Kagi/Orion status update: First three months

Both Kagi and Orion are deeply impressive products. Even though I try every new general purpose web browser and search engine that comes out, this combo is the only one that stuck.<p>Orion: Finally a non-chrome based web browser that can compete with the likes of Brave and Arc. It works much better on Mac than the alternatives, with the same engine as Safari it also benefits from deeper system integration such as native Sign-in with Apple and password management. Also, like Brave, comes with powerful ad and tracker blocker so you don&#x27;t need a separate extension. I also love its built-in tree-style tabs implementation.<p>Kagi: It is Google without all the bad parts. It is user centric like some other alternatives, without the poor index and search results.<p>Props to the team, I am looking forward to what&#x27;s to come. It is mind blowing how a single small company can make one of the best desktop browser AND search engine AND mobile browser on the market. Hope they are not spreading themselves too thin and can fund the development of all these for a long time!<p>My only complaints are the slow performance of Orion on iOS, and its poor handling of app urls. Latter caused some issues when I had Orion set as the default browser on my iPhone and some payment flow that used app redirects between my banking app and the store app got stuck. I was lucky and I could manually launch the app by pasting the app link in Safari, but I hope it can handle these cases as well as Mobile Safari in the future.

I joined the Kagi beta two weeks before it ended and have been a paying user ever since. I find the price to be quite steep but so far it have no regrets and will most likely continue my subscription. I average over 2000 queries per month.<p>- Search result quality is at least equal to Google for most queries and far superior for queries involving discussions or technical topics. Sadly, it is inferior for queries in my area of expertise (Swiss law).<p>- Kagi is the only alternative to Google that I know of (and I have tried many) which is able to produce good regional results and mix them - when appropriate - with international results. Most privacy focused search engines are very US centric.<p>- Blog spam and copy cats are not completely gone but the situation is at least bearable, especially after continuosly filtering them and boosting credible sites instead.<p>- Customization options, filtering options, speed and site layout are also far superior when compared to Google.<p>Apart from the lower quality results from queries involving my area of expertise, the only thing that still keeps me using Google Search are the reviews from Google Maps.<p>All in all, I recommend supporting this product.

I can&#x27;t stress how much better Kagi is than Google, I&#x27;m a paying user. No more scrolling through tons of ads. Filtering by time and language is great, no more GitHub and Stackoverflow clones in the result. Thank you, I actually haven&#x27;t realized how small Kagi still is, given how polished that product already is.

I think competition in web search is desperately needed and Kagi is promising. I used it during the free public beta and the search results were comparable to Google - sometimes better, sometimes worse. I sincerely hope they continue improving their search engine and other products, and make a well deserved profit from that.<p>However, this seems a little disingenuous to me:<p>&gt; We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.<p>I have no reason to doubt this that their software is like that <i>currently</i>. But I also know that you don&#x27;t need to change your software architecture to log user queries.

I tried many search engines, but I always ended up going back to Google for many queries. Kagi it&#x27;s the first one that I really feel like Google doesn&#x27;t add anything any more. Sometimes if I can&#x27;t find something I will try google, but I never actually got better results, which means my query was just bad.<p>I am just so happy with Kagi I can&#x27;t explain. I am not a huge fan of subscriptions and I carefully curate what I pay for monthly. I love paying for Kagi! I wish them only the very best!

I&#x27;m really surprised how much a single search query is costing them in terms of compute&#x2F;infrastructure (1.25 US cents). That buys you more than a minute of compute time on the top vps on hetzner. What&#x27;s happening behind the scenes during a query?<p>Getting the compute costs down will probably be a major obstacle to growth, since they&#x27;ll have to keep prices high (19 USD&#x2F;month) to pay for their infrastructure.

I would really love to use Kagi full-time. I&#x27;m currently on DDG, but something about them that I can&#x27;t quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it&#x27;s the amount they apparently spend on advertising, or maybe it&#x27;s that they&#x27;re just sourcing their results from Bing.<p>Anyway, at $10&#x2F;mo I’m not quite prepared to put my money where my mouth is. $5&#x2F;mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they&#x27;d have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?<p>Edit: Thanks everyone for the pricing info! I guess in a world where we expect search engines to be free, we don&#x27;t realize how expensive they actually are to run (at least at smaller scales like Kagi).<p>Intuitively I would have expected the expensive part to be building the index and for each query to cost fractions of a cent. I am extremely surprised to learn that each query apparently costs them $0.125.

