Are you paying, or have you paid, for Kagi? Curious what others experience has been to date. If you didn't keep at it, why? If you're loving it still, why? And which level?<p>Based on some comments here on HN, I've been playing with both Kagi and Orion. I've found the searches on Kagi (for tech stuff) as good as google at least. Better than DDG and Brave of late. The internet content just honestly feels like it's decaying. As for Orion, it's decent on MacOS, but really buggy on iOS, where I've reverted to Brave.
I've been using Kagi for the past 3 months, recently moved to the ultimate plan (assistant + search). I've highly enjoyed my experience, and I think the best analogy I can think of is switching from shopping for food at somewhere like Safeway or Walmart to a local organic grocery store. It's loads of tiny things plus a few large things that I end up seeing as benefits.<p>One of the things on the largest end for me that I don't see mentioned here very often, is how amazing the development team has been! It's tremendously refreshing and amazing to be using a product, encounter something not working right, write up a feedback post, and see it fixed in the next changelog. That's where the local bit of the analogy comes from. It's small, and I think that's brilliant. It makes you feel seen and heard, something that is absolutely beyond hopelessly lost when using any sort of Google product. You're a part of a paying customer base, you're not some minuscule cog in a massive conglomerate.<p>The pace of development is also wonderful. Getting new little features released often and watching the ongoing development with things like Kagi Map. I can only imagine this is what it was like to live during the golden age of construction and development in the US, seeing all these new buildings go up all around you.<p>There's also the search of course which so far has been great. I think it's power comes from the lack of ads of course but also the filtering, which makes it *your* search. Little features like appending @hn at the end of your search instead of site:news.ycombinator.com, or as mentioned by gutt3r_punk, the question mark to bring up the AI summary answer only on the queries that I want it to be on, not every single search on Google.<p>solid recommend
I pay for the top tier. I really enjoy it. I’m also someone that tries to support the alternatives. I pay to host my private projects on SourceHut too.<p>I love that Kagi allows me to make the huge list of domains to ignore. No more Pinterest results along with many other sites I hate polluting my results. Add in the quick answers from AI models when I end my query with a question mark and I’m a very happy user.
I think it's worth it. Much less SEO-driven crap; pages with actual info about a search term seem to be more prominent than pages trying to sell me something related to the search term. YMMV.
I paid for a month previously, and still try it out for time to time on some specific queries. But overall it doesn't really seem obviously better or worse to me. Some queries are worse, some are better, but overall I use ChatGPT a lot more than either Google or Kagi these days (and happily pay for that).<p>It would be neat if there was some Chrome extension that could do a blind test on the results... i.e. randomly replace some Google results with Kagi results, record which ones I don't bounce from, and then report back to me after a month "You have a strong/moderate/weak preference for Kagi/Google results! Here's the data..."<p>Or if Manifest v3 really kills uBlock, I'll probably disengage from the Google ecosystem as much as possible and move everything off, including adopting Kagi and Orion at that point. But I'd really rather not, just because it's a huge hassle to de-Googleify.<p>Edit: I forgot to add that I can only use Google with uBlacklist filtering out a bunch of domains (Quora, Forbes, YouTube, Medium, etc.). Otherwise it's unusable.
I’ve been paying for it for the last year or so. Whatever the mid level is. Part of the value is that I’m not reminded of what I filtered out—which is a double edged sword. But when I find myself on someone else’s device that defaults to Google or Bing, I do see the difference (again).
I tried Kagi and it was convenient since there are no ads, making searches faster and less cluttered. It works well for finding information, but Google meets my needs for most searches. Overall, while Kagi has its strengths I decided to stick with Google for everyday use.
I've been paying for months now. I, personally, think it's well worth it. I finally have access to a search engine that works reasonably well for me.
If anyone from Kagi is here, I found a bug:<p>On <a href="https://kagi.com/welcome" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/welcome</a>, your logo links to <a href="https://kagi.com/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/index.html</a> which cannot be found
Kagi rulez! Highly recommended. I'm paying the top tier just because I love it so much and I want them to succeed. Top tier gives me Kagi Search + Claude 3.5. I'm in heaven :)