I've been evaluating Kagi for a couple weeks, I'm liking it, but today I'm completely sold. I've been doing a niche, technical search this morning: trying to figure out if Emacs and TRAMP can be made to work with flatpak-spawn.
Google returned a ton of unrelated posts and I had to tell it to stop ignoring my search terms. Kagi returned the only relevant page: a comment on a Github issue that Google wasn't able to find, and no other fluff, because that particular combination of words doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet.
In other words, Google lies and paraphrases your search to return as much results as possible, usually not very relevant, while Kagi respects my search terms and can surface very niche pages. 2022 Google makes the Internet feel very small.
I've test driven Brave Search for months as well, and this is my personal ranking, from best to worst: Kagi > Brave Search = Google Search > DDG.
I like the UX, but the results are full of content farms and weird ranking for the query "golang parser" (https://you.com/search?q=golang+parser). OTOH it is much faster than kagi.
First result is good:
pkg.go.dev/go/parser
Second result looks like a content farm:
golangdocs.com/golang-parser-package
Third result looks like a valid Chinese search result, but it's a duplicate of the first result and also _very_ weird that it would rank that highly:
golang.cm/pkg/go_parser.htm
Then the next two results are content farms:
golangexample.com/tag/parser/
golangexample.com/a-dead-simple-parser-package-for-go/
Then a valid result from a low-starred GH project:
github.com/prataprc/goparsec
Then a good result:
blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2014/parsers-lexers/
Then a random seemingly unrelated academic paper:
www.arxiv.org/abs/1505.08075
Then a valid result from a high-starred GH project:
github.com/alecthomas/participle
Then another content farm:
awesomeopensource.com/projects/golang/parser
kagi also has a bunch of the content farms, but the ranking is better IMO. Good luck!
> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.
> At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal
Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their reported beta-testers usage is 30 / day. At their current expense level, that would be $116.25 / mo.
I wonder how can this be sustainable. Maybe they expect a large number of paying users who do 2-3 searches a day.
I am one of the "more than 30 searches per day" beta users.
I just saw this looked at the 10$/mo price tag, gulped, then considered just how much better it makes my life compared to the google results, and paid up.
I wish the team best of luck and want to thank you for already having saved me tons of time and nerves!
They can change the model later, add caching, improve performance, and use better hardware. Just getting a native search engine off the ground is impressive.
They may be running a flask app reading data direct from s3 feeding through a giant ML model right now - which wouldn't be the application architecture they'd use if they served 100x the traffic.
- Technology which can extract frightening amounts of information from search history, location data, and other data sources. It's not 2012 anymore when a google or FB ui just showing the places you had been was enough to get me to give over that kind of data.
- Ad based search engines literally filling the search page with ads.
- SEO spam so severe that the non-ads are generally terrible pages anyway.
Given all of this, and a young daughter who will be browsing the internet in another year or two - I'd be willing to pay for a search engine.
> Given all of this, and a young daughter who will be browsing the internet in another year or two - I'd be willing to pay for a search engine.
Thanks for saying this, it is not been discussed enough. The main reason I started Kagi was exactly to protect my own kids from being exposed to ads and tracking from the very young age.
This is a random place to throw this at you, but you seem like you have a) the skills and b) and the motivation.
The internet needs an “allowlist” front end for kids, especially for video platforms.
I would pay $20/month for a family subscription to a front end app for Netflix and YouTube that lets me allowlist shows and channels, and never lets Netflix or Youtube AI choose what to show my kids next.
Netflix in particular is extremely subversive. I have seen it stop a show mid-episode to suggest a new show to my 6yo - which is clearly aimed at slightly more mature audiences, and is therefore more exciting/scary for my daughter.
The AI is constantly pushing her toward more mature content even if she doesn’t choose it. And there is NO WAY to stop it other than just get rid of Netflix entirely, but they also have by far the best content for kids.
Anyway, a browser with proper kids controls, good UX for the parents, and especially the ability to filter/block the closed video platforms, would be huge.
If you want a more "private" experience, just use an Apple device and search through safari and enable parental controls. Or if you're an Android user, just don't create a google account.
I would think that this cost metric will change to their benefit with scale. Lots of constant factors go into these calculations that are significant when you are small-ish but become insignificant when you scale enough
I do not understand how people get through their day without doing at least 2-3 searches an hour. If you're online, working or pretending to work, consuming all that "internetz info", how can you do that without also bombarding Google with Q's about translations between languages, conversion between metric/imperial, basic fact-checking, wikipedia-ing, looking up definitions of words, and such? Even while listening to music, I Google either a phrase from the song or, if I know it, the title plus "lyrics" to immerse myself further into it.
I truly appreciate Kagi's effort and their transparency when it comes to cost.
I will definitely pay money to become "not the product". Is search as important as Netflix? To me, the answer is hell yes. I just need my next search engine to be at least as good as Google. That bar is pretty high, regardless of what we say here on HN.
