives the hours of my local Walmart
It's really cool to see a search engine alternative. I wonder about the practicality in the wake of large language models? It would seem almost easier to build a model that acts as a search engine than to build a traditional search engine.
Yahoo returns thousands of results for dorking queries where Kagi and Google return an identical list of 5-6 results. Pretty disappointing for me as a paying customer to learn that Kagi is basically a Google wrapper
I really need to try Kagi out this weekend. Whenever I try to change search engines I hit the same wall in that ~20 years of Google has trained me to think in terms of their search algorithm when searching.
Kagi is good, but they claim they're faster than others, but it depends. In my country, Cyprus (I know nobody cares), it's significantly slower than Google, so I decided to stick with a classic.