This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's what makes their results so much better than Google's: where Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains as you go!
Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.
If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of search result domains is a high value feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done its job.
The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state.
The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user, me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.
That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone else, priorities may be different, but I know what to expect for the search queries I issue, and I'd be glad if the search engine helped me.
Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with information I happen to seek, like reddit.com, so I'd like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer something else, or not give any boost at all.
So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I would skip and what would click :)
Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important: with more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting it any more.
> That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.
I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often!
It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with.
> Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important
I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine.
It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.
> you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites
That strikes me as a non-goal. As the search engine, you can't know what attributes a user is valuing when they boost, and so you can't know when it's appropriate to override that boost. "Better" is subjective, contextual, and comes in thousands of different flavors.
Pintrest is among the top blocked. It clearly doesn't have spam, but it commonly shows up because of it’s vast array of user content. For people not interested in Pinterest content, this is a very useful feature.
NYTimes is another good example, great content for subscribers, essentially useless spam in a search result for non-subscribers. The only person who can configure this is the user.
They used to have outright incorrect information a long time ago. They fixed the site and are much better, but it's aimed at a non technical audience in the end.
> New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often!
But when they do, how are you going to know if all you see is the mediocre spam instead? No, I want to block the domains which are never going to be a good result. This may actually surface things I will want to boost.
Totally get where you're coming from about removing certain domains from Google search. But let's take a step back for a sec and consider what this could look like in a different light. Imagine if Reddit got the axe - a site that, despite its redesign snafus and sometimes annoying mobile login walls, a lot of us here on HN still find pretty useful.
Now, I'm not blind to the fact that Reddit's user demographic has a lot in common with us HN folks, while Pinterest... well, not so much. It leans towards a non-techy crowd, with more women users. But the way I see it, if Google keeps popping Pinterest up in search results, someone out there must be finding it helpful.
Perhaps what this all boils down to is a bit of a demographic reality check, rather than a definitive statement on any one platform. And just to be clear, I'm not standing on a soapbox championing for Pinterest, but I reckon we could probably nudge Google to get a bit smarter with its algorithms.
So, what if instead of giving domains the chop, we pushed for Google to up its game on the personalization front? Like, if I'm consistently booting Pinterest from my searches with "-pinterest", Google could take the hint and drop it down the ranks for me. Wouldn't that make more sense than completely blacklisting sites that some folks might still want to use? In the end, we all win if Google gets better at tuning into our search habits, right?
I'm not saying we need a global chop/removal, I'd be happy if i had personalized filters for me (using my logged-in account + removal settings) to remove pinterest just for me. Same for Quora and ExpertSexChange or whatever that other technical site was.
Same for youtube, a simple blacklist would make my search results much nicer, but youtube seems to push a few large media companies as hard as possible.
Is w3schools still that bad? I know that it used to be awful in the past, but IIRC they managed to do a complete 180 in this regard. I'm not into webdev but I occasionally check how to use a particular feature on there and it always delivers a pretty good reference.
And this is exactly why the custom domain block list is so useful. Blocking w3schools entirely would be unhelpful to beginners, but a lot of experts find their content to be less helpful than that on other websites and would rather not see them at all.
This is a well written post. I describes me perfectly and my knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. I usually start with w3schools, then if I need deeper info, I repeat the search with "mdn". That does the trick!
w3schools garnered a reputation for stating outright wrong facts. I think they rectified that part, but I think the way they break down information is still far inferior to MDN on basically every topic.
> Third, some people will probably block domains they shouldn't have blocked, and then have a bad user experience in future searches as the sites with genuinely best results is blocked. And then you're only left with only bad options: ignoring the users' stated preferences which they'll hate, or serving bad results that they'll also hate.
That's a real possibility, but it can be addressed by presenting a block that would say, for example "results from blocked domains" or some such.
A key point is that Kagi raised its prices already so it was sustainable. The reason most services get worse is because they are downright unprofitable and it is impossible to get them there without either making them drastically worse, or raising prices, which free sites can't do.
Kagi has already put itself on a path where it doesn't have to make itself worse to cover its expenses, because it is already covering them.
No, the main reason why companies turn to shit is because they’re publicly traded and accept VC money so sooner or later, they’re beholden to shareholders demanding infinite growth and profits.
"Enshittification": God, I love this term. It so perfectly captures what happens to a product when revenues stall and product managers think of anything to drive new revs. See: Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office.
As long as they don't take outside investment that's not a certainly. People complain about the prices but it's charging the real cost that let's them be able to offer something good without mortgaging the future.
I concede that if they got big enough, someone would come with enough money that they couldn't refuse, and buy them to try and "unlock vale" by racing to the bottom.
My ML prof in university used this as an example for something that could happen but is highly unlikely. Each particle of oxygen can be in either half of the room so it's like 1/2 to the power of the number of particles (avogardo?) chance that all the particles are in one half suffocating the ppl in the other half. He was such a great guy.
This is a good point. Did Kagi ever consider having a freemium tier that uses adverts to pay for the (search) content? I don't think it is a terrible idea if it helps Kagi to improve their paid search.
Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first place.
Don't confuse an entire economic system with the unique problems caused by public ownership or investing (i.e. growth at all costs). Plenty of smaller organizations would be quite happy to operate with modest profits for their owners and never scale beyond that point.
> Capitalism is the only reason they exist in the first place.
Precisely, which is why enshittification is a when, not an if. A paid search engine will never pick up enough users to survive at $10/mo. It will either be acquired or start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the books.
> start throwing in "non-intrusive" ads to balance the books
Here is a personal guarantee that this will never happen with Kagi while I am in charge.
There are too many ad-supported search engines and browsers out there. I would not waste 10 years of my life to make yet another one. If Kagi can not sustain iteself with memberships, it will be the end of it.
The initial reason I started Kagi was to provide my kids with an opportunity to grow up in an ad-free experience of the web. In this interview [1] I talk more about my motivation.
How has this broken any privacy policy? To me this seems like general information that can’t possibly be traced back to any individual users or groups of users.
This is honestly probably the most tiresome argument that constantly pops up in every HN thread.
Imagine if one of your friends come back from a holiday trip and tells you how fantastic the place they visited was. Is your response "Well, maybe that place ain't going to be so nice in a few years!"?
People would use it to block all the spam sites that host copious amounts of (potentially Google's) Ads/Analytics, and since they might actually start finding what they're looking for this will reduce engagement on the search results page and with the sponsored links.
This is bad for Google's bottom-line thus why such a feature was removed and will never be coming back.
Yeah. Engineers hate when something isn’t a technical feat. The best innovations are usually software people working with the right people from other disciplines to make a thought out CRUD app.
Firefox on Android only supports a handful of curated add-ons. You can apparently create your own collections or install anything with Firefox Nightly but I've not done this.
You can do that with Firefox Beta too, which likely will give you better experience / stability. It's a shame you have to jump through so many hoops to get it working.
when google first came out it had nothing to do with that, it was that they offered as strong algorithmic ranking in the feed. Before that the search providers ran in a few ways (by my memory):
1. Sell the first few results but make it look organic (this all happened behind closed doors and I knew a few people who paid for such results)
2. Hierarchical/topic based collections of links (This is what Yahoo was famous for in the 90s if I remember correctly, I'll keep saying that because it was a long time ago!)
The whole "google cares about you" was an outcropping of the organic flocking to google because of their reliable and algorithmic results that just seemed trustworthy, they capitalized on that and it honestly lasted a lot longer than I expected before they really started being evil.
Yeah, this is _the_ reason I started using Kagi. The default results aren’t significantly better than Google/Bing/DDG, but being able to block and boost domains is a killer feature.
