Comment by ab_io
7 months ago
I just cancelled my Kagi subscription over the weekend. Some of the ideas in the article resonate (the dev team seems spread way too thin) but I also decided that the main product just wasn't distinct enough. The lens and quick answers features were nice, but otherwise the search results were not that different from Google's -- Having just switched back, I haven't noticed a significant difference.
I also think this product might be a bit too late. GPT4 has been out for over a year now, and it's changed how I look for answers. I tried FastGPT but like the author I found it lacking. As it stands, Perplexity feels more like the future of search than Kagi.
It's likely dependent on the 'user archetype'. If you need to e.g. lookup things related to beginner-friendly programming languages, the search results for Google are strongly tainted with SEO crap.
Being able to either outright block/pin sites, or only lower/raise them in your search results, made a difference for me after a few days of searching.
I do hope the future of search will include being able to use natural language, but also still the more precise '"This" +"That"'.
In any case, more competition is a good thing, the lack of it is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I churned from Kagi twice before sticking around as a long term customer, because the results were better than Google.
I’ll be curious if you come back to Kagi in a couple months too.