Thoughts on Kagi?
I've been using this search engine and I have to say I'm absolutely in love with it.
Search results are great, Google level even. Can't tell you how happy I am after trying multiple privacy oriented engines and always feeling underwhelmed with them.
Have you tried it? What are your thoughts on it?
It's ridiculously expensive. It's not private if you have to link your searches to a paid account and none of those payment providers are private. They don't seem to have open sourced any of their key functionality, meaning you have to trust them to not be collecting your activity data.
I spent a long time getting rid of software and using services that I either no longer trusted or was unable to make an informed choice due to their lack of open source code and I'm not going to take a retrograde step now. And that's without the issue with their choice (a continued choice I believe) to use Brave results, a company I'm personally not prepared to support.
Current Kagi user paying for it privately. They offer top ups to your account with crypto. I do xmr - btc to top up my account. Also signed up with an alias email.
Bit too expensive
I stumbled onto some comments about Kagi angling to become an AI-first search engine that actually brags about putting you in a filter bubble. From Kagi's manifesto:
In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.
One YouTube video suggests a grim future: "Everybody has a feed uniquely tailored to them. Nobody talks about their favorite YouTubers anymore, because everybody watches different content farms. All the real creators quit a long time ago."
Food for thought. I don't like the idea of these filter bubbles.
ETA: I didn't realize it at the time but they also promise data collection for
If you're looking for an open source search engine that's building its own data set, one exists (and it's totally open source and free).
If you're looking for something that collates other engines' contents, SearXNG is also open source and free.
Kagi isn't really unique in any way here; their most unique quality appears to be linking your searches to an account, requesting money, and promising not to sell your data at a later date.
... Okay, I just tried Stract, and its results are... Mostly not helpful.
My understanding is that Kagi makes an effort to tell you how they anonymize your search so they can't tie it back to your account afterwards, whereas Searx is more dependent solely on the goodwill of whoever is hosting the instance. Both are good faith dependent in the end, but one has a profit motive for keeping that faith.
Edit: I hope Stract gets there and takes off one day, but today doesn't seem to be that day for me.
The privacy policy is also a legally binding document, not just a promise that the company does. If they are found violating it, the GDPR fines are going to hurt and they would lose the customer base in a blink. Their privacy policy right now is exemplary, I am one of those who read policies before using a product and kagi's is literally the best I have seen: clear, detailed, specific and most importantly, good from the privacy perspective.
There's some tradeoff here, keep garbage out and relevant results in. Definitely want to stay connected with others and share knowledge (such as websites that provide quality info)
I'm not a fan of them doing business with Brave and how they handled criticism from the community.
For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave
IMO the previous link provides better context, as it provides a look into what the leadership said within that thread before trying to clean up their optics, as well as showing other examples of what the company was up to.
The original behavior, and the censorship on Kagi-run discussion platforms is quite telling.
ETA: somebody catalogued the CEO's damage control across the thread last month. Some of the observations were really interesting.
I've had better results than on Google in many cases. Also leaves DDG and other privacy relevant alternatives in the dust.
But, unless you are a power user it's hard to justify the cost. Very pricey.
I use the family plan with my wife. So we end up at $7 per month per user. Which IMO is ok. Given how important search is for our every day internet usage, I can accept this price.
I rarely have to jump to the second page of the search results to get what I want, so I am really happy with Kagi.
The starter tier is only $5/month for 300 searches, which is more than enough for your average user.
I can get not wanting to pay for search, but I wouldn't call $5 "very pricey". In fact, I'd be so bold as to call it reasonable.
I just checked my history and performed 611 searches this week on this device alone. 300 is not even close to enough for a week. $5 is way too expensive for that.
I have 2000 searches in the past 7 days... 300 searches a month seems so miniscule
Personally I love it. Being able to boost results from some sites while depriotizing or even banning others has been real helpful. Not having unrelated "sponsored" content cluttering up the results is certainly nice as well. The results themselves feel like Google from ten years ago, relevant and on point.
It's not open source, at least to my knowledge.
No it is not. They are "increasingly open source", whatever that truly means.
It means absolutely nothing
It means that they are open sourcing an increasing number of components? In the very same page they are linked: browser extensions, libraries they use for their AI features.
That's the problem, though, given the cost of indexing it. I'm not sure there's a single open source search engine that doesn't rely on some sort of proprietary software. My philosophy is that if the product is free, you likely are the product.? We would almost need a donation-based search engine to get around that, which would likely would not be sustainable.
I don't need my search history linked to my payment data for future enshittification. At least Google (and DDG or whatever) is guessing and I can make that harder with a proper browser.
What would i be searching for that's so difficult to find that I would pay for Kagi? Especially when there are multiple options for good free search engines.
From the looks of their own promotional material, the opportunity to build your own tailor-made filter bubble...
Search experience tailored to you and your needs.
We encourage you to evaluate and change results.
I find DDG not great at finding what I need, where Kagi returns less results but they are more relevant.
There's also AI features that can be integrated with the search results which helps.
It is a privacy nightmare as they have your payment information on file.
Kagi only stores the information about the client that you explicitly provide by using your account, as laid out in our interface. This includes:
Your email to facilitate account access and support contact (ex: password reset) Your account settings (ex: theme, search region, selected language)
And nothing else.
I’ve been using it as my primary for quite a while, it’s pretty awesome and the development pace is pretty good.
I’m not really a fan of the lead guy, some of the comments he’s made on the forums are less than great, but the product is top notch.
Care to elaborate on the comments? I haven't read any of them.
