- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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.
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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.
Ah a fellow discord member
FYI: I’m not affiliated with Kagi, even though my opinion seem very biased
Been using Kagi for so long. Currently I’m using their unlimited plan. It’s really helped me with my research because kagi can summarize pdf directly on the search result. You can also ask about pdf like what chatgpt premium version did.
I went from $10 to $25 because I want to support them for making this beautiful simple search.
I’ve been using it since last year. It’s always been much better than the mostly unusable ones Google has given me for years now. It’s the best $10 I spend. It saves me time.
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.
DDG was great a few years ago and has steadily become shitter and shitter with time. Its still my default but I find myself banging to others more and more.
Google’s results are often unusable now for anyone boycotting Reddit.
For years I was annoyed by all the Google ads and junk websites that were just there for ads, behind paywalls, ai generated or trying to get me to buy something.
To find anything of use I would often type in Reddit. Now they have nothing with their best results becoming more junk not to click on. Staying with Google makes it incredibly difficult to quit Reddit.
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.
My trials of it always seem outstanding, but the price with search limits has thus far discouraged me from signing up every time I think to do so. $5 for 10k searches (or some number that I wouldn’t have to think about as a human user searching for things) would get me over the fence. Even the family plan with up to 2 users seems stingy.
I really like Kagi. Its text search is better than Google’s. Its image search still sucks though.
I’ve been a Kagi user since launch, and it has completely replaced everything for me except image searches. It’s the best $10 I spend each month.
I tested it a bit a few months back, when the trial was still a bit more generous. Results are generally good (often better, but sometimes worse than Google’s) and the custom filtering/weighting of search results is really cool. That said, for me the difference isn’t nearly large enough to justify the price compared to just continuing to use Google with uBlock Origin. Especially considering a big part of their costs are third party API integrations for AI summarization, weather, maps etc (IIRC from some of their comments on HN), most of which I don’t actually need or want. Maybe if I could pay like $3-5 without having to worry about going over some search limit and suddenly having to pay per search…
If you like google’s engine without all the trackers and other garbage, check out https://startpage.com
I wouldn’t trust Startpage anymore since they were bought by an advertisement company. Better use Whoogle fo get results from Google.
I have not properly tested it, however I had a look at their sample queries. One of which was Steve Jobs, the main thing I noticed was that three of the top 5-10 results were the Wikipedia page for Steve jobs but in different languages. I appreciate that Google isn’t great but it’s not bad enough to serve you the same page three times. I personally use searxng.
I have not experienced anything like that. There have been a couple searches that were poor at the beginning though. You can just block or down rank the bad results and make some custom lenses that solve that problem.
It really improves the more effort you put into customizing it. The free trial really isn’t enough time to get a feel for it.
I just checked the test results again and it still has the three Wikipedia pages for Steve Jobs. It makes me question how good their results are, but I am glad it works for you :)
Check again. I submitted feedback yesterday based on what you told me. They already fixed it today. Looks like it just wasn’t checking for language without a user logged in.
It looks like it would now in a real search before personalizations.
They seem to be good at fixing anything or adding new features if you ask.
That’s really interesting, I checked it again and the results are much better. I may properly check this out now!
