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Posted by elashri 2 days ago

Search for everyone(kagi.com)
752 points | 410 commentspage 3
superkuh 2 days ago|
I know Kagi is supposed to be a curated experience but I really, really wish they'd have a setting I could toggle to see more than 200 search results per query. 200 is just 2 pages and for more obscure search topics (like, "pyroelectric partcile acceleration") I found that Kagi could never "curate" and actually deliver the links to the research paper PDFs that other search engines could find. Even google with it's 400 maximum search results and Bing with 900 are more useful because of this. But it not like search engines used to be where you could dive deep into many hundreds or thousands of results and find serendipitous things related to the intended search. I really miss and would pay for the ability to read and select search results myself instead of having them curated for me by some algorithm. Or at least give me a couple thousand "curated" results.
nobodywasishere 2 days ago|
We're planning on adding support for more pages. We can't guarantee a specific number of results, but at least you should be able to get more than you do right now.
01100011 2 days ago||
Is there a search widget available for iOS? I tried installing the kagi for safari app, but apple’s intentionally scary warnings did it’s job and convinced me not to enable it. I'd rather just have a widget on my homescreen which opens results in a safari tab. I built one with shortcuts, but it’s ugly.
syntaxing 2 days ago||
This is a really good move. I noticed this yesterday when I was in private mode in Orion and the Kagi search went through.
lapcat 2 days ago|
> I noticed this yesterday when I was in private mode

How are they going to enforce the 50 search limit? IP address?

moecables 2 days ago||
I was a subscriber for 2 years but as of late, I've had less and less need for Kagi's awesome search experience. Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.
BeetleB 2 days ago||
> Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.

This is more work up front, but I have a bot I communicate with via Telegram, and I've hooked up Kagi API Search and Extract, and now achieve something similar. I just ask it to do a web search to try to find the answer to my question.

It's pay-as-you-go. Not particularly expensive.

getnormality 2 days ago|||
But what happens when search gets so optimized for delivering ads through AI, that your AI starts giving you crappy ad-driven results (which is already happening).

We'll need a way to hook up the agent to a subscriber search service.

krupan 2 days ago||
They have a $5/month plan now, if that makes a difference to you
ada-h00k 2 days ago||
I do think it's good that you can now try it out without logging in, but using Cloudflare with aggressive fingerprinting does go a bit against the whole idea of data protection. If you're already being tracked as a trial user, why would you want to give them your payment information, which would only lead to even more tracking? I'm a Kagi user myself and enjoy using the add-on to take advantage of Privacy Passes. But now I have to assume that I'm still being tracked and that my searches are being linked to me.
dawnerd 2 days ago||
Very happy with it and also extremely happy that you can actually get support from them. Very impressed.
jan_m_savage 2 days ago||
i tried Kagi against Duckduckgo, Google, Bing, Yandex. It turned out more complete, old-web results whereas all the rest merely returned duds (same search, something difficult to find).

Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.

smodo 2 days ago||
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.

That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?

fl4regun 2 days ago||
I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
pedro_caetano 2 days ago|||
The biggest value for me is:

- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.

- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).

Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.

Zambyte 2 days ago|||
> I end up going directly to certain websites instead.

Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.

ActionHank 2 days ago|||
Everyone I mentioned it to scoffed at the idea of paying for search.
CSSer 2 days ago|||
Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".

Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.

throwaway219450 2 days ago||||
How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. I digress. It’s not as if showing ads has somehow funded a better search experience, if anything ads go up and quality goes down is what I see. I pay for YT Premium. I would also pay for ad-free, more controllable, Google Search.

Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?

druskacik 2 days ago|||
I mean, I think for average internet user the existing free alternatives are more than good enough.
jeremyjh 2 days ago|||
Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids on Kagi and they don’t want to go back to Google now.
ActionHank 2 days ago||
How do you deal with searches for local businesses? I've found these to be a big blind spot vs DDG / Google.
dotancohen 2 days ago||
Am I searching for a local business? I go to Google.

Am I searching for the range of input voltages an Arduino can safely handle? Kagi.

mulderc 2 days ago|||
I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.
bdzr 2 days ago||
I've found the assistant, particularly the android app, to be buggy as all hell. Perhaps it's fine in the browser but as a heavy phone user I couldn't make it work anymore.
khaleel-kagi 2 days ago|||
Sorry to hear that! Could you please share a bit more about the issues you ran into with the Android app?
mulderc 2 days ago||||
At least on iOS running the site as a web app works great. Also the iOS app works
neogodless 2 days ago|||
I recently tried the Android App, and could not get it to function. But Kagi Assistant on Firefox for Android works fine.
khaleel-kagi 2 days ago||
Can you please share a bit more about the issue? a crash or an error? I'd love to understand what wasn't working. Thanks!
neogodless 2 days ago||
It just didn't do anything when I hit Enter. I typed in a query, hit Enter, and nothing happened. I gave up after that.
jbaber 2 days ago||
Great! That's the last bit of friction for friends and family. Kagi is no longer something eccentric I do that I can't explain well enough.
LoganDark 2 days ago|
In terms of Diataxis [0], this is like optimizing for application over acquisition. I've been needing more acquisition lately, or honestly for my whole life, so I don't necessarily want something optimized only for application. Yet here we are, in a world that increasingly seems to be forgetting acquisition entirely.

[0]: https://diataxis.fr/compass/

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