Haven&#x27;t used it yet, but very impressed with what I&#x27;m seeing&#x2F;reading.<p>$10&#x2F;mo could work (I think many people would go for it for $5&#x2F;mo, though I understand that may not work for Kagi). More than that it starts to be very niche I think.<p>A family plan is interesting, and I would pay for a Kagi for Kids that works and filters out garbage without dumbing everything down to a &quot;kiddie&quot; level (like Google does). My young kids have a great deal of scientific curiosity and I&#x27;d like them to be able to explore freely and learn interesting stuff that might go way over their head at first but isn&#x27;t &quot;kiddish&quot;, without worrying about them stumbling into a cesspool (and I don&#x27;t mean just a &quot;safe search&quot; porn blocker, but just all the horrible stuff out there you don&#x27;t want them to stumble on).

Paying user of Kagi here. I recommend it to all my friends. They have a family plan on the roadmap which is great for me. I have left Google search altogether and never looked back.<p>Over time I have managed to block most of the websites which annoy me the most from the results. For example I have blocked w3schools and boosted MDN or the annoying ads disguised as blogs or websites which pollute the search results by mere SEO enhancements.

&quot;For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy.&quot;<p>This was raised in a flagged comment, so I still felt it was worth highlighting. I don&#x27;t find analogies work well for technical decisions. I usually prefer that a company tell me what is and is not private and anonymous so that I can made a decision on if I should use an application and on how I will use it. There is no need to justify the decision you made and in some respects lecture us on why the decision was justified. Just be transparent about what is and is not and that&#x27;s enough.

Here is my question. I used Kagi Search in beta, then when it went pay, I stopped due to my search being pretty basic. My concern&#x2F;question is, will they make this pay too once its out of &quot;beta&quot;

I&#x27;ve been a subscriber for a while now - completely replaced Google, even for esoteric tech queries.<p>Only feedback I have is, if someone on the team gets some free cycles, please make the calculator a little more user friendly. Mostly looking for the ability to Kagi search an equation, and then tack on additional operations to the equation in the results page. Right now I have to reach for the mouse, click the small text field and type ans*. Would be nice if it just inferred that I want to use the previous answer.

&gt;We are also considering a pricing change for our individual plan which is currently $10&#x2F;month ($120&#x2F;year). It is clear to us now that providing superior search quality at the current price will not lead to sustainability and that we will need to increase it.<p>I guess I will be part of the 70% that will drop. Back to DuckDuckGo it is. Great product, enjoyed using it, but $10&#x2F;mo for searches was tough to swallow, there&#x27;s no way I can double that. I was really enjoying it but their cost per search is waaaaaaaaay to high and they need to seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those. I don&#x27;t necessarily need infoboxes with my search. I&#x27;d be happy with just the indexing.

I started using this when it was in free&#x2F;public beta, and signed immediately once it required a subscription. Zero regrets.<p>The results are <i>excellent</i>. Definitely better than Google and DuckDuckGo in my experience. I’ve been telling people to use it, but it’s kind of hard to convince them that $10&#x2F;mo is worth it. A family&#x2F;group plan would probably help get more people on board.<p>Also I completely forgot Orion was a thing until this post. I went to check it out, but unfortunately it’s Mac only. A port to Linux would be awesome.

&gt; Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled by default<p>This is a very surprising choice. I&#x27;m also leaning towards the side of irresponsible. Web browsers are probably the biggest attack surfaces users have. They are running untrusted code thousands of times a day. That isn&#x27;t even counting all of the other attack surfaces such as HTML rendering, media decoding and playing, WebGPU type stuff and more. The stream of vulnerabilities has been constant so far and there is no evidence that the stream is over.<p>If this was my product I would disable everything but auto-updates, and make a clear policy about what data I track on update downloads.<p>Trading security for privacy likely results in less privacy once you get pwned.

Orion looked (and still looks) amazing but when I tried it a few months ago 1Password refused to work with it (and any non-authorized browsers). This is 1Password&#x27;s choice and entirely their fault, but I haven&#x27;t found an alternative (though at the current rate of decline other options will become better by default soon).<p>Does Orion work yet with 1Password, or are there any workarounds yet?<p>Edit: found the thread on the 1Password forums and sounds like Orion has tried to reach out but are getting completely ignored by 1Password.