I was just about out of my free searches on Kagi before I ever realized it could do this. That feature converted me to a paying user (although I've got browser plugins to block domains from Google search, but boosting is something I can't do there).
This is the feature that I originally started using Kagi for, but I wouldn't say it's the best innovation. Their default search results are already dramatically better than Google's, and their AI tools which can summarize individual results or give you a quick answer for your question based on the first page of results are way more innovative. All of those features combined and their subscription-based business model make Kagi by far the most innovative player in search at the moment.
I have been using this with ublock for a long time. It actually makes me wonder if that is the reason I dont have the complains about google search that I read about here
Also: incentives are aligned. Kagi gets money from its users, so it will do what's best for them. Google's incentives are more muddled, to put it mildly.
Yeah, boost and pin are just as important to me. Google inexplicably doesn't show Wikipedia on the first page much of the time anymore, and I can fix that with Pins in Kagi.
I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.
It's more a historical thing. Over a decade ago they were always on top, with often wrong/misleading/bad practice/insecure/simplified stuff. And lots of people thought of them as some kinde official entity because of their name similarity with W3C / w3.org
It's much better now, though. But for lots of old school frontenders the reputation stuck.
They had functional but inaccurate articles (in terms of best practices and long term solutions). I avoided them for a time but I must admit they listened and amended their tutorials, which is more than a lot of websites can say.
I knew many developers that used w3schools that thought it was official source because w3c, I know it's not completely the sites fault but they named the domain. That's one reason I dislike, additional the quality of w3schools is compared with mdn for beginners that are not interested into the details.
Historically, at least, it had a lot of examples that technically did what they were supposed to do, but in ways that you really, really, really shouldn't be doing them.
It was offensively bad and incorrect, and while I've heard it has improved since I think a lot of people just remember how it used to be and don't use it.
W3schools intentionally placed themselves as a representation of the W3C (similar to what Fedex does with its name) and sold, still does I'm sure, certificates under that misconception. These were worthless. This is in addition to the other complaints.
w3schools is only bad in comparison with MDN, but it still always rises to the top. I don’t think people have a problem with w3schools as such, but with the fact it always bumps MDN.
In your opinion. W3fools only pulled an “it’s ok now bro, don’t sue us” update. Anytime I give it a go, I’m still presented with inaccurate and harmfully incomplete results.
Want to learn from a “for dummies” website? Be my guest. But my hate is fully justified.
The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.
I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, and if so, how they would be able to actually reach them.
> It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.
I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here).
> I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements,
Yes, we are :)
> if so, how they would be able to actually reach them
Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my family members on board a paid search product.
I might add that "Kagi for Kids" is the first true attempt at having a search engine made specifically for kids, with a host of parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason.
We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but are tech-savvy) becoming members. This may be followed by non-tech savvy users in the future. I do see the first signs of the age of ad-supported, "free" search, coming to an end [2].
The work you all are doing is incredible. Thank you, and I’ll be a paying customer as long as you keep the show going. I’m notoriously stingy about paying subscriptions for tech services, but the money I pay for Kagi directly impacts my productivity. It feels like a distant nightmare when I think back about the days when I spent time sitting through blogspam results on Google :p
One thing that I don't quite get about your family plans: why is the smaller plan ($14 for 1.5k queries) cheaper per query than the larger one ($20 for 2k queries)? Not that it's a big difference, but it feels off somehow.
Product prices are determined by the willingness for consumers to pay for them. Families (especially kids) have different priorities and search habits to IT professionals, for example, which appears to be a common persona for them. It is likely that they bet that the four extra users and child friendly options are what families care about, rather than a high number of searches. It's also likely that families simply don't need that many searches, and in limiting them to 2,000, they discourage abuse (six professionals purchasing one family plan).
I was hesitant to configure my partner’s devices (family plan) to set as default engine but eventually convinced them and they haven’t even brought it up once since. I assume no news is good news! I would be less hesitant to recommend to other non-tech friends/family if it were easier to configure as default on Safari. Heck, I’d even entertain gifting subscriptions. The quality of results for me has been incredibly reliable. Enjoyable, even. And, I didn’t even take the time to start configuring these kinds of rules. Love this. Great product. Wishing long, lasting success.
Unfortunately we can not influence the choices that Safari makes, but we did pull an effort to build an entire browser [1] to replace it because of that :)
We haven't begun work on the Linux version of the browser yet. We will need to significantly expand our team before undertaking the development of a browser for a new platform.
The macOS browser is based on WebKit. If the team can’t justify the Linux version yet, changing it to a whole different engine (and one which is notoriously hard to embed, by admission of Mozilla itself) is even less likely.
Any chance you would consider adding cryptocurrency payments as an option? You would load up the account with these prepaid credits, and then use whatever plan you want until the credits run out. This is how I pay for Mullvad and works well for me.
I think would be nice as I see kagi is aiming to be privacy-forward. And it’s nice knowing that such a payment is a one-off and won’t forever keep renewing.
There is a lot of value currently tied up in crypto around the world, with increasing difficulty in using it on products and services. Offering a way to use this value would open additional revenue streams for Kagi. The challenge is in conversion, as many banks do not support the practise, and laws are becoming tougher with regards to crypto payments.
Yikes, that thread reflects so badly on Kagi to me. Over a year of people explaining why Monero is needed if you actually cared about user privacy, with no results. Weird claims that it is difficult to implement. Can only conclude that the company doesn't actually care about user privacy
And pray tell, how does one acquire this Monero that you're defending with religious fervor? By linking your credit card to some "currency" exchange that may or may not already be under investigation for fraud?
If you use your credit card with an exchange to buy Monero, then use that Monero (from a non-custodial/self operated wallet) to pay for Kagi search (or Mullvad or anything else) you’re not linking the ID tied to the credit card to your searches and other activity. That’s the point.
Even if it were a process as invasive and painful as getting a bank account, it would remain the only technology that enables users to get a search account privately (since Kagi says cash is not scalable for them). Given the level of snark and off-topicness, I presume you don't actually expect me to answer the question with dozens of different methods.
This is a company that claims over and over that they are privacy-respecting, but are running a service that unnecessarily collects your real ID via credit card, otherwise you can't do searches. After seeing what happened to Google, I am shocked that people like you are so dismissive toward me for trying to hold them to account and caring about this issue. Yes I react with religious fervor at this issue - privacy. This is an age where companies are handing over information to convict people for seeking abortions even in the US.
If you have another solution then please share it.
you have to trust not just kagi: the server hosts kagi uses, kagi security policies, all kagi employees, the country kagi operates in, and kagi as a business in perpetuity (not getting bought or drastically changing just to survive).
I can't trust that forever. So it's really just simple that they should have a way to dissociate accounts with searches and payments properly
> parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason.
IE tried to setup a rating scheme for websites to adopt for this purpose but it never got any traction. Someone wrote an interesting post about it once but I can’t find it.
Hi. Would there be any chance of you releasing the index of how many trackers websites have publicly? I remember reading about that somewhere on your site, but you eventually took that offline.
I feel that programmers are the main audience that knows life can be better in software. A typical programmer might be so offended by Pinterest's awfulness that they'll look for any way to prevent it, knowing it can be done. Some might go for an extension like uBlacklist, others might be so furious that they want to pay money to stop this somehow.
But seriously, I do think that unless you work with software, it's hard to even imagine alternatives to the big players could exist.
It shows the demographic of those who would customize their search results. Any search engine that provided this feature would probably skew this way if you looked at who used the feature.
Though since they offer it and others don't, your point still applies.
As a European IT professional and a Kagi subscriber, I get my information from and contribute my knowledge to the same sources as you do. I don't know why I would bother to look something up in my native language when there is much more information available in English, the lingua franca of the (Western) world. I don't even read Wikipedia in my own language, unless the subject is better covered.
I’m also European and subscribe to Kagi. One feature I really like is that I can specifically make a local search by adding a bang with the country, like !fr or !es.
Mainly the foxnews.com and breitbart.com being in the top 15 (top 10 if you count all the Pinterest domains as one) in the Block list. As a non-American, I hardly ever see these in my search results, and wouldn't have felt a need for a Block filter for them.
And while there's some British news presence (Guardian and Daily Mail), and what seems to be a Chinese one (kknews.cc), American news media is the one with the heaviest presence (CNN, NY Post, NY Times, etc.).
Ok wow, seeing these lists might have just made a customer out of me. I’ve been vaguely aware of Kagi and know the general premise but this made it real.
Similarly, I had no idea about this feature, but I now know I want it... I think I just need it to be cheaper, maybe $5 unlimited (or enough for me, which I think is certainly higher than 300, probably higher than 1000, at least without behaviour change) and I'd be in
I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling & development/SRE that's expensive - so should (or at least could) come down as more people adopt it, driving further adoption from relative cheapskates like me?
It seems great, but I use DDG 'bangs' (which are also a Kagi feature) loads of times a day, rather than going directly to websites - especially !w & !wikt, !arch & !aur & !archpackages only slightly less - I'd blow through the monthly limit in no time on that alone. (Which also seems a bit unfair, they're just redirects, not using index, there's an argument they shouldn't be included? I suppose if you're so motivated you can work around by using Firefox's feature for it instead of search engine anyway.)
Edit: oh wait, I just found in the FAQ that 'bangs' actually aren't counted as searches. I may have to trial it, see how many searches I actually use how quickly. (And how reasonable the 1.5ç overage seems in my usage.)
I was worried about the 1000 search limit, and it has so far (since beta) proven not to be a problem. I use Kagi for all my searches on all machines and my phone and average 800 or so a month. I haven’t modified my behavior at all, and consider myself a heavy search engine user.
I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever, since the SEO spam would force me to do more term refinement. With far less of that (and a tiny tiny bit of settings tuning) I get better results much quicker. I’d test it but I have a job to do and can’t swallow the idea of going back to how bad the other viable options really are.
That sounds appealing, but there are so many $10 and $15 monthly warts on my balance that the burden of adding another (with even a minor overcharge fee) feels pretty high. I wish their lower tiers had double the current limits.
> I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever
FWIW, I counted searches I made with DDG (by parsing my FF history export) before joining the beta, and it was slightly over 1k, with Kagi my searches are in the 700-800 range.
> I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever
This is a great point that should really be highlighted more in their marketing. It was obvious once I read it and shows two obvious benefits: 1. There is probably zero issue with fitting in to the 1000 searches per month. 2. It saves time for many of the searches we’re already doing.
> 1. There is probably zero issue with fitting in to the 1000 searches per month.
You are never limited to 1000 monthly searches, this is a great misunderstanding about Kagi. After passing your threshold, you are charged 1.5c per query.
I think that’s clear enough on the details of the plans. What I meant is fitting in without incurring extra charges (no point in arguing that 1.5c is small, that’s not the point)
I’m a former DDG user and current paying Kagi customer. One critical difference I’ve noticed is that frequently used bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi.
I think this is because over a very short period of usage, I applied block/lower/raise/pin to various domains, and now my search results are almost always perfect.
That said, I understand the value of going directly to a site. On that front, Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs.
Lately I’ve moved to doing this at the browser level instead of via a search engine. It’s not a huge speed difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go directly. Firefox makes it easy to do: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
I've used DDG for years before switching over to Kagi and I was accustomed to having to use the !s bang daily (and !g before I found out about !s). On Kagi I literally never use it, since it already incorporates Google search results and filters out a lot of crap.
I've also defined some custom bangs to search private Jira and Confluence instances with some default filters applied, because the default search on those instances was driving me insane. It took me a long time to convince myself to pay $10 a month for a search engine, but I've never looked back.
I'm currently experimenting with hostname rewrite rules.
I'm at the $10/mo level, and am totally happy to keep paying. I rely on search throughout the day for my job, and for my personal interests. $10/mo for an ad-free tunable search that provides good results is a completely worth it. And, I'm more than happy to vote with my money to support the web that I want to exist.
Otoh (for contrast) I run adblock and sponsorblock on youtube, and if they start blocking traffic from people like me I'm going to cut back my YT viewership significantly (and maybe try harder to look for stuff on nebula instead, which I never browse). While I do get some educational value from YT, it's limited, and I guess I just fundamentally object to the ad-first business model.
You should install the Kagi browser extension and try out the Summarizer functionality on YouTube videos. I’ve found it pretty useful for videos that are needlessly filled with fluff.
Oh really? I just commented about how this misconception made me change my behavior. Wish that was more clear, or that I had higher reading comprehension.
In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the user whenever we can.
Redirecting a bang costs us basically nothing, so it does not count as a search.
Also reloading the same search within a short time (~2 minutes, for example coming back in browser after clicking through a search result) does not count as an additional search as we served cached results.
Another tip: We have decent documentation (that is also open source and editable) and you can access it quickly from Kagi with the !help bang, for example
> In general, assume that we pass down the savings to the user whenever we can.
This is great to hear but it doesn’t really address the point you’re replying to:
> Wish that was more clear
As someone who is just seriously noticing Kagi because of this HN post, I have no brand impression that tells me you’re trying to pass on the savings (most companies don’t) and the marketing material even makes me think you’re targeting a premium price point with healthy margins.
I’m also going to suggest a do not do: Do not make cost savings a public-facing core value. Racing to the bottom usually erodes the value prop while simultaneously opening the door for low-quality competitors.
I would suggest (and caveat: I’m not a marketer, just someone who has seen a lot of brands come and go) either of these directions:
1. Be clear about the cost savings when talking about the specific features. Example: Add a new heading to kagi/features/bangs.html that says “Bangs are Free” and talks about how bangs do not count towards your searches
2. Remove it from being part of your public values altogether. Lean in to the value prop of having a cost and let users self-discover what’s free. If it’s the right choice, highlight it privately: make it a line item on the monthly invoice with something that describes why they are free or put it in onboarding material.
I didn't say it was a 'killer feature', I said 'now I know I want it'. There are very many things I want but not at the price they cost!
I don't think coffee's a great analogy - it has far more utility for me, I don't buy it as a service, and it costs me roughly £24 (what, $30ish) a month in beans.
I'm not seriously suggesting it because I think comparing prices of different things to determine value very quickly gets silly, but a closer comparison might be Netflix: Kagi would cost me about as much per month for search as Netflix. Silly, as I said, but if I tried really strictly to pay for things according to relative value or utility to me, there's no way that would make sense.
Part of the problem is asking me to switch from free I suppose - if DDG suddenly started charging me $5 I'd be more likely to pay Kagi $10 than I am today if that makes sense.
People always compare with Netflix, but that makes no sense at all to me. Is Kagi comparable to Netflix because they are both presented to you on a digital screen? I see nothing else that makes them comparable.
Laundry detergent and breakfast cereal both come in a box in the supermarket, but it doesn't make the products comparable. A house and a car both have a door and you usually sit inside, but it doesn't make the products comparable.