I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:
Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)
Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/
Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)
Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)
Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)
Awesome, I've been using kagi for a couple months now, and it's been awesome! I love thee ability to open internet archive quickly or bump the ranking of certain sites.
I am still a little confused about the pricing situation though. As I understand you guys plan to offer "free with limited usage" and a paid 10$/month unlimited use plan. But I can't seem to find any information on what the "limits" are? I do not have any insights on how much running a search engine costs, but 10$ a month seems quite high for most users. I really like the flat pricing model though.
Another issue I feel like that largely goes unnoticed is, privacy in incognito mode, if I use kagi in incognito, all my searches are associated with my "account", even worse for some people their payment information!, which is something I'm just not comfortable with.
EDIT:
So I thought about it a little, and I'd say 10$ a month is probably worth it (to me)! Just for the features and search result quality. Considering how much of a value a search engine has in my life. I was initially skeptical if it would cost them THAT much. But I see it from a different perspective now.
I would still not use Kagi for private searches though, and that's just me. Privacy is something I would rather trust someone without my full name with, that just my opinion though.
As for the incognito side I'm not convinced it's any less connected than switching to Incognito and searching with your normal search provider. Yeah, the sign in info is explicitly sent but it's not like Google et al don't know it's you just because you didn't send the sign in info. If you're worried about that threat vector (your search engine tracking you when they say they won't) I'd use a different than your normal search engine through something like TOR.
gosh 1$/80 searches is somewhat expensive... are these pure infrastructure costs or does this include development costs which I hope would scale down as the search engine grows?
They use a lot of 3rd party APIs rather than try to beat everyone at quality and the only monetization is via direct payment so those 3rd party API costs get baked in. For an idea how many things a search might call
https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20...
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
...
And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently.
Cost of their infrastructure to tie it together and development/maintenance may go down with scale but it's not really expected to get significantly cheaper to provide the search results without either lowering quality or using alternative monetization, both of which Kagi is against. I'm not associated with Kagi I just happened to ask very similar questions a few days ago in their Discord.
Been using Kagi for a few months now and, unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google.
I guess now is where we see if Kagi's model can actually work. Will people pay money for a search engine when all other major players in the space don't transact with users in cash? I definitely hope for their success!
Kagi's quite good for general purpose searches, but there's a number of specific queries where it falls down: timezones ("9AM SF in Tokyo") and currency conversions ("100000 JPY in USD") are two big ones for me.
It would be great if Kagi could open source the engine that powers these queries, so people could contribute their own features.
We plan to do exactly that. Our constraint is not the lack of vision but the lack of resources. Opening widgets API to users would be a great thing to scale this effort (provided there are enough users to build them).
The only time I've felt the need to use Google instead of Kagi was earlier today when they were having service disruptions. Apart from that and some searches that take a little longer, Kagi has been indistinguishable from Google as a default search. I'm very impressed.
I've dropped back to Google simply for comparison purposes a few times, and the Kagi results are better virtually every time. The only exception is when you get one of those very convenient quick result thingys that google has for like sports results and stuff.
> unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google.
Same here. I have now been using Kagi for about 6 weeks. While using DDG for many years (at least 9, probably over 10) I built up an automatic response: When the results aren't what I want and it doesn't seem to be a problem with my query, I add !g and expect better results on the other side. A week or two ago, while doing exactly that, I realized that my expectation for better results has disappeared. I'm now slowly learning not to do it at all.
Been using Kagi too. Search results are pretty decent, and sometimes better. Problem is that I need Google almost exclusively for shopping and price comparison. Wonder if there's any other websites that can replicate this (non-US).
> We care deeply about privacy. We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us (we do not ask for any apart from your email address which can be any email really). We do not log or associate searches with an account, because we do not want or need to. More details in our privacy policy.
Is there a way to pay the fee anonymously? I am not interested in linking my search history to my real name, no matter how much the provider claims to deeply care about my privacy. If not, this service simply does not exist for me.
"We care deeply about privacy" until we succeed, then we will be bought by, say, Microsoft, which has sucky search engine and then we will write to you a long letter starting with traditional "it was wonderful journey..." but, for now, so long and thanks for all the fish. MS will have all your data plus search history attached, but, no worries, you will get free (for 3 months) pro Linkedin account!
And yes, you are guessing right, we will link your Linekedin account with Kagi one and future employers will have access to your search history, isn't that a cool idea?
> MS will have all your data plus search history attached, but, no worries, you will get free (for 3 months) pro Linkedin account!
This is not possible with Kagi because there is no data/search history to begin with.
In the very unllikely event of Microsoft acquisition tomorrow, Microsoft would get tech and IP, accounts which only have email address, billing tokens for Stripe (as we store no payment details), and no search history as one is not recorded.
