> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.<p>That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine.<p>How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?
I’ve spent money on things because I had to, I’ve spent money because I wanted to. I have rarely spent money on something because the idea just sounded good and been so consistently pleased with what I received for my investment. It’s not free, but Kagi is a small investment for a vastly improved (and customizable) search experience.
> welcome Stephen Wolfram to Kagi’s board of advisors<p>This is interesting. I guess we will soon read a longwinded post about it from the first person perspective.
I'm excited for this. I've found Kagi to be very useful having widgets like this, in addition to the search results being good. I still have DDG as my search engine for ephemeral searches[1] on my phone and I'm getting sick of it. I don't know if I'd say the result quality has been getting <i>worse</i>, it's just not good and hasn't been for years.<p>Kagi on the other hand feels like an ideal subscription service. It feels like what Google search wanted to become.<p>[1] To force me not to leave open tabs I don't really care about, my default browser is FireFox Focus, which is strictly "incognito" mode, which means I'd have to manually log in to Kagi every time I did a search.
So.... this is about a pay-subscription search engine called 'Kagi' out of Palo Alto, founded 2018.<p>Made me think and have to do some digging for the 'Kagi' out of Berkeley founded in the 90s where you could register your shareware purchases in the days before PayPal. Which seems to have been largely scrubbed from history outside of some WayBack snapshots.<p><a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/</a><p><a href="https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud/" rel="nofollow">https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...</a>
Wolfram Alpha still has the same old bug:<p><a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2016-04-04+to+2019-01-31" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2016-04-04+to+2019-01-3...</a> = 2 years 9 months 27 days<p><a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-31+to+2016-04-04" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-31+to+2016-04-0...</a> = 2 years 9 months 26 days<p>The duration should be identical but is off by one day.<p>One day a space mission will fail due to this bug.<p>Reported several times, they never cared.
I’ve been a paying Kagi customer for a few months now. It has reconciled me with search. Result quality is great, and the tools like fastgpt and the summarizer are precious.<p>I was a bit reluctant but I don’t regret doing it.<p>Really happy to see Wolfram added to it!
I like Kagi, and this integration seems useful, but I'm wary of search engines showing "widgets". That is often a slippery slope that incentivizes them to add more features to keep me on their site, instead of leading me towards what I'm looking for.<p>A search engine should show web results based on my query. That's it. Some summaries and highlights are useful, but show them in the sidebar, and make them optional.<p>If I need a calculator, I have plenty to choose from, including the Wolphram Alpha site.<p>If I need an answer to a question, LLMs do a good job at that.<p>Please don't make the common mistake of making your search engine "useful". My average session on your site should last seconds, which is the time it takes me to see the results, and click on the most relevant one. If you achieve that, you're doing a great job.
TIL that Wolfram Research has 1000 employees. what do they... do? what is Wolfram's revenue? i'm completely out of the loop. This is the size of Automattic - which makes Wordpress. is Wolfram on that scale? idk.
How do new search engines like Perplexity and Kagi avoid getting rate limited or hitting captchas as they build and maintain their indexes?<p>Sites have to make exceptions for Google, but likely wouldn’t care enough to allow other search engines in.
Kagi has tried a few different AI solutions, and now this integration with a different search engine. I think what I want is just a redoubled focus on improving search results (not quick answers) while maintaining or improving confidentiality.<p>If they announce that my monthly payments are going up, and I suspect it's because they're paying for partnerships with services I don't view as core to the product value that brought me in, I would feel cheated. And if they add those integrations and <i>don't</i> charge more, I'd have to wonder about that too: are they trading something for the integrations, or are they charging me too much?
> ...We are even thinking of providing a consumeable API for users to add their own widgets to Kagi search results triggered on demand (and shareable with others via an open-source repository[1]).<p>Neat!<p>1: <a href="https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/open-source.html" rel="nofollow">https://help.kagi.com/kagi/support-and-community/open-source...</a>
This is probably similar to the Wolfram|Alpha + Siri integration (which AFAIK no longer exists):<p>- Kagi will rely on Wolfram's okay-ish stack to immediately add features to their engine<p>- Kagi will, over time, 1-by-1 remove the reliance on the (generally slow and expensive) Wolfram API with built-in features<p>- Once the meat of the features have been rewritten internally by Kagi in more performant and self-controlled ways, remove the dependence on the slow and expensive Wolfram API<p>Not saying that's a bad thing, but it's quite likely this is how it plays out. We've seen it before.