Netflix is a great bargain (for those who enjoy their offerings), and I think people are shooting themselves in the foot by dismissing other great services because they've somehow tricked themselves to thinking they should be compared to Netflix only because they're offered through a digital screen.
I have gone over the limit (on the grandfathered 1500 search plan), and paid the extra $1-2 for it. It's fine.
The cost of search has made me think about what terms I use now and what I search for. Google made me lazy, I now use my phones world clock app rather that searching for "current time X", and word my searches more thoughtfully.
Defaulting to DuckDuckGo and using a bang for kagi when I don’t immediately get what I want would be nice. Unfortunately there isn’t one. I guess I could use an extension that lets me add personal ones.
I subscribe to the cheapest plan, and only use Kagi for non-trivial searches. That’s more than enough, I don’t need a paid search engine when I just type a website’s name instead of its url.
I set it up with DDG/Google as default, and for Kagi I start with “k “.
Pinterest does a whole lot specifically bad - they tend to trap users with login prompts on entry and make it impossible to see the full image. If I'm searching for a meme to DM to someone or a photograph of a landmark Pintrest is something I avoid like the plague. It's essentially a black-hole for images - people pin them and then they are lost forever.
I like Pinterest, it is a useful site. But it is basically a (image) search engine itself, so it's pages shouldn't be in Google results. Just like you don't want Bing or DDG image search results showing up in Google searches.
Pinterest could simply tell robots to 'noindex,follow' the page to help search engines understand there is no utility in it appearing for a search. But agree, perhaps it shouldn't rank first anyway.
Guess it depends on whether it's UGC entirely or whether the CMS could note these kind of pages. Again, shouldn't be hard if it's just a simple link as the main content of the page.
There's precedent that would make it in Pinterest's best interest. IIRC Google's "Panda" algo update basically wiped out search referrals to certain content farms overnight, can't recall specific examples but there were some at the time. They were labelled as low quality and subsequently faded into obscurity.
//added
EHow is an example of a site that was flagged
I've been shouting for years how google should know by now, if there is a relevant wikipedia page, it should be at the top of the results -- not number 2 or 3, number 1. Every time.
Likewise IMDB (not that I'm fond of the site, if there were an alternative I'd switch in a heartbeat) -- if I search for "bogart bacall" then the top six results should be IMDB and Wikipedia for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo.
How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery.
Let’s dispel with this fiction that Google doesn’t know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're trying to change the internet.
1. I don't necessarily know I'm looking for a wikipedia page. For example it turns out there's a Bogart-Bacall syndrome -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogart%E2%80%93Bacall_syndrome -- that would actually be a false positive, but it's definitely not the first time I've found there are interesting wikipedia pages related to the thing I'm searching for.
2. In general, wikipedia's search is worse than google's -- meaning that if I don't know the exact name of the relevant topic, a google search for <topic> "wikipedia" is more likely to hit the right page than a search in wikipedia itself.
3. Opening wikipedia first is more work than typing bogart bacall wikipedia in by browser's search bar.
Dearrow. An open source and crowdsourced tool replace youtubes stupid fucking clickbait title cards, and replaces many titles with better ones. You can contribute!
Simple, common sense features for any search engine that actually wants to help you find what you’re looking for. Such a stark difference from what Google offers.
Although boosting cant be done, blocking can be achieved using ublockorigin and custom filters. Here is an awesome spam filter list that removes spam and copycat domains from google and ddg searches[1]
It often outranks MDN official docs which these days are very readable, in-depth, with examples, and a simple UI and the only time I click to inappropriately named W3Schools is by accident because it's the top result and I'm expecting MDN and then I click back and that's why I don't like it.
Nothing about that makes w3 a poor source. I get why you block it - so MDN is shown first. That’s fair. Im just saying its not a fault of W3. Because I tend to agree with that guy. W3 really isnt bad. A bit simplistic, and MDN is better, but its not bad.
Yes, and historically those code demos were often wrong in many important ways (like not working in all browsers, or insecure). They are much better now but reputation is hard to recover.
That must have been like 12 years ago or more at least because in my career I don't have much memory of feeling betrayed by the information on their site.
It's a question of presentation. Back then (and to be clear, I'm talking about 00s here) the correct way was to point out that something might not even be doable in cross-browser way at all, and listing the proprietary features that'd let you do it in specific browsers while clearly labeling them as proprietary. Quality websites would do that, while w3schools and the likes would just give you the snippet for (usually) IE. Worse yet, in many cases they would keep suggesting the old proprietary approach even after a new standardized way of implementing something showed up.
That's why Kagi's personalization is so cool here. Kagi doesn't have to block it, and neither does the user. The user can just lower it, and raise MDN, because that's what they want in their search, and it helps them more.
Yeah the simplicity is what I prefer about W3schools. A lot of times I want a quick code example and don’t really want to go in depth about how something works.
I have similar feelings about baeldung.com. It isn't that the content is inherently bad, but it is super annoying that when I search for a java class the first few results are from baeldung instead of the official javadocs.
Yeah. Search for class, open official docs, read very short description. And still have absolutely zero idea is where this class is used, and how it should be created, and what alternatives.
How wonderful to differ - I actually love bite sized, "tldr" or baeldung and almost always get what I need. (not to mention that quite often javadocs of many project are just empty or severely lacking... )
From what I understand a lot of it is residual. W3schools has always been directed at beginners, but it also used to be wrong rather frequently.
This site [0] used to be the hub for the hate and now has a message saying that w3schools has gotten better. If you're curious, they still have a link to the web archive that has all the mistakes documented.
The most egregious of their mistakes to me:
> […] professional web developers often prefer HTML editors like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, instead of writing plain text.
W3Schools was essential in helping me get to where I am today. Learning HTML and PHP through it was great, my favorite feature being their "Try It Yourself" button, which opens up a sandbox where you can play around with PHP, HTML, CSS, JS etc (note it's not just client-side languages like MDN does). For beginners, this kind of thing is essential, and this was before MDN was good. And even now, I compare MDN vs. a W3Schools page, and the overall design and content is more welcoming for beginners.
As others have said, it's t least in part because of the beginner orientation. I'm not a web developer and I found it useful when looking up some html/css stuff for a project years ago. But for example in python I find it infuriating to see geeksforgeeks or whatever at the top of my search results. I want SO or documentation for most stuff and consider the rest spam.
All that to say, I think beginner oriented well SEO'd content is going to be polarizing, which makes Kagi's approach great for everyone, if you want it it's there, if it annoys you, quickly block it
w3schools used to be one of the best resources ~15 years ago. Today I intuitively avoid it because
1. The ads make the fan on my laptop spin (I prefer to avoid ad-heavy websites over using adblock)
2. The 'Try it yourself' button is fake. It doesn't actually run the code and doesn't let you edit it.
3. It is not a good reference. To give an example, the last time I visited w3schools was upon searching "react ul li", which landed me on the page https://www.w3schools.com/react/react_lists.asp . Ironically, the reason why I was searching the term, was to find advice on setting the "key" prop in on list items. The w3schools example doesn't even mention the prop and produces errors. Compare that to the official reference which ranks much lower in Google search: https://react.dev/learn/rendering-lists#where-to-get-your-ke... .
Yeah MDN is the de-facto reference guide for web frameworks. W3schools feels like beginner tutorials. For me, I want “what happens if I pass undefined as the second arg to this function” and w3schools doesn’t answer that. It’s fine as a site, I suppose, it was insane when it outranked more complete websites. Off topic I see this more and more with Stackoverflow where semi-related questions outrank official docs.
I learned from w3schools in the early 2000s, and helped instruct my high school web design course with it.