In Germany there is a payment provider (viacash) that allows customers to pay in cash at selected retailers. You get a code, it gets scanned in the supermarket, you pay without any requirement for identification and get a confirmation. Big fan of that, but unfortunately only few websites are using it yet.
Oh OK. Changing model to pay per use is something we thought of but most people told us they would feel anxiety to search and preferred a fixed monthly fee. We are continuing to have an open discussion about this in Discord, our site and here on HN so lets see if we figure it out.
Prepaid doens't have to mean pay-per-use. It can mean I load up 50€ to my account and you debit 10€ per month until the account balance is less than 10€.
Some other pay-with-cash methods in other countries are paysafecash (like viacash), paysafecard (only anonymous if you meet strict KYC requirements), some gambling related one (whatever) and cash-by-mail.
Do note that all of them have significant fees and probably not that many users.
> We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Giropay, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24. With credit card and PayPal, you have the option to set up a monthly recurring subscription.
> Can I really pay with cash?
> You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.
Posteo [1] also allows cash. But I'd say there that makes more sense than with Mullvad, because as a VPN provider they'll very likely know your IP address during operation, while for posteo you could at least access through tor (which doesn't make sense for Mullvad)
I've been using Kagi for about three weeks and the experience has been excellent. I think I reverted to Google maybe twice, and for many searches Kagi has been simply better.
Despite all of this, 10 bucks a month is a tough sell to me. I understand the cost structure, and I am not saying that this product is not something worth paying for, because it is. It feels like the golden age of Google, and that's what I've been looking for.
But there are many other things I could spend 10 bucks a month on, and get much more value from it. I think the problem is that subscriptions as a funding model have such a limited runway for each person, and very quickly you start having to compete against not only other products in the same category (search engines here), but other subscription services. The value you provide not only has to beat Google, but also Netflix, Bitwarden, my email domain and email service, the VPS I'm hosting a few services on and a few other bits and bobs I'm subscribed to. When it comes down to it, I only have so many dollars I can allocate for subscriptions a month, and I don't think Kagi, excellent as it is, will make that cut.
I agree, it's very hard to get me to subscribe to anything, but Kagi managed to do it.
I think the business model can be pretty good, if you are just aiming to build a sustainable business and not a billion dollar venture.
It might be useful for Kagi to look into business/family model that 1Password has. If you have the 1Password business account, you also get the family subscription. One could argue it makes sense for company to pay for Kagi since taking away the ads from the result page makes people more focused on the task and boosts productivity.
Kagi will likely remain a niche product for those who really care about search quality since it will never be able to catch up to google in convenience or integration, etc. That almost by definition limits maximum addressable market to a small fraction of the population. So it makes sense to price it at a premium, or on a per search basis.
Some power users could in fact be money losers for Kagi even at $10 USD/month so moving to usage billing is
probably more likely as it gets greater traction among that crowd.
> The value you provide not only has to beat Google, but also Netflix, Bitwarden...
It's hard to compare the intrinsic value of all services that cost ~10$. Is the ability to search the whole Internet, something you do every single day multiple times, less valuable than watching Netflix shows a few hours every week? Our perceptive is seriously skewed because we've had free (paid with ads+data) web search engines for almost as long as we've had the web. On the other hand, Netflix seems incredibly cheap because for a long time before it, legal access to movies and series was expensive and hard/impossible due to strong copyright laws.
I have no reasons to doubt privacy statements but it rubs me the wrong way that I'm identifying myself by name to use search engine that's supposed not to track me.
The requirement for an account also makes ad-hoc searching on whatever device/browser/profile tricky.
> You should pay for your search engine to ensure that the incentives of the information provider are aligned with what’s best for you, not what’s best for the advertisers.
DDG tends to show some search term-related ads but those seem quite harmless and aren't loaded from 3rd party sites.
> We care deeply about privacy.
Worthless statement. And quite annoying since most vendors start their privacy policies with similar calming statement which multiple paragraphs later is followed by "we'll give your data to advertisers"
That being said, Kagi looks interesting and I'll consider paying to try it out.
EDIT: media are loaded from AWS and browser sends a kagi_session cookie while grabbing them. kagi.com itself seems to be hosted on GCP. How am I supposed to trust any privacy assurances with this setup?
This. For me, it feels wrong entering my name and credit card details to be able to have a more private search experience. Especially since alternatives like SearX or You.com are at least as good as Kagi and don't have such requirements.
> DDG tends to show some search term-related ads but those seem quite harmless and aren't loaded from 3rd party sites.
Disclaimer, I work for Ecosia, but I have to agree. The one moment when I'm totally fine with seeing some ads is when I'm actually actively searching for something to buy and those ads are relevant to my query. What I don't want is my search queries in one site to stalk me around the whole web. Pretty much only disable uBlock in Ecosia and DDG.
Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this.