I pay for Kagi’s duo plan, $14/month or $151.20/year [1], a discount which implies a 10% cost of capital.<p>At that discount rate, a lifetime membership at $1,680 would be rational for Kagi ($600 individual). And at that price, I’d pay! Hell, do $3k flat (5% cost of capital; ~$1k individual) and throw in an annual in-person event and I’d call it a great deal. For Kagi, moreover, it would be permanent capital.<p>(I would also love for Kagi to launch a K-12 education product, possibly marketed at first to PTAs.)<p>[1] <a href="https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family&period=annual" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family&period=...</a>
The steve jobs example has a typo, "place of dearth"<p>(<a href="https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2024-03-05/1709652268-714268-screenshot-2024-03-05-at-072340.png" rel="nofollow">https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2024-03-05/1709652268-...</a>)
Hey! This is off-topic, but I'm not sure where else to post it.<p>Does Kagi hang indefinitely for text searches for y'all? I experience this behavior about 1/4 searches. No error; just no page load. I am about to cancel my sub and switch back to Google.
I love using WA as a calculator since it's so good at handling units.<p>Silly example: I just tried "average distance to moon/Eiffel Tower height" in Kagi and got "= about 1.167 million" (powered by WA).
Happy Kagi user here.<p>Random aside: this blog is the first time I've seen a monospace font used for prose that doesn't look absolutely terrible; in fact, it's very readable for me. Inspecting with Firefox, I see the font is Menlo--and looking it up, it even seems like it's a web-safe font. Pretty interesting.
A lot of people may not realise that Apple's Spotlight has "instant knowledge" built in, too. The "norway gdp" example given in this post also works perfectly, telling me the GPD of Norway without having to actually do the search.
One thing I miss from Google is relatively seamless integration with maps. Sometimes the address queries just fail for me on Kagi. And even when they don’t, Google’s maps are still far more useful IMO.
Tangentially related: does anyone have a recommendation for adding a Kagi search widget to Android home screen? I have read some related documentation [1] but it's not super clear if what I am looking for is supported.<p>[1]: <a href="https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html" rel="nofollow">https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...</a>
I just tried all those demo queries in Google and it had similar output for all of them, except "MangoldtLambda[11]". Looks like that's a function specific to Wolfram.<p>Bing couldn't answer "MangoldtLambda[11]" either, and it also couldn't answer "differentiate x^2 with respect to x", and didn't show a graph for "norway gdp".
I feel Kagi can be good just because it is not relevant for sites. Once Kagi gets to a size where it is profitable to be in its first page results, it will be the same cat and mouse game that Google plays with the SEOs white/grey/black hats…
I bought it as I needed it for an exam that needed me to do a lot of research and it combined with bing gpt really was a big help. I probably won’t use at as a main driver as I only have the 300 search a month plan and I get a feeling like I wasted a search when I searcg something stupid like x documentation.
I'm just happy if I can do some basic W|A without it being so slow. Things like dates or solving simple equations with unit conversion work great but is so slow on W|A. The actual wolfram language is fast, I just find their website feels slow (it's probably only 30 seconds)
Anyone using their own searx-ng, the metasearch engine? Have you tried Kagi? How is it comparatively when it comes to quality of results given that with searx I can customize the engines and such.
i love kagi results, its a great search engine, and wolfram is quickly becoming the backend of the internet - which is fantastic<p>fantastic news, really glad to hear about this
What a mistake by
Vladimir Prelovac to get
Stephen numbram involved.
I was considering continuing
My subscription to KAgi but
Finding out that kagi becomes
A wolfram toy - no thank u.
I pass.
Wolfram alpha works only half the time
Correctly for anything practically useful.
And half of the time it works, it’s pain
To make it work.
Uggghhh wolfman.
Kagi is well worth the money. Just converted my monthly sub into an annual. It just flat out works better than any other search engine I've come across. Also, the ability to just filter/weight sites that it returns is incredible. I'm not sure how Google is this far behind at search, but here we are.
Did kagi recently (past 12 months) add the unlimited plan? Last time I checked even my human search usage was way beyond their limits (Google regularly accuses me of being a bot!), and my primary interest was in 100Xing that volume with autonomous agents.<p>Now it says unlimited, but I'm not sure "you and a swarm of a thousand digital clones" counts as fair use...