I wish I hadn't. There were many innacuracies, outdated advice, and over simplifications.
I came up on a slew of weird and inconsistent sources, and that bit me when discussing things in college. I often felt over confident because of these type of sites.
W3schools (used to at least) gave a very shallow intro to programming languages (PHP, ASP, etc), and I remember a professor basically laughing at me once because of that misinformation.
So, maybe others had experiences like mine.
EDIT
They also had these weird "certifications" for technologies that were basically really dumbed down quizzes. They were made to make people feel special, I think. Dunno, I did them all, and I almost got laughed out of class.
Yep. W3schools is one of those sites that helped me begin my career. I still find it useful to look up something in a hurry. No idea why so many people hate it.
The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari.
It is infuriating and is the one thing that has caused me to seriously try other browsers on mobile. The problem is, they are all terrible in some small paper cutting ways (including Orion, though that has been rapidly improving).
> The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari.
Seems like a deficiency of Apple products to me. I know it's beating a dead horse, but this is what happens when people willingly buy into a closed system they have no control over.
I have the same hunch. Google pays Apple $20B annually to be the default search engine. Thankfully those of us in the EU will soon be able to choose any search engines we like once the DMA comes into effect.
I use the app xSearch, which lets you use custom search engines with Safari. Once you turn on override mode inside of xSearch, it works perfect. I agree that it’s unfortunate, but for the time being anyone who’s going out of their way to pay for Kagi is someone who will go out of their way to install an app like xSearch. Hopefully we see some improvements from Apple with this
For what it's worth, I only buy Android phones that have unlockable bootloaders and I can root so that ultimately I have control over my own device.
But yes, I agree on how letting Apple and Google assert a level of control unparalleled in the history of computing has been a massive step backwards for our industry and consumers in general.
I don't trust Google, but it's practical. There are tons of ways you can control/limit privacy issues, like a combination of opting out of personalized ads, AdGuard, DNS level filtering, and not using any Google services other than necessary for Android. Many of these require little effort but go very far -- farther than the default experience from a new iPhone. In fact many of these things are unrelated to Android. With these in place I don't see using Android a problem by itself. (On the other hand, if you use an iPhone but have no adblocking or don't block tracking domains, and use Google services all the time, I don't see how it is better)
I realize this is probably not the solution you want, but there is an official iOS Safari extension that will intercept all address bar searches and route them to Kagi. I don’t remember how much it costs, and it doesn’t seem to work super well with private browsing, but it’s better than nothing and works well for what it is. Ymmv
It actually works very well with private browsing. You just need to have the extension enabled for private browsing (in iOS 17 that's a separate switch) and tap on "get your session link" once in the extension menu in Safari. That way it knows about your subscription, even in private tabs.
I should give it another try. I believe the last time I tried it, I was frustrated because of the private browsing login issue. Maybe one day (probably not) Apple will allow setting a simple URL for custom search engines.
Orion needs a lot of polish, but I am hopeful they will get there.
I took a closer look and the iOS extension supports entering a “session link” which allows the Kagi redirect to work in private windows. Entering it is a bit cumbersome—you have to first open a private window and then any random page so you can see the extension button in the address bar, at which point you can tap it and then the Kagi icon to get to the session link field—but it appears to stick after that and the redirect works as expected (although you do get a brief flash of Google or whatever — they suggest changing it to DDG which looks a bit smoother).
Agree that it feels hacky, but sometimes you just have to take what you can get.
You can generate a Kagi login link with a token and save that to your favourites. Then, click that link in the new private tab window before searching.
Every time Kagi comes up, a lot of folks say it is too expensive. That it should be unlimited. That if it was just $x per month, then it would be worth it. That they feel uncomfortable about the limits.
I will simply say that I cannot imagine going back to being a “user” of a “search provider” over being a paying Kagi customer. It is the single most critical service I worry about losing.
If they octupled the price tomorrow, I would murmur an expletive under my breath, then thank god that they didn’t choose to go down the path of fucking me over by materially changing the business model to adtech, and continue paying them.
I am actually not sure what at what price point I’d drop the service. I’d probably start looking at canceling less used subscriptions first. Another shitty Gal Gadot Netflix movie has negative marginal value for me.
If you haven’t tried it for an extended time and used its core features, then you don’t get it and no one can explain it to you. “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.”
Edit to add: this is search we are talking about. It is literally your entry point to the world’s entire body of knowledge and ultimately affects your decisions and actions both daily and over the long term. And nearly everyone is perfectly happy to let it be run by companies that make more money when they lead you astray to click bait, hot take, content farm, and AI generated sites. Garbage in, garbage out, both in software and the knowledge you depend on to live a thriving life.
Funny story: Earlier this week, my Kagi results when to shit. If I made the slightest spelling mistake in a query, it would return nothing. Often it would just return nothing for a query where google would return millions of results.
It got so bad that I started getting in the habit of typing 'g' in front of searches to go straight to google, but then I was hit with the usual google issues of SEO sites, spam sites and low-quality results.
I wanted to cry in frustration because my wonderful Kagi experience was suddenly gone, and was furiously typing up a support ticket when I noticed that the "verbatim" choice was somehow permanently selected, after I tried it a few days ago.
Lessons learned:
1. Kagi really is hugely superior to google as a daily search engine
2. "Verbatim" should not be a sticky choice, or at least Kagi should enclose "verbatim" results (or lack thereof) in a bright pink frame or something.
Yep. As a developer my life is infinitely better because of Kagi. The product is wonderful, the team is wonderful and responsive - it’s everything I want from a company I pay money to.
I sound like a shill but I’m not. I’ve just been a happy user since their private beta and have had genuine, kind, and personable email back and forth with Vladimir.
Sidenote, i'm a very happy $5-10/m Kagi user. However i also happily pay $20-$30/m for ChatGPT or Phind. I hope one day Kagi consumes some of these shares too (to convert my $30 to Phind into $30 for Kagi).
That might sound insane, i'd think so too, but FastGPT[1] is pretty damn good. It's not trying to be Phind, but still, quite surprising to me that it exists.
I made a Kagi account when they had a free tier, thinking I'll test and then decide on paying or not. Then they dropped the free tier and with the # of trial searches limited, I'd need to make a conscious effort to use it to test instead of just trying it when DDG fails me, which was the initial plan. Somehow that's not very enticing.
And I'm in the demographic that would indeed block pinterest and w3schools. It's just that my lattes aren't $12 each...
Edit: Btw @freediver, you should turn this top blocked list into a public indepth report every 3 months or so. Just like Backblaze does that hard drive reliability thing. It would be great for your marketing.
Not everyone has the same spending habits. I (in the US) happen to know that none of my colleagues buy Starbucks or any other shop coffee on a regular basis. Although we are paid a decent (although not high) salary and can easily afford this without thinking, I don't see people eagerly spend $25/month on this.
Not to mention $25 is very different in other countries.
Very few people actually need unlimited searches. I search things compulsively - for example, while searching for something related to language A, my mind makes me search for the same thing in languages B and C, what happened to the last duke of Brunswick, and where can I download the latest bonobo genome.
When Kagi transitioned from unlimited plan to 1200 searches (later increased to 1500) for early adopters, I was certain this would bankrupt me, but I decided to try it out. Turns out, most of the time I somehow don't even hit that limit.
Yep. They’re trying to drop the price as well—users on an annual Legacy Professional plan have been given unlimited searches again (which is the $10/mo pricing). Really hoping this is sustainable because Kagi is night-and-day for me compared to google and ddg.
Is that a different thing from "early adopter professional"? Because that one still shows "$10/mo - 1,500 searches included" for me on the billing page.