Point of feedback for your consideration, I was surprised that Orion+ did not include source code. Binary-only releases seem to me an enemy of both privacy and tinkering, and represent a showstopper for the (admittedly likely quite narrow) segment of possible customers I personify. Open source is mentioned aspirationally in the FAQ; however, I don't personally need a FOSS license, just an individual right to read, modify, and rebuild for personal use, and that's something I value - as in, willing to pay for.
We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.
Okay - but just to be clear, I'm not suggesting Orion become an open source project; I am suggesting non-free access to source code as an Orion+ subscription inclusion.
I just want to say thank you, I think I’ve only opted to use Google a handful of times since I started using Kagi for work (software eng).
I always thought that JetBrains IDEs were the only products that raised my professional productivity so much that they were worth paying for, but now Kagi will join that club.
What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.
Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure.
But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more.
That has to be one of the best deals in the universe.
(and mind you, with other search engines that cost is still there, it is only paid by their customers - the advertisers)
Assuming you experience good growth in your business, is there room for you to reduce your dependency on external API's, while maintaining the good quality search results you seem to be generating?
And to add to what others have been saying, I've been finding your results to be quite high quality, absolutely better than DDG and probably better than Google for me too. I subscribed immediately. The only thing I'm missing is I'm still getting slow result times from Australia. Just now, for a test search:
Connected to: ASIA-SOUTHEAST Network latency: 501ms
I suspect that your estimate of google search infrastructure costs may be high by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Have you considered what the cost would be if the external APIs were in-housed? As an early-stage startup, you likewise are paying extra for compute, and expedient but often inefficient systems.
Is there a path to a <$5/mo unlimited plan? IIRC Google made less than $10 per year per user up until the mid 2010s.
You are probably right if we disregard the 20 years of cap-ex investments Google made into having that infrastructure. In order to in-house this we would probably need to own $500M-$1B worth of infrastructure at the very least (web is vast). Yes then the cost per search would be lower.
Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.
This strategy of not focusing on growth is key to my interests. For example, I’ve been a customer of Fastmail since they launched maybe 20 years ago. And I’ve got my family and many colleagues using Fastmail. It is a paid email service.
Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.
Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.
Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.
> Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.
Everyone has different needs, but I've seen this "I hate google but not enough to spare $10 a month out of my budget" sentiment quite a lot in these comments and it really surprises me.
Folks, there are almost non-stop complaints on HN about "big tech is evil" this and "Mozilla is mismanaged" that. There are endless tirades about "big tech monopolies" and how there is an insurmountable dearth of competition in the browser space. The sheer number of comments I've read where people attack Apple because anything that isn't Safari is more or less a second class citizen on their platforms, where people cry out for more options, for even a single ever-loving service that isn't driven by ad revenue, and about how freeloaders who expect unlimited free tiers are the bane of humanity is bonkers.
I mean, HN has tens of thousands of comments bemoaning these things.
Any of you who're reading this and haven't tried it out yet, give the beta a shot and then ask yourselves: is watching and experiencing the continual decline of free services from huge companies (companies that may as well be monopolies and duopolies) worth saving $170 a year (kagi and Orion+)? Or would you rather support a worthy cause with some real potential?
One of the most oft-repeated sayings I see here is "vote with your wallet" and now's the time to do it.
Is it really hard to justify? Search is one of the things that I do most on the internet. I use it daily. Google search results are really bad for me: full of SEO spam and github/stackoverflow repeaters, or pinterest crap.
I feel it's like paying for a mattress or an office chair: the time I spend there adds up quickly. $120 a year is a freaking good deal for me.
yup! If I do a very conservative 40 searches a day, and save 1 second on every search, that will be 20 minutes of time searching saved over a month!. I think that alone might justify the cost for some people.
Unfortunately the price is a function of the search cost, not our wishes. Even at $10/mo it is still unclear whether we can make it to sustainability (this is why we launched payments while still in beta, to find out).
Search cost is non-zero. It was hidden from users for 20 years, and it may come as shock, but it is real.
Thanks for making this Vlad! I’ve been testing it out for the last few months and it’s really coming along. As a developer who used the old Kagi.com before you bought it, I’m curious about what inspired you to pick that particular domain? Did you know Kee?
No, I did not know Kee or anyone from old Kagi.com team. They went bankrupt in unfortunate turn of events. The opportunity presented itself and I acquired the domain. I liked it because Kagi means 'key' in Japanese and at the time this idea of a 'key to the web', and replacing big-tech infrastructure for consuming the web with something "decent" was forming in my head.
I envision Linux next. Windows would be tricky as WebKit is not really up to date on Windows. So we would probably have to resort to a differnt rendering engine. We are long way from this though, that kind of project would probably take 20 people extra.
There is already an iOS/iPadOS version. Elsewhere, I have read that the developers would like to make a Linux version, but that they currently don’t have the manpower to do so.