While I am a happy paying Kagi customer, their stance on privacy is nonsensical and amounts to saying &quot;We super duper pinky promise that we won&#x27;t use your data&quot;<p>From the Anonymity section: &quot;For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy.&quot;<p>Ok, but if anyone thinks I trust a company the way I trust my parents they are sorely mistaken, and I certainly wouldn&#x27;t want my parents to have an easily searchable record of everything I&#x27;ve ever searched for online, the same way a search engine provider does.<p>The complexity of accepting crypto payments is totally understandable. If that&#x27;s the reason Kagi does not prioritize anonymity then that is understandable, but the justification that &quot;you don&#x27;t really want privacy anyway&quot; is unnecessary.<p>&quot;We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.&quot;<p>&quot;Software architecture decision&quot; is meaningless. The only guarantee that data will not be collected and stored is a technological, probably cryptographic one.<p>If an organization is in a position to gain intimate knowledge of your life and habits, they have the ability to influence your life and that of others. Pinky swearing not to do so is a lot like following someone around with a camera while repeating &quot;it&#x27;s just for a video&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg</a><p>I don&#x27;t expect Kagi to accept crypto, and I&#x27;ll keep paying just because I&#x27;ll jump at an opportunity to pay with my money rather than with my data. However, given that they decouple their service from the need to track users, I would have expected them to prioritize anonymity wherever possible as the next logical step.<p>If the justification was technological it would be understandable, but their reassurance that there is nothing to be concerned about is itself concerning.

As someone who used to sell shareware through the original Kagi (that went bankrupt), it is so nice to see the name live on!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;faq#kagi-old" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;faq#kagi-old</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidbits.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidbits.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...</a>

I have been trying out Orion for the last few months and have found two features to be very valuable:<p>• vertical&#x2F;nested tabs<p>• sharing tabs between desktop&#x2F;mobile<p>My daily driver has been Brave for the last few years, but the lack of TST has me looking for alternatives. If I&#x27;m not able to find a decent TST solution, I&#x27;ll be migrating more of my browsing to Orion.

Big fan of Kagi - I was part of the original completely free testing period and recently bought in to the subscription and changed all my devices to using it. Results are great so far. I really like that you can customize your results (and &quot;up&quot; or &quot;down&quot; regulate certain websites and especially like that it also searches some lesser indexed sources like smaller personal sites&#x2F;blogs. Probably the coolest thing though is that it will also search old offline websites (archive.org) for results in super niche stuff - this makes it super useful for some things.<p>I am not on MacOS so I have no opinion on Orion but Kagi + Firefox is a great combo.

I was thinking that something like this sounded interesting, and certainly couldn&#x27;t cost more than $20&#x2F;year for unlimited searches. But $10&#x2F;m, and already being raised to $19&#x2F;m?<p>Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems like this product doesn&#x27;t have long left to live. And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be considering it.<p>And for anyone saying free plan, 50 searches a month is just too low. If I have one issue I&#x27;m trying to resolve, it&#x27;s very possible I use half of them right there, and who wants to worry about how many searches they have left.

Another happy, paying kagi user here. I find the search results for dev related queries MUCH better than google. This is mostly because I set official documentation sites to have a higher precedence (No more w3 schools appearing above MDN, for example), which is a feature google lacks.<p>Here&#x27;s to hoping it gains more traction! I love the competition in the search space.

I’ve been using Kagi for three months now, and 27 queries per day sounds about right, it could be more but when I open incognito tab on Brave it asks for a login which is super irritating, so about 15 queries a day still go to google. So far Kagi results are so good I forget about it until the end of the month $$$.

I&#x27;ve been just considering signing up last week, and this blog post has tipped me into pulling the trigger.<p>I am worried though, due to their high query cost, are they doing the full pipeline with external sources for simple queries too? Like I am accustomed to using google instead of my brain for literally the tiniest and pettiest of things, from just googling website name just to open it, spell check, conversion of anything into anything etcetcetc.

Love Kagi, can&#x27;t remember last time I!g something. I admit $10 is a bit steep but there was a week after they changed the free tier when I was on the fence but I realized I can&#x27;t go back to Google or ddg. Thank you Kagi team, the web is usable again.

$19 per month for single user without regional pricing is just insane given localised results (here in Japan) are really bad.

As a macOS user, I was very well impressed by this project (mostly Orion browser) but, I simply can&#x27;t use the basic plugins I need with it.<p>Been trying to get Workona plugin to work with it (both the Chrome and Firefox versions) on every Orion beta update, but nothing, it just doesn&#x27;t work.<p>I&#x27;m starting to wonder if it&#x27;s Orion that doesn&#x27;t support some API call, or if I misconfigured something, but, there&#x27;s no documentation that shows either.

I really like how listicles are compartmentalized to one section of the results, instead of taking over the entire page.

Many complain about the price, but for me it is an absolute no brainer.<p>In this day and age a search engine is one of the most important tools we have, and the price is rather cheap for not having to deal with Google and DDG ignoring my actual queries and including tons of results that doesn&#x27;t match my query at all.<p>My time is worth something and having to deal with false positives takes actual time. Also it is mentally exhausting and the better I get at detecting fake results the bigger the chance is that I skip an actual hit.<p>But maybe most of all the arrogance of Google and DDG and Bing is tiring. When I ask for &quot;something very specific&quot; and every time they include a number of results that doesn&#x27;t match, it is like they don&#x27;t think I am an actual grown up who can decide for myself.

I pay for Kagi after a recommendation here on hn.<p>I have been very happy with it and how clean&#x2F;fast it is to find what I want.

I&#x27;ve been following Kagi&#x27;s development for some time now and the idea looks promising. Not sure if the team plans to develop its own crawling engine and index that won&#x27;t depend entirely on sources such as Google&#x2F;Bing&#x2F;Wikipedia, etc. Right now, it seems like the results are 90% google results without the ads (which is still a big plus). However, I&#x27;d like to see if they can pull off indexing of (maybe a smaller part?) of the web on their own -- that way they can completely get decoupled from Google and not put their fate in the hands of much bigger players.<p>Anyway, exciting stuff and I wish the team best of luck!

I&#x27;ve been super happy with Kagi over DDG and Google. The results are significantly higher quality to me, particularly as a software dev that performs numerous searches per day.<p>The $10&#x2F;month price is a pain point that will test my desire to keep using it long term. The $5-7 range feels much more ideal. Obviously they have costs to cover, but I can&#x27;t see a large adoption rate unless they can bring the price down, which would be a bummer if they couldn&#x27;t because the product is great.

I pay for Kagi on principle. I’ll just come out and say it though: Kagi is missing 30% of the internet, at least. It may just be that Kagi is in the landing phase of “land and expand”, but I do think that long term, and generally, search engines need to be indiscriminate. Sure, interpreting queries and providing flavored results is fine <i>especially</i> when I’m paying so I know the flavor is in my interest, but excluding entire categories of content is not.

I&#x27;m using Kagi in France. First time I&#x27;m not actively looking back to be on Google (which sometimes I still do). Congrats and continue your effort !

Been a paid Kagi user for 3 months and it&#x27;s been a wonderful replacement.<p>If I could ask for one thing, though I don&#x27;t think it is up to Kagi. I use my Android phone with the Microsoft Launcher and Edge and I for the life of me cannot figure out how to make it Kagi the default search engine.<p>Besides that, it has been a great service and well worth it! I wish the Kagi team well and I look forward to buying a shirt or hoodie in the future! :)

Another happy early adopter here: I use Google tech for a lot of things, but not for search for many years. DDG is really good, enough that I&#x27;ve pretty much given up falling back to Google Search if DDG can&#x27;t find something. Kagi is even better.<p>I particularly like the ability to lower and raise domains. I don&#x27;t have many in my list, but the ones that are there are there for a <i>reason</i>.

First I am hearing of Kagi. I&#x27;m impressed with what I am reading though. The company seems very transparent about their business model, which is refreshing.<p>Reading their pricing page, it says it costs them about one dollar for a single search query. Holy moly, that seems wildly expensive. I would really be interested in knowing why a single search query is so pricey.

Beta user and paid subscriber here. Kagi is just great—for all the reasons that everyone else here has already said.<p>I use Orion on my phone because it&#x27;s the easiest way to get Kagi as your default search engine. It also sidesteps my two problems with Orion on the Mac: 1Password support (and Chrome extensions generally) and my years and years and years of muscle memory built up around Developer Tools. I&#x27;ve tried Safari&#x27;s tools and they&#x27;re just too different. (Once the Chrome extension support is fully-baked, I&#x27;ll probably force myself to get used to the Safari tools. Until then, Brave it is.)