For comparison, $25-30/month is the lower end of what US mobile carriers charge per line.
That $25-30/month gets you access to a nationally covered 5G/4G mobile ISP that cost billions to build out. Having said that, does it seem reasonable to assign the same monthly value for an early stage search engine?
yup. I pay $25/mo happily but would go up to at least $100 without blinking. I do between 1k and 2.5k searches per mo, and also use the summarizer a bit. Compared to DDG (which I was using before), I haven't done a bang to fall back to google in months at least. DDG searches were better on some topics but on average slightly worse than google for me, Kagi is fairly consistently better and being able to block domains is fantastic.
I don't see any people say Kagi is too expensive, where do you find them? I don't use Kagi as I found it useless. It is only UI for Google search. Yandex and Bing works better than Kagi.
I'd say it is expensive in countries where dollar conversion rates are very high due to inflation. I did ask about introducing different prices based on purchasing power parity in different geographies but got a very polite rebuff :)
They claim that the prices are largely defined by the actual cost of the search, with fairly slim margins. In which case they literally can't do what you asked without becoming unprofitable.
They spend 5% of their profit for donations.
It's ok as a company for general, but for payment with this low rates of search results and the argument that they can't reduce the price because of the cost. I get mixed feelings.
I've become a paid Kagi subscriber because DDG (UI for Bing search, as you would call it) didn't cut it for me. One of the most annoying things was that it often ignored a crucial part of my search query and only delivered very generic results. What kind of searches do you do and in what language(s)?
I might be tempted to use Kagi (especially for my family), but the thing I'm afraid of is the quality of search in non-English (specifically Polish) internet. Anybody knows how does that work?
It has a quick region switcher like DDG (a must-have for me), and the results are way better than DDG. Give it a try!
I just did a Google vs Kagi vs DDG test on "grzyby marynowane" (pickled mushrooms, usually pickled champignons, a common snack on Polish family gatherings).
Google: Starts with recipes, then there is Allegro ("Polish Amazon") where you can buy jars of them, then Google page ends (10 results/page).
Kagi: starts the same, but there is more (20?) results/page. It continues with some podcast episode about pickled mushrooms on Soundcloud, a Wikipedia page, some more recipes in Polish and English and finally a Pinterest page (:rage:).
DuckDuckGo: first page is just recipes. I decided to give it a bigger chance, so I checked out a second page. There you have pretty unrelated articles like "where to pick wild mushrooms" and an Allegro link in between.
However, as happy Kagi user I still have to note that they are using Apple Maps for maps/POI search. As you well know, they are quite useless to us compared to Google Maps, so I keep using !gm bang to get redirected. Bangs work almost like DDG, the only difference is that they must be at beginning or end of your search (DDG lets you put it in between words too).
The first 100 searches are free, just need an email address that can be a throwaway to sign up, so you can check it for yourself with just a bit of time expended.
This is a clear violation of Kagi's privacy policy.
We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. Kagi's entire business is funded by its users and we have no intention to or interest in manipulating or monetizing user information in any way.
How many months (or years) has it been since Kagi launched and they're already using User Data to advertize on HackerNews.
Yawn.
Not a dealbreaker for me, I am still a Kagi customer. But it's clear that written promises from CEOs are empty marketing fluff and not real commitments. As it always is, on the web.
I totally agree. I'm not sure how they can rationalize sharing this information with that privacy policy unless they let users opt into a "Kagi is allowed to use my private preferences to aggregate and share statistics."
I totally see the appeal to share these statistics, but they are literally breaking their policy here.
Tried out a few searches that I’ve recently struggled with on both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially if I can get a license through work.
I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass.
Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.
> I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass.
We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers.
SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.
Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Cool.
I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For research I certainly search like a professional, but don't have the income stream to compensate.
> Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite.
Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and their knowledge of it is why early google was good.
> Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998)
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side.
> “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
I know this isn’t a support channel, but is there a way to use Kagi with Firefox Focus on iOS without having to go through the login flow each time? I’d be happy to open some intermediary app or something.
Reminder that W3Schools is good now (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP) and has been good for several years. In the pre-Flexbox, pre-grid days, I used W3schools to build a framework-less mobile site as part of a JS bootcamp admissions test. The explanation on W3Schools about creating multiple floats with media queries was so clear, I stuck around.
I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app.
It is a true shame that so much useful information gets trapped within their ecosystem.
I successfully use it to automatically link to Old Reddit. I guess it can also be used to rewrite user-hostile websites' URLs such as YouTube/Twitter/etc to less hostile frontends such as Invidious or Nitter.
This is cool but imo it makes more sense to have URL redirection as a browser extension. That way all twitter links resolve to nitter, not just ones from a search engine. I use this one https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
As siblings have pointed out, reddit is actually popular for raising.
For me, what distinguishes it from a stereotypical "block this please" site like Pinterest is that, clunky as the UI may be, content on reddit is often relevant and well linked up with other pages on the Web.
Compare that with Pinterest which I've taken to describe as "the universal sink of the Web" because it seems to get linked to from everywhere but then it's a dead end with zero non-repost content 100% of the time.
Well actually, come to think of it, Pinterest hasn't figured much in my search results ever since I started using kagi a year or so back, and really it didn't get linked to very much from anywhere but the Google results page... Guess I'm getting my money's worth in one more way then I realized. :D
I certainly agree about Pinterest being where data goes to die - and for Reddit I agree that it has an extremely high quality of information, it's just held back by presentation. If I can find the information I'm looking for on a blog I'll usually prefer that but Reddit usually has a good deal of commentary on whatever the topic I'm looking for is.
On reason that Reddit is valuable is that it often contains information that, as far as I can tell, literally doesn't exist anywhere else. This is especially true for product category research. Other than Reddit posts, any product that is even vaguely not mainstream, the only information other than Reddit will be obvious marketing blog spam that doesn't actually help differentiate anything. Generally, I'll check wirecutter, and if Wirecutter doesn't have an article about it, then Reddit is the only other useful option. If it's the only option, the presentation doesn't really matter, although I disagree with you on how bad it is. I still quite like old.reddit on desktop. Although admittedly my mobile experience has been severely degraded since my old preferred app got killed.
A lot of people actually disagree with you—Reddit is number four on the Raise list and on the Pin list, and every few months there's a thread on HN talking about how the only way to get useful information out of Google is to add "reddit" at the end of the search.
Clearly not, they think it's clunky and desktop and too annoying on mobile, (I agree but put up with it often) they're not saying they want more of it.
I was indeed talking about the lower list - simply because of the information presentation is so poor. The information itself is usually quite high quality.
> ... or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app.
It’s not really less inconvenient in terms of time or screen taps in my experience, but changing the subdomain to “old” will at least skip the app prompts. The day that option dies is a day I put a new 0.0.0.0 entry in my hosts file.
> Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app.
I have the old-reddit extension on every device I use. It's my 3rd most essential extension, after uBlock Origin and Kill Sticky.
I strongly suspect that if they kill it off at some point we'll have solutions like archive to work around being forced into their UI - even if those solutions are forced to scrap the information out of their web presentation rather than via API calls.
It won't help the clunky mobile site much, but if you're on iOS there's a Safari plug in called "Sink It for Reddit" that hides the attempts to funnel you into their app.
This third party browser extension looks like it hides UI contents whereas with Kagi your preferences are used in what is actually returned from the search engine and in what order. I don't think these things are all that similar.
It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?
Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially considering other engines correctly ignore such pages).
The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is unwilling to implement an override because this spam contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the search results page).
> I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search…
And
> The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler…
Don’t seem to be statements that really make any consistent sense.
It’s like if you ordered soup and instead got a bowl of human shit, a thousand times, and then felt compelled to explain that nobody wants you to eat shit, it’s just that bowls are a really convenient place to shit in.
Pages are primarily written for display & human consumption. Whatever was left of the "semantic HTML" went out the window when everyone switched to the JS SPA fad.
As far as I know there is no "right" way to design a JS SPA overlay/loginwall in a way that search engines ignore it - it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers (other engines seem to handle Pinterest just fine). Outright denying access to search engines could be wrong because logged-in Pinterest users may actually want those results, so that's not a good solution either.
The fault is ultimately on Google for ignoring this high-profile issue for such a long time because it contributes to their bottom-line, even though a very simple, low-tech fix (easier than making the crawler recognize such loginwalls reliably) could be to just allow users to make their own decision as to whether to block the domain, like Kagi has done.
> it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers
And
> The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler…
I apparently misunderstood your phrasing of “exploit” to mean something intentional. You submit that Pinterest is unintentionally exploiting a flaw in a way that both drives traffic to them and ruins search.
I suppose in my shit soup analogy, the thing you’d explain is that there’s shit in the bowl because the laws of physics coincidentally allow shit to rest in a bowl.
The thing about Pinterest is that it seems to be offering something that it never delivers. A few years ago I was doing an image search and I was like, fine, I’ll sign up, I just want to see this image I’m looking for so I went through the whole process and they still wouldn’t show me the image I wanted to see. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re trying to run forward but you’re not getting anywhere? That’s Pinterest, at least in my experience.
Reminds me of the Warez sites around 1995 - 2000. Searching for "Photoshop 5 crack" or similar would lead you to a web site that would ask you to click on another link which would open a dozen popup windows. Many of those popups would also purport to have what you were looking for - just click on this link here (which opens a load of further popups).
Teenage me spent too much time wading through these pages. To this day, I'm not sure whether any of these sites really had warez or whether they were just a huge clickbait mazes.
Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and I'm sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they don't de-rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
But yes, they could fix it. However if it keeps you searching maybe they don't want to.
> Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and I'm sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they don't de-rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
I don't think argument takes exploit off the table. It just doesn't address it. Same thing for Pinterest's shady behavior.
I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose.
I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
I don’t think waronprivacy knows what exposé means in this context. Rather than addressing the very obvious implication that you meant a description of how a publicly traded company creates policy they found opportunity to talk about posting pictures of people’s homes online. I’m assuming they would’ve brought this up if you’d posted any other triggering key words like “newspaper” or “journalism”
It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.
There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()".
The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains.
The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.
I find it amusing that reddit managed to make all of the lists!
I personally still find it to be a useful source of information - I wonder if all of their recent drama with third-party apps has led to it earning a place on the negative lists, or if it was there all along.
I an part of the former. I do miss it. Glad to see there’s more people who are doing this. You shouldn’t be allowed to treat your community this way and get away with it.
I think it might be more understandable if you could block individual subreddits, I found experience to vary greatly depending on your topic since the moderation isn't uniform.
Mulitply that by the factor of ~50. Not all users use the feature or if they do, block same domains (our user base is very international).
We plan to launch full stats (including number of members and queries/day) next week. "Domains" is meant to be just one of the tabs on this page that got pushed earlier to prod.
To me, the results seem interesting regardless of whether they are representative of the population or not. There are questions you can answer without relying on that assumption.
For example: "Can you imagine what your search results would look like if you had access to this tool?"
Definitely the best feature of Kagi! I sometimes wish there was some way to slightly adjust how this works. As I also have Wikipedia on raised priority, I'd still like some official product/company/etc. website to rank higher than the Wikipedia article of it.
Also, a custom priority ranking among the raised importance domains would be nice.
I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall geeksforgeeks being ok a few years ago. But I've started avoiding it because it seems like there's multiple nag screens in a row whenever I make the mistake of clicking. Seems a lot of people agree.
Is the issue here these sites aren't putting up the barriers to the crawlers, and are getting high ranking in all the results despite all the friction to normal users? It'd be nice if there were a way for a search engines to tell if paywalls / nag screens are a thing on sites and to demote them from the results accordingly.
It seems like it wouldn't be hard for them to tell, but maybe they don't want to de-rank sites with these patterns. But really, from the consumers' perspective, who wants these sites in the results? I'm all for subscribing to something if I use it repeatedly, but that doesn't describe 90% of the sites I visit and I don't have the money for 1000 subscriptions.
Maybe they could just have a filter to filter for free sites only. I don't know what the solution is, but having blocked domains while nice is just a band-aid.
This kinda illustrates how dead easy it would be for google to improve their search engine. There's no way they couldn't figure out a similar list as this and just re-rank things to down prioritize these sites.
One should note that Google is already constantly improving their search engine for their customers. It is just that they are not the same as their users.
Most documentation sites along with the stackoverflow sites and the venerable wikipedia are among the top most boosted. Only if someone brought search to books, wouldn't that be wonderful?
Great product from a great team!
Pretty expensive for non-casual searching, I do a lots of searches in a day. Currently self-hosted SearchXNG does the trick but would love to start use Kagi for all.
Would love if they manage to find ways to increase limits or reduce pricing.
We can use uBlock for ads + ddg for results, but for masses and in general for healthier search engines I would be happy to use Kagi daily.
Anecdotally when searching for Python standard lib docs on Google, python.org is never at the top. I think this is because they have a single page titled "Built-in types" instead of dedicated pages titled e.g. "str.split".
Above python.org I get links to w3schools.com, programiz.com, python-reference.readthedocs.io (some inofficial project abandoned 2015), geeksforgeeks.org, codegree.de and freecodecamp.org.
1. make the homepage simpler, get rid of the dog and the moving clouds
2. this price won't fly on other geographies
3. don't make me 'add credits' to use the api, just accumulate some costs then bill me, once a week or even daily if that helps you sleep at night
4. you opted me into receiving product updates, don't do that, don't make me add you to my junk list, this was going so well, look what you're making me do, ohhhh
This, like many other Kagi features, came as a feature suggestion from the very Kagi users [1].
And the way the list is done is that it aggregates data anonymously and posts only domains that were acted upon by at least 20 users to preserve privacy.
I don’t think every single Kagi user asked for this feature, so I still wonder how those users who did not ask for the feature could approve of their private settings being used in this way.
As a beginner w3schools.com is likely my first port of call for something that it covers. Easy to navigate and use, and covers a wide range of things. I'm aware of its history but it's never steered me wrong.
MDN I only use if I can't find the information elsewhere. I need ELI5, MDN is harder to understand when trying to grasp a subject, at least for me.
This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me wonder whether this is just the marketing so far, or a more fundamental limitation on the market that will actually draw value from Kagi. Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?
It depends on your definition of "works as business"?
I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users.
Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs.
Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers.
For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale.
Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost.
Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget.
So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search.
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?
You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses
If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher revenue per user compared to paying users.
Pin means that if a result from that domain would appear anywhere in 50 or so relevant results that Kagi usually surfaces on the first page, it would be 'pinned' to the top of results.
I like Kagi but I’m willing to pay like 10-15$ for unlimited (actually unlimited) searches so I don’t have the emotional overhead of counting and worrying about how much I’m searching.
I don’t like how they told people on older unlimited plans they’d be grandfathered in and then didn’t honor that.
One recommendation for Kagi is to also introduce region based pricing. I subscribed, but in my country, the base price is probably too much for most people (that said I doubt the mentality here would increase sales for you so it is not quite a no-brainer).