I was going to say that unfortunately Vimium, Dark Reader, and 1Password support are non-negotiable, but the browser evidently has its own built-in dark mode, and they claim to support both Chrome and Firefox extensions as well?
I'm happy to provide non-Chromium traffic from either Firefox or something else; I'm increasingly running into things (often corporatey things) that only work in Chrome.
It also sounds like they use your icloud for syncing things like bookmarks and sharing tabs and use the built-in password manager, so if you're Apple-only this is a great fit. I hope the tab sharing will be more reliable than Firefox's has been.
Waiting until I can brew install, but looks promising.
Unfortunately 1Password doesn't work. Not because of extension compatibility but seemingly because 1Password has an internal whitelist of trusted browsers that Orion is not included in. It's really unfortunate as there's been a community forum post about it for months[1], but it's never been addressed.
Dark Reader has worked perfectly fine for me though.
At least with 1P8 (and I can only speak to the Linux version), they have an opt-in file located in /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers (https://1password.community/discussion/comment/641837/#Comme...) although one will want to exercise caution about the ownership of the actual binary, as one can see in that thread
I haven't needed to try that on macOS but it may be worth a shot, given the shared Electron codebase
Then be sure to check that 1Password_rCURRENT.log mentioned in the thread, as it may provide at least more debugging info about why they're angry; that's how I found out how to fix my Firefox install (albeit not on macOS)
It's refreshing to see more stuff using WebKit and not Blink / Chromium! Will definitely give this a go
/EDIT: this looks, feels and acts exactly like Safari. Feels like I'm just using Safari with a little bit of extra on the top, is that what this is or is everything re-implemented to look like Safari?
Also sad to see Safari extensions not supported. It's super cool to have chrome/firefox extension support, but Safari has some really nice things as well
> Why use Orion instead of Safari?
> Safari is truly one of the best browsers you can use on macOS, and we’re grateful to Apple for creating such a solid foundation. By basing Orion on Safari’s tech stack, then adding productivity enhancements such as built-in ad-blocking, Orion can provide users with exactly what they need.
> You want speed? Orion is currently the fastest Mac browser out there. We built a snappy, lightweight browser around Safari’s WebKit engine to accelerate your web experience.
> Orion is fast
> What about privacy? Orion is a true zero-telemetry browser, with a powerful built-in ad and tracking blocker. Even with its default settings, Orion offers the highest possible privacy protection on the web.
> And extensions! Unlike Safari, Orion has native support for both Chrome and Firefox extensions. This gives our users access to the largest extensions ecosystem in the world. With Orion, you can one-click install your favorite extensions directly from the web.
/EDIT2: Extension support is still a bit wonky. Sometimes the chrome version works, sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the Firefox variant, sometimes neither work
> /EDIT2: Extension support is still a bit wonky. Sometimes the chrome version works, sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the Firefox variant, sometimes neither work
then I wish Orion has an updated compatible extension list
I'm very happy to see that Kagi is succeeding! I've been using it for about 3 months and I can concur with others that the search results are superb, on par with or above in quality of Google's. This is an impressive feat! And the ability to down- or upvote sites in the search results makes it even better. During my testing I only resorted to checking Google less than a dozen times and each time I concluded that Google doesn't have better results either.
As far as the cost go, I hoped for a lower figure but based on my experience it does worth $10/mo without a doubt! I trust Vlad has done the math properly on the costs and as an IT guy, I know that it's far from free to provide such service. And, on the benefit side: good quality search results saves you time, lets you find the correct solution rather than going down a rabbit hole. And without ads you are less likely to click on a spam or scam link.
But, of course, everybody's situation and priorities are different. An ad, spam, scam and privacy violation free search engine might not be as valuable to you as to me or others. Then you can simply use any of the other ad-supported search engines. I think the price is quite reasonable and in alignment with the costs of providing the service. And it's likely that as the user base grows and more and more search result caching opportunity will be available and the costs will come down. It's a new and pioneering approach which I think will give us a very valuable alternative to the current, declining quality search engines.
I also agree with Vlad on concentrating on quality and sustainability, rather than lightning fast expansion of the user base. This approach is a lot better in the long term and would help it to stay independent of other influences. With that said I'm really hoping that Kagi will stay clear of getting merged with some big tech company and its core values getting twisted along with that. That's another reason to put some user support behind to help Kagi make it.
My take has been that I pay more than that for almost every other subscription (Netflix, Spotify, etc.) and yet Kagi is the only one that I'm almost guaranteed to use every single day and it's got the biggest influence on my productivity. The others I'm more likely to just passively consume. With Netflix increasingly being more hit and miss as to whether it's even an enjoyable experience.
True, I wish they gave a discount when paying for an year. BUT! with the quality of their search results I am still going to pay for it. I used ddg to get away from google and I often found myself doing g! everytime.
With kagi, I almost never have to go back to google. Its really good for programming related searches as well. One of my favourite features about them is I can block certain sites from appearing on my search results and see more of certain sites.