Some interesting moderation choices that suggest a lack of support for the LGTBQ+ community, a business partnership with Brave, and a really shitty take refusing to add help numbers for self-harm related searches.
You can get the cliff notes of it from this post and comment to it: https://lemm.ee/comment/8016834
I am currently subscribed and it is definitely a step up from other engines I have tried. The main feature is just that it seems to somewhat cut back the general blogspam and SEO fluff. It isn't perfect but whenever I do compare it to Google, Brave or Duck Duck Go it seems to be ahead, or in rare cases similar.
The ability to lower/block sites is also quite nice. I also have a few raised sites, but that is really a minor improvement compared to blocking crap like Quora and Pintrest.
That being said the small plan is a pretty small number of searches so I need to pay for the unlimited plan which is quite expensive. I currently think it is worth it but it is definitely borderline value, not a slam-dunk decision.
I also have concerns about them focusing on things I don't care about. Lots of AI features and a browser. I don't want any of that, just focus on search, there is still lots of room for improvement, even if they are currently leading the pack.
Not saying you're wrong, want to share my perspective: I agree with the AI, the quick answer saves me a ton of time by adding source links where I always click on to verify the answer (quicker than going through search results when I don't know the terminology).
As to the browser - not really sure why they're pushing for their own, isn't FF good enough?
Yeah, the AI I am lukewarm on. I'm fine having them experiment, and it does seem that they are using it tastefully. It is something that I can see improving the experience in the future even if I feel it has little to no benefit to me now.
But yes, the browser just seems like a distraction.
I created an account a few months ago but I've barely used it. DDG provides pretty much everything I search for. This might be because I don't typically do very "esoteric" searches, but for now I don't see the need for a paid service. Most of the times, tweaking the query so that it looks for a specific source is good enough.
I'd love if DDG had a system to remove entire domains entirely from the results, though.
I'm currently a Kagi user. When I first used it I thought it was an excellent alternative to Google, and well worth the price. However ever since they integrated Brave results, I've noticed a significant decline in the quality of results. The only reason I'm still subscribed is because I haven't found a suitable alternative.
Yandex
I just started paying the unlimited plan. I like the search results and the URL replacement setting. I can redirect YouTube videos to piped and Reddit to the old one so my VPN doesn't get blocked. The lenses are also top notch.
Been using is for several months. Definitely VERY overpriced (I'd say $3-4/mo for a search engine would be fine, not $10), but the results are great, and I love the quick answer feature. It quickly summarizes info from top results, helped me a lot in college, where sometimes your brain is melting and you want the answer NOW.
I was introduced to it by an IRL friend of mine very early on and was very sceptical. I then tried it many months later and what actually convinced me most are its "advanced" features. They're features that should obviously be in any search engine but since there's been practically 0 innovation in this space in the past decade or so, this is very refreshing.
The results being on par with Google at the worst also helps.
Pretty much everything about it is really great. The only thing that's not great is that you're required to identify yourself with every search. I'm not aware of any alternative for a paid search engine though. They claim to not log or otherwise abuse your PII and it's believable but there's still a risk.
I guess the price is also kinda high but it's justified AFAICT.
Btw: !kagi@lemmy.ml.
I love it. Personally I don't think it is too expensive, though I am probably a power user of search engines, as I need it a lot while programming all sorts of stuff... So maybe it is just me saying its worth the money, because I use it a lot
To me 100$/y seems a little much compared to Proton Unlimited and the amount of features there. Perhaps it's like that due to their size and AI features
Running a search engine is just a lot more expensive than running a VPN and email service. The amount of data and processing power needed to have a useful search index is just so much higher
I think it's great. It's the only search engine where I don't find myself going back the Google every now and then. I'd say the results are actually a lot better than what Google offers. Being able to rank websites higher or lower (or even pin them or block them entirely) is great, and as it's saved to your account, it's basically synced across devices.
It's $10/month for unlimited searches. I tried their limited $5 plan first, but found myself thinking "do I really need to search this?" way too often to try and stay under the 200 (back then I think, now it's 300) search limit.
Their privacy model is mostly based on you trusting them that they don't keep your search history for longer or any other purposes than stated (if turned on), but their business model is clearly based on subscriptions, so it should be fine unless they get greedy.
You can not enable the "feature" to keep search history. The slider stays disabled when you try.
True, it's even disabled by default. But you still have to trust them that they really don't store your history.
It's great using their Fastgpt which gives accurate results from various forums and websites, where other gpt based search engines lack. And got to try their Summarizer.
I recommend to use it as Secondary source (with tempmails) and Primary remains SearX for sure.
startpage is already on google level and the defaults of some searxng instances are better the google results
startpage is already on google level
probably because it literally proxies Google's search results.
From my brief interactions with the dev I believe they're doing things the very hard way when it comes to indexing.
It might be the only choice once AI poisoning becomes prolific. It's already corrupted the niche topics and soon it may overwhelm the topics with more human eyes on it.
Do they have an android app? I haven't been able to find anything that looks trustworthy
I just added the search engine to my browser. I don't see the need for an app when all of the results are going to open in the browser anyways.
I've used Quick Search since 2013. Simple, configurable.
Back then I had it tied to the search button (which no longer exists ☹️)
The Search button is now when you long-press the Home button.
How is map searching/integration?
It's Apple maps. It works but it's not great.
paid options for the elites: buy several multi TB hdd and host&curate a personal search index.. to supplement conventional search results.
or personal AWS storage but thats likely to be risky and more expensive. also relatively difficult.