&gt; Do you have advanced Crystal or vanilla JavaScript knowledge? (Kagi search team)<p>I am surprised at the mention of Crystal here. I wasn&#x27;t expecting Crystal to be used for crawler!

Google has a search API. Does Kagi use this on the backend?

Kagi has been worth the money for me. It&#x27;s got a lot of room for improvement, but compared to DDG (which I like) it&#x27;s given me everything I could ask for. I don&#x27;t like the subscription business model most of the time, especially for software, but in this case there is a definable cost associated with me using the product, so it makes sense.

I&#x27;m interested in alternative browsers that aren&#x27;t google based&#x2F;owned and have found myself limited to use Firefox. But that I mind it, it does everything I need, But I&#x27;d be open to Orion, but correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, it&#x27;s not cross platform?

&gt; There are some incredible discussions happening here, like for example this one about should Kagi include a suicide prevention widget.<p>That seems a weird topic to highlight, quite far on the long tail of what is important for a functional web search engine.

Any way to disable the „auto correct“ feature? No, I don’t want to search for „mind journey“, I want to search for „midjourney“. Without additional clicks please. But apart from that I really like it, thanks for offering a real alternative.

In regard to anonymity, I&#x27;m curious if the kagi users can form a closed tor-like network that will insure that all queries come from an authenticated user and at the same time the query source is obfuscated.

I love this browser but I have problem with missing autocomplete on text inputs and with latest update I can’t play any video on youtube. Also would be possible to not animate address bar when entering url?

Satisfied customer here. I like being the customer, not the product.

Congrats, Vlad &amp; team. You seem to be off on a good trajectory!

10 USD&#x2F;month is too much for me. 5 USD&#x2F;month in family sounds reasonable but if that means 250 searches for month for one user, it&#x27;s not enough.

DDG was always better when I tested Kagi and Orion was not performing any better than brave either. Both products are far from terrible but based on the merit and value of the product alone I could not pay for it. The privacy angle is worth paying for but why won&#x27;t I just use DDG? I use private tabs a lot and having to login to kagi or searching the internet logged in with an account tied to a payment method isn&#x27;t a positive thing for me. Good idea but bad business model is my experience with both products.<p>But YMMV so don&#x27;t let me discourage you from trying them.

kagi is awesome, really awesome. and Fast.<p>But they are like: super expensive.<p>Unacceptable expensive. More than netflix, spotify and friends.<p>I wish they invest more into bringing down their own operating costs so that the premium package could be more affordable.

Wow, 26.000 USD MRR within a couple of months, that&#x27;s really impressive.

A few things rub me the wrong way here... first, they don&#x27;t accept cryptocurrency. Then they go on to say to be anonymous you can use services like SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ, and they state &quot;We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design.&quot;<p>The issue here isn&#x27;t whether you log searches, but whether you log payment transactions and it is almost a guarantee that they do and is probably by law. SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ offers no guarantees of anonymity when it comes to government agencies. In fact, you can almost guarantee that virtual debit card providers are logging your transactions and from experience usually require you link a bank account.<p>So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay, it can still be tied back to your search history if for some reason you are suspected of searching for something that may be investigation worthy. I don&#x27;t think it is fair to simply trust a company that claims they don&#x27;t log things, when history has shown that they do in fact even when they say they don&#x27;t.<p>So why would they even try to market themselves as more private or anonymous? If you want privacy or anonymity then you&#x27;ll use a free search engine that doesn&#x27;t want payment; and you&#x27;ll search from behind a reliable VPN or via Tor.

Three things:<p>1. You don&#x27;t know what privacy is. &quot;We believe that Kagi has the most user-friendly privacy policy of any search engine out there. However, privacy and anonymity are not the same things. For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy.&quot; Ask any kid if privacy is their parents knowing everything. You&#x27;re using it as a marketing term.<p>2. This is illegal public solicitation and an SEC violation: &quot;anyone passionate about Kagi and our vision for the web will have the opportunity to invest as little as $5,000 USD and join the ride with us. It would be structured as a SAFE note and we would use the funds to expand the team and accelerate our product vision.&quot;<p>3. Stop abusing HN to shill your paid search engine. &quot;We are pleased to see that Kagi is propagating fast through Hacker News, Reddit and Twitter with word of mouth from existing users.&quot; Kagi shills hijack every single Hn discussion thread about search. You is just as bad. Just. Stop.