Ha, I was trying to debate the cost of paying 10$ a month for a subscription like this, and this might have changed the way I look at it. As a developer I wasn't thinking about "how much I am willing to pay for it and how much use I get out of it", I was thinking from a "how much does it cost Kagi" perspective.
I do not care much about ads or privacy from Kagi (I use adblock + I won't use kagi for private searches). But I think the features just make it worth it.
I agree that I think the cost may be worth it. I am a little disappointed that they want to link private searches to an account (which I think they’ll eventually change based on the user feedback they’ll receive).
It is interesting though because I share the same thought where something physically tangible like a gym membership can be quadruple the price of monthly subscribed software but the other way round and I’m surprised.
Here is a concern that I have with kagi... Let's say I want to search for something privately. I can VPN and use private mode, and it would be extremely hard to link that search to me. Definitely not in an NSA style dragnet, someone must be tracking me personally to know what I search for. But with a search engine requiring payment it's super easy to deanonymize everyone in single swoop. And if it can be done, it will be done. Ironically, bing and google can be much more private than this engine if used properly
If you're dropping in a VPN in private mode to avoid active adversarial tracking on a search despite the claims of the search provider then it's probably best to also avoid your primary search engine anyways.
I've been using Kagi for a while now(maybe 2-3 months iirc), and it's been a great experience. I've hopped between 4[0] search engines in the past year, and I've finally found one that works really well, is private, and does what I need it to do. My thanks to the Kagi team for delivering a great experience, I've enabled my premium account. 100% worth it for me.
Been using Kagi Search as my daily driver for a few months now and am really happy with the experience. Also the founder is very active within the community, responds to every message, implements a lot of suggestions. Happy to pay and hope that the project works out.
Happy to see they changed their pricing model. Previously it was something like $6/mo for 80 searches or something like that, which made it a non-starter for me. Honestly, I'd likely be willing to pay more than $10/mo for unlimited use assuming I'm satisfied with the quality of its results, but a pay-per-use model would trigger a "I'm paying for this search" thought every time I go to run a search and that small amount of friction would kind of ruin the product for me even if I ended up paying a bit less that way.
Looking forward to trying it out with this new pricing model.
Been in the beta for quite a while now and have been thoroughly impressed. Very, very rarely do I have to fall back to Google search (mostly for image search, which can occasionally be a little lacking in Kagi).
$10 isn't a small hurdle to get people over, but I really hope you can make it work; I'd love for Kagi to succeed.
I'm not that interested in paying to protect my data (I think that battle is forever lost).
But the results are simply way better than anything else I've tried.
It was probably one of the easiest purchasing decisions I ever made. I really don't understand the comments about this being expensive from HackerNews folks, who I assume use search quite a bit.
Just do some math, check how long you spend looking for stuff with google, dealing with SEO spam, unable to blacklist domains (and even if you do it client-side, you need to constantly keep updating your list), lost time due to not being easy to perform language-specific searches (with kagi, my other languages are a dropwdown away).
Then factor in the amount you spend frustrated with other more subjective things. One thing that bothers me is the political bias of the results (among other things), piracy censorship, etc, but for you it might be something else.
If I had to ask something from Kagi, though, is to be careful about this part from their FAQ:
> Some results from traditional sources will reflect biases
This concept of favouring "traditional sources" (authoritative sources in google language) is a major red flag for me. But I'm not sure this is what your FAQ means. If I noticed anything too overt like I do with google, I would drop kagi the second another alternative with the same search quality shows up.
Overall, thank you for building a great product and service. I am recommending kagi to everyone I know.
Hi! I am most excited for Orion browser (Mac & iPad).
Orion on my M1 Mac has effectively replaced Firefox for daily use. The battery life is incredible, and support for extensions is excellent (including uBlock Origin).
Once again battery life is much better than Firefox. It is somewhere between a 50-100% improvement over Firefox. In general, performance and latency is at least as good Safari (but better because of uBlock Origin).
Bugs and compatibility issues have been present, especially early on. They have been very rare in my daily use.
From my (informal) tests, many of these compatibility issues are problems with Safari too (just not Firefox/Chrome). In practice, it doesn't affect my daily use and I use Firefox as a backup.
On my iPad, extension support is not great (and buggy). However, the builtin adblock is about 80-90% as effective as uBlock Origin. Significantly better than anything you can pay for as a safari extension.
I have never used the search engine, but I the work on the browser (Orion) is extremely impressive, both on Mac & iOS.
I've used kagi for a few months, it is "OK". Searching for technical information on FreeBSD it preformed well. For local things it is useless, the image search is not great, once you click on an image it goes into a slide show view which is not good. I also found it limited results a lot, like search for some pictures and it shows you 1 page of results but the same search on google or ddg you will get 4x the results.
I like the idea of kagi and I think it will get better but I will not pay more than 4$ a month for basic search functionality. I would accept being rate limited per day or restricted on the lower tier, but I cannot justify the cost they are asking for a currently subpar product.
It is also annoying to search when using private mode. Yeah there is an addon but it still is an annoyance.
I've tried Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search. I desperately want a better privacy-centric search engine. But nothing could ever give me results as good as Google. Then several months ago I heard about a pilot for Kagi. I decided to give it a shot. I would have to say that I am very satisfied. The results consistently show me what I seek. I haven't seen any reason to revert back to Google now. I have decided to pay the monthly fee to support this effort further. Here's a small list of why I like Kagi:
- Ad free
- Ability to apply lenses to my results.
- I have the ability to rank certain sights as low or higher priority.
- I have the ability to outright block certain domains!
- I love the "Discussions" lens. Makes it easy to find results exclusively from forums, reddit, and the like.
I would really love to use Kagi, but the only thing holding me back is being able to type in my query from the Safari url/omni/mega/awesome/whatever-it-is-called bar. There are hacks to redirect search engines to Kagi but that adds extra waiting time and from my experience removes the ability to fallback to a different search engine. I know that this behavior is one that Apple forbids changes to and that I could get around this by using Orion or a different browser, but I use the Safari Tab Groups feature frequently which AFAIK, Orion does not have.
I did use both products in their closed beta forms, and I genuinely enjoyed using them, but inertia kept me on Apple's browser. Great to see the positivity in the thread!
Edit: it seems they've fixed my gripes with Kagi search in Safari since the last time I used it! Just paid for premium!
Can someone explain what the Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature is designed to guard against? Will it be limited to cross-site tracking, or does it also prevent individual websites from fingerprinting you through stuff like WebGL/WebUSB?
Non-Chromium browsers are protected from fingerprinting by stuff like WebUSB by the nature that none of them support WebUSB. Many of these supposed "Web" things are actually just Chrome-proprietary features.
What makes it interest enough to worth $10 while I can do multiple searches across engines? Privacy is something that I value, but $10 is a significant amount that's above most of popular privacy services pricing (usually around $5).
Been using Kagi for a while now after using every search engine under the sun, and I've enjoyed it thus far. I don't mind paying for good software so I'll probably pay for premium when i burn through the free usage.
Been using Orion browser for a while now. I switched from Chrome because in Indian summer temperatures, even inside house my MacBook would heat up and go in throttling mode very fast. Even with 1-2 tabs open. Basically made my Mac unusable.
Good things I loved:
- Easy onboarding, switch was easier.
- Love the help interface, full text search that directs you to steps.
- Makes my MacBook usable in hot Indian summers.
Things that need improvement:
- Extension support, only supports few popular extensions for now. I miss Pocket, Raindrop.
- Devtools could be much better.
- Buggy sometimes, but I hope this will get better with time.
Happily signed up to pay for a year. I've been using Kagi as my main search engine for a while now and they really offer excellent results on top of the pro-privacy stance.
Finally uBlock origin on iOS, not just that, chromium AND firefox extensions? The only other browser that does this is Waterfox on desktop, none on Android.
I havent actually tested uBlock because whatever the built-in is, it works well enough that I didnt get ads on youtube. Other extensions I tried (eg workona) didn't work but that's a good start. This was on an iPad.
I was texting a developer friend just a few days ago about the idea of boosting specific sites in search results, so yay!
Basically, if wikipedia has an article that is even remotely related to what I queried, I want that link at (or very near) the top.
Unfortunately my first test didn't work: I pinned wikipedia (the most prominent option) and searched "spline socket" -- no wikipedia link at all. "wikipedia spline socket" on google gives:
* Spline - Wikipedia
* Spline (mechanical) - Wikipedia
* List of screw drives - Wikipedia
* Socket wrench - Wikipedia -- this is the one with the info I was looking for.
That said, this is super promising. But apparently even at $10/month they'd be losing money on me, significantly. I average 20-30 searches per day on my laptop alone. I shudder to think what my phone usage is.
Been using on iOS for a few months now. I enjoy using Orion because it actually gives the user options and imo fixes the issues I had with the Safari redesign. Love that it’s fast and intuitive.
One thing I don’t like is that there’s no option to never save history (like the DDG app)
I remember when Kagi.com was a payment platform, one of the earliest ones and the first one I used back in the day. Great guys, too bad they've been shafted hard by a dishonest customer. Feels a bit weird to see the name used by a search engine now.
I really like the idea of Orion (I refer to it as a "superuser safari") and would gladly have paid for it if it had been necessary.
Not a fan of subscriptions though, I was hoping for something more akin to what most MacOS-software does.
I wish the two services were integrated though.
To me it feels strange I'd have to pay monthly for both Kagi and Orion and still need Apple's iCloud to sync my settings across devices.