We get asked this a lot. The problem is that one search costs the same whether done from a desert in Africa or from San Francisco. And since we are not breakeven yet, there is nowhere to discount from.
We mitigated some of the price anxiety by introducing the $5/mo plan, but we are still prioritizing sustainability over growth and will not let have a situation where we are on average losing money per customer (or otherwise eventually there will be no Kagi down the road).
Kagi does have its own search index of niche sites, they even have an API for it. This is combined with Google results; they used to combine with Bing as well but stopped due to Microsoft charging too much money.
Very different from DuckDuckGo and Startpage which are still just a Bing proxy and a Google proxy respectively.
Starting to try kagi now after this. I knew the diverse browser add-ons for blocking results, but being able to lower instead of all-out block something seems nice.
Just wished they made it easier to block/lower all the international versions of pinterest though, lol.
I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions.
shrugs I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. If the resulting conversations suck, aren't relevant to me, and clog up the HN front page - in they go.
There's something uniquely social-media-y about a person posting a list of websites they don't enjoy the contents of or discussion around, and then posting that they've filtered them out in a way that only impacts them, and then that person getting questioned and challenged on their filtering.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The domains in question lead to guaranteed uninteresting and routine political bickering where each side is compelled to recite their talking points. It has nothing to do with the reporting and everything to do with how people comment on those topics. I'd be guilty of it too if I weren't busy flagging those posts.
Isn't VOA (and BBC for that matter) government owned & funded? That's enough right there for me to doubt their "reliably factual" reporting. It's hardly a political opinion- the owners of these services expect to get some return on their investment. Because they're not in it for the money (they can just create more money basically at will), then why are they in it? Likely to help craft a narrative that suits them.
At least for the bbc, the government isn't directly involved in the editorial. They have to resort to appointing their friends director general & threatening to abolish the licence fee to try to get what they want.
VOA and BBC are not alike at all in my opinion. Many countries in Western/Northern Europe have government funded sites run like the BBC and they are mostly in the top of unbiased and free journalism. They also create a lot of high quality documentaries and crime thrillers.
Nothing is perfect and of course there's a certain kind of culture on each of these workplaces that will mske it either more left or right up or down, but they aren't controlled by politicians, just like a hospital isn't told how to treat patients by politicians.
I'd rank BBC News above all US news outlets (and I'll just add I'm neither from the US nor UK).
Could this be modified to block comments from a list of usernames too? The last time I looked at HN’s DOM made me sad.
There are some prolific users who… while their comments are of normal quality, trigger a strong desire for me to respond. I’d rather simply not see their comments (and reply trees) at all.
Comments Owl for Hacker News [1] adds a mute control to comments and user profiles which lets you do this.
If you want to roll a quick version of your own, once you've identified rows containing comments you want to block, you need to hide all subsequent rows which have a higher indent. I see there's now an "indent" attribute in the DOM which would make this even easier.
Personally, I never reply. I only lurk. Because every time I reply I get sucked into the social media nightmare that is waiting for a response to my reply. So I opt out of that by never, ever replying, no matter how big the urge is to reply. I never do it. Almost never. 99.99% of the time, I skip replying. I think you might lack a discipline.
Serious hint to any Google engineers reading: just penalize those exact freaking sites, and you are half-way there in fixing your results issue. It's not AI-driven or anything, just a regexp will do.
Search is one of the most critical pieces of technology for most people on the web. That, combined with the point another comment made that indicates the demographic of Kagi largely revolves around IT/SWE (who generally have more disposable income than other types of jobs), shows good reason why Kagi could survive long term
It has blown my mind for years the extent to which the Google Image Search team let Pinterest completely undermine the usefulness of their product, and they just kept on giving pinterest the top search result spots.
It's honestly more useless than the pages with a list of 1000 phone numbers that you get when you try to search for who an unknown number is.
Does anyone even work on Google Image Search? Is it run by a bunch of undercover Pinterest employees who infiltrated the team and pushed out the Googlers?
I'm honestly surprised by all the Pinterest hate because I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it.
>I don't think I've ever once, not a single time, left clicked a Google Image Search result. It's like drinking from the dead. You just don't do it.
You just don't do it according to whom? I would consider viewing the fullsize image to be core functionality for an image search, and it used to work just fine on GIS up until a few years ago.
Umm, according to the latest data, user choice is far less competitive than algorithms at stabilizing engagement metrics. Users' behavior speaks louder than what they believe in their little heads.
Or perhaps an amoral and unrestrained trillion-dollar paperclip-maximizer is, within certain paramaters, more effective at steering monkey-brains than said brains' resident consciousnesses are.
my little head sometimes has me patch and spin up old pc's which should be a fairly meaningless and pointless exercise if it wasn't for those marvelous algorithms. Each box represents a mental time capsule worth of youtube suggestions. It attempts to lure the viewer into popular shit everyone else is watching but if you carefully avoid those thumbs and click only on the things seeded initially it will gradually show more and more of it. Things like small minded peasants farming their little farm by hand in languages completely unknown to me. The next box is seeded with "full movie" with an algorithm trying to carve out my taste. I also have A box full of little prepper people.
On my main pc it is 100% convinced I want to watch starcraft, technology, coding and fitness videos. Im not completely uninterested but the goal of the design seems to make my mind even smaller. It is constantly signaling that... how put it.... it thinks Im shallow as fuck.
Then again on the other box it is convinced I want to see nothing but old people planting rice. Its probably not good for its world view. If it was conscious it would be a cruel thing to do.
Is TikTok even search engine friendly? I don't remember ever ending up there by searching for something (that's not explicitly someone's TikTok account).
You definitely don't need to be logged in. I used it in other browser sessions sometimes and you just have to scroll down about half a page and click "Explore" and it works fine.
I guess you're right. I haven't seen them in a while either. But for a while there they would be among the top results for all kinds of searches, and the content itself was always garbage.
But I don't get pinterest very often lately either. Not never but not most of the time either.
I found the right wing media blocks interesting. I wondered if that was in response to getting search spammed by them or some "principal". Because I don't think I've ever seen Fox News or Breitbart in search results anyway.
Same comment for CNN and wapo that I see are also there. Maybe I'd dont search current events enough, they all seem like odd things to block to me.
Fox News is the same level of journalism as guardian, verge and nytimes. As well as Wapo and CNN. I guess people are choosing to be in a bubble of the trash they like. Maybe because they don't know the billionaires that own the other media they think they are decent news sources.
Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com.
I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there.
And the NYT is publicly traded (The CEO has an estimated networth of only 10mil)
Verge doesn't really do journalism that makes me worried about who owns it.
> Other surprising trash to me is people want to see: rtings.com and goodreads.com.
rtings does colour profiles of plenty of slightly less popular monitors that no one else does. It's been an invaluable resource for me.
This comment is genuinely nonsensical. I'd think that it's obvious that rich owners tend to push a conservative economic spin to preserve their wealth.
> I really tried hard with Goodreads and never found good book recommendations there.
Most people end up on goodreads from search to see the reviews people left for the book....
But like what? Genuinely curious for an example of "blatantly false claims"? As I'm on the "right" side of the spectrum, and these kinds of comments come from a criticism of "misinformation".
Also, as an aside. What is a "false claim"? If it's a claim, they're asking you to believe it, which means they need to motivate it and provide details to back it up. Seems precisely where all the media generally is (including CNN/BBC/etc), pandering to peoples' bias without saying anything factually incorrect.
I’m curious about the right-wing news sites appearing in the blocked list. I also want to actively avoid them, but they’ve never once appeared in google search results for me.
