Comment by flexagoon

3 days ago

Obligatory Kagi mention

Kagi costs money and isn't that great to begin with

  • People just keep pitching Kagi as revolutionary, especially software engineers and people on HN.

    I respect a lot of them, people I respect a lot, and I saw people like Jon Gjengset use it. so I gave it a few months of daily use. I just eventually drifted back to Google. The results weren't better for anything I search for. It felt different, but not better in any measurable way. $10/mo for a different feel is a strange value prop.

    DuckDuckGo sits in the same spot for me. I want to like it, and I don't think one company should own web search, but when I need to find something Google finds it first. I wish the answer were different, but that's just how things are.

    • >$10/mo for a different feel is a strange value prop.

      Thought Kagi would want the strange part to be, say:

      "strange to let advertisers cover your monthly search bill, trading your privacy and using Google--we're only ten bucks a month!"

      So, pay for peace of mind.

      (do recognize $10 is an entire e.g. daily wage for some)

      1 reply →

    • This hasn't been our experience; can you please reach out to me with specific examples? My email is in my profile.

  • Counterpoint, Kagi is profitable and it achieved that milestone solely via user subscriptions, so its incentives are aligned with users, and not advertisers.

    And I've found it so good that I haven't used Google, except by accident, in the past 18 months.

  • Costs money is a good thing. You want to be the customer, not the product.

Kagi is just a front end for Google with extra anti-slop filters. These are useful, and when you pay you become the customer instead of the product.