Also, I wish they wouldn't state things like "the fastest browser on the Mac". Having used both Kagi/Safari side by side for a few months, Safari definitely feels faster in regular usage (I don't care about benchmarks).
I really like the browser, and Kagi as well is giving much better results than Google.
Regarding Orion, is there any built in way to migrate user data (bookmarks/favorites/reading list) automatically from Safari/Firefox/Chrome?
Also, scrolling with a mouse on Mac is discrete/jittery rather than interpolated (this seems to be a problem with Safari as well however). Firefox's scrolling is much nicer by comparison with my Logitech mouse.
I did change some mouse settings so maybe its on my end
I'm very happy with Orion's performance on Mac, the built-in content blockers do a great job and don't get in the way. I had some issues getting password autofill to work but just needed to import them from safari.
Updated from 0.99.114 to 0.99.115 and I think they worked out a lot of bugs with the built-in tree-style tabs, so I'm enjoying those again.
The Shift-CMD-F "focus mode" is a nice upgrade from safari too, which doesn't have a proper full screen mode afaict
Love what I see from Kagi search so far. Tried out Orion, but unfortunately the Bitwarden Password manager extension is pretty much unusable for both the chrome and firefox extensions. It locks the vault after every page load and the biometrics requests in MacOS take considerable longer than with chrome/firefox.
It won't be my daily driver, but I will check back when extension support is more mature.
I've been using the Orion Browser as my secondary browser for the last couple of days and so far its really good! All my web extensions work, I can download them straight from the google or mozilla extensions store. It also uses waaaay less energy to run on my MacBook then any non webkit browser. If this gets polished and maintained as well as I hope, this could be a real competitor on Mac.
I just signed up for Kagi and installed the Orion browser to take it for a spin.
First search query, the third result was a particular brand of fish tank that I had forgotten, then forgot I had forgotten, months ago while planning out my home office build.
Thanks to you, I will have a great office with a cool fish tank, and a great browser/search to go with it!
It would be easier to evaluate this browser if the website highlighted the unique features instead of listing them together with the stuff that other browsers have too. Every browser has a reader mode, sync, tracking protection, autoplay blocking, picture in picture, etc. Why mention it? That just makes me think that this browser is nothing special.
A month into Kagi and not one fallback-search I've made on Google yielded better results.
I'm glad to finally have the option to use an essential web service without being turned into a product for advertisers. Would definitely pay more if I had to.
Initial searches look promising, but the proposed costs are vastly too high. In my google history I can easily hit 100 searches per day. If I'm researching something this can hit 1k+ per day.
I'd gladly pay 5/month for search, and 10/month in a stretch. But 300 per month is a non-starter.
I think I am going to at least check the free tier anyways, but to manage my expectations, does anyone have experience from non-us-centric non englis h searches, are they also good?
I assume they're fine with never being able to have this on the App Store, since that seemingly goes against their rules, considering the trouble apps like iSH had to go through?
I agree. I dislike the tendency in Apple circles to just simply imply that things only run on mac. It’s like: I know it’s obvious to you, the software author, but it’s not obvious to me, the reader. Even though I use mac sometimes, I mostly don’t use software that isn’t cross platform.
Yeah, and that’s annoying, but at least it makes sense, being quite a majority share of the desktop and laptop market. And I can run it on Wine if I want, which gives me a better prognosis than any Apple software does on other platforms…
I wish it was open source, which would help your concern as well as "what secret stuff does this thing exfiltrate?" Hell, I'd settle for just "source available," given the company
I understand how that may feel. Orion founder here. Here was the thought process behind the choice.
When you decide to build a browser you first need to decide the browser engine.
We decided we don't want Chromium (because who needs another Chromium browser) so that left Gecko and WebKit.
Since I happen to personally use macOS and thought it had wonderful future as a consumer OS (this is all happening in 2018) I decided we should go with macOS and picked WebKit because it is native on macOS while Gecko isn't. It is all the fastest web rendering engine, with the best energy consumption and very robust privacy practices. All good base for a fast, zero telemetry browser.
Also Safari left a lot to be desired (my previous browser of choice) so since we are building a browser from scratch, why not build something that works great on Macs/iPhones first and then we will think about other platforms when we get there.
If you compare the current vs dev versions on https://caniuse.com/ you can see that Safari is catching up. Besides, I consider Chrome the modern IE because it keeps trying to subvert standards to hold on to its monopoly.
Google returned a ton of unrelated posts and I had to tell it to stop ignoring my search terms. Kagi returned the only relevant page: a comment on a Github issue that Google wasn't able to find, and no other fluff, because that particular combination of words doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet.
In other words, Google lies and paraphrases your search to return as much results as possible, usually not very relevant, while Kagi respects my search terms and can surface very niche pages. 2022 Google makes the Internet feel very small.
I've test driven Brave Search for months as well, and this is my personal ranking, from best to worst: Kagi > Brave Search = Google Search > DDG.