Basically the title.
I’m interested in any opportunity to inprove the way I navigate the internet. What I’ve been for a few years now is DDG, which works fine. Not great, not amazing, just fine. And that’s ok considering how they opperate.
I just heard about kagi and was really cosidering it. Makes sense as a business model (pay so we don’t have to sell you data), seems privacy respecting, and claims to strive for best search results in the market. Some test searches from the trial seem promising.
If you’ve used it for any amount of time, what has your experience been with it? What plan are you using? What are you mostly searching for?
Even you haven’t used it, any thoughts / opinions are welcome.
I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…
On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.
Yeah +1 on Google Search becoming shit lately. I shifted to DDG for a while but settled on Brave Search for now. Their new AI summarizer is quite good and I like how they club Discussion posts together.
Well Mullvad can only offer that because they require you to be on their VPN. How would Kagi enforce their payment plan without an account?
Mullvad can offer that because they generate you a one time access token that’s good until a certain time for a set number of simultaneous clients.
Kagi could do a simpler version - an access token that’s good until a certain number of searches. In fact, they have that mostly built - the link they tell you to use in private sessions is literally it.
Add to that anonymized payment options, and you got yourself a hard to track design.
I’ve been using it for about a year and a half, on the unlimited plan. I pay for the year up front for the discount. There’s no way I’m willingly going to stop using Kagi. I’m a developer and perform about 2500 searches a month.
The ability to adjust the ranking of domains and the lenses save me a ton of time. No other engine comes close to the productivity.
You can easily talk to the developers and founder, too. I’ve had many of my suggestions actually implemented. It’s great when you pay for the service and they are in it for you, not your data.
My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I’ve paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it’s great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi’s results pages are very light. It’s also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I’m de-ranking certain sites so they’re pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.
There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.
Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google’s API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.
I’ve found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn’t handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.
Just FYI: They ditched the Bing API completely ca 2 months ago. See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1685-no-tears-shed-after-losing-bing
I actually do remember hearing about this somewhere, but even though I have their blog/updates in my RSS reader, they never officially mentioned this before this user brought it up—maybe in their Discord server? Thanks for pointing this out! I can imagine they really wanted to get away from Bing after the price surge, as that was only a signal of more to come. Duckduckgo seems to be paying for that with the massive increase in ads.
However, it is still disconcerting the degree to which Kagi is hugely reliant on Google. Doesn’t change any of the positive aspects about Kagi, though.
I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2
Pros for Brave Search:
- (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
- Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.
Cons for Brave Search:
- Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
- Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
- Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.
Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don’t even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it’s cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the “smaller web” and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html
Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I’ve had with them. I just don’t have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.
Lastly, I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don’t use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html
Yeah I might try out Mojeek. I use brave for my searches and do !s [query] to get startpage results for my images
I thought I read in one of their feedback threads that Kagi doesn’t use Bing anymorel, but I could be wrong.
I have used Kagi for a few weeks now after hearing about it on Lemmy.
At first I wasn’t that impressed for the price. It is really growing on me the more I use it though. Where it really shines is the customizations. Once you rank up and down to your preferences the results are way better than anywhere else.
One way they rank results is based on how much tracking a website has. You can also see the number of trackers, check the archive or do an ai summary of it without even visiting the website. You find a lot of high quality nonprofit information with the commercial high tracking websites filtered out.
I also made custom redirects for sites like reddit and quora for privacy frontends.
I find myself actually using bangs now that I can customize them. You can also add other search engines so they are one click away if you want a second opinion. Lenses are great, I made some custom ones to search the top 10 websites for forums, tech support, news, etc.
When I don’t feel like sifting through a bunch of results the ai summarizes the results. When it doesn’t come up with a good summary it’s because the results don’t have the answer and you saved a bunch of time.
The free trial wasn’t enough time for me to decide if I liked it. I am glad I paid for the $10 plan. However, I seem to do about 3,000 searches a month. I was able to upgrade to unlimited at a prorated amount. $25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
$25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
I justify the cost by relating it to how it helps me at work. I believe Kagi makes me more effective; my boss(es… :( ) and peers notice, and that translates to better performance evaluations and raises. I don’t hide my usage of it from my team, but I don’t think they realize how much of an advantage it gives me. Once you get the rankings and lenses tuned to your workflow, it’s amazing how it lets you cut through the nonsense of the internet.
I have not tried it, but I’m not a fan of logging into a search engine or providing an email. Mullvad, by comparison, just gives you an account number.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-does-kagi-search-require-an-email-address
