I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time. For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to before, often almost mirroring Google.
I am still a user because Google is worse than ever, but I wish Kagi would stop interpreting my queries and randomly decide to ignore or assign a random weights to my words.
If I search for `foo bar baz`, I want pages with `foo`, `bar` and `baz`, please. No, verbatim doesn't cut it because it somehow is far too strict and even common queries return half a dozen results at most. Google started sucking in the 2010s when they decided they know better than me, and the more Kagi improves, the more they follow down Google's path of trying to be outsmart me, and falling short.
I just want a 2003 Google experience. A computer is not smarter than me, stop trying to interpret and make assumptions.
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Aside, is it so hard to make a search engine with a query interface like any trigram-based SQL full-text engine? With quotes, AND, OR and -word. I still believe any AI-powered solution of the past 20 years to be a mockery of this gold standard of precision and simplicity, except maybe Google 1.0.
That is only going to get worse, with the direct copies of StackOverflow and other popular sites (which are easy enough for search engines to filter out because the body content is practically identical) that exist only to fool less careful clickers into getting their adverts & such, being joined by a multitude of LLM generated rewordings of the same which will be harder to automatically drop (or de-prioritise).
Did you start to notice things getting worse around the new year when they added Brave to their search results? That was the turning point for me, I was a huge advocate but then quality went downhill and then a few weeks later they proudly announced that they had spent a third of their funding on...t-shirts. Between that and this huge push towards being just like Google and Bing with LLM hallucinated nonsense, I'm not sure what their aim is anymore.
Kagi is partly powered by Google, so I can imagine specific searches resulting in results pretty similar to Googles, if none of their other source have any matches.
I noticed something similar with Ecosia, they apparently switched to using both Bing and Google, and the results, while still pretty good seems a little worse. That's all anecdotal and may be completely random, but I think one issue could be that Google is getting worse.
I tried a few searches side-by-side and they were pretty much identical. I get that Kagi offers customization etc but that’s not worth the money for me personally. I just went back to Google because the results were the same.
Damnit I was on the narrow path of convincing myself to start paying for Kagi. I've been using QWANT but the search results are a bit off tbh. And they've started doing full-screen ads to turn of my adblock (which well to be fair thats the way they earn their keep).
For what it's worth, whenever I've switched to DuckDuckGo, I've found myself adding a !g to nearly every search. Since I've switched to Kagi a few months ago, I've hardly ever had to go to another search engine. If you can spare it, I'd suggest you invest the 5$ for a small account and just test it out for a month.
For me, it’s not only the price you pay. Having a username attached to each your searches is the opposite of privacy, no matter how much you trust their legalese wording
I go the opposite way. I trust a company that takes my money to pay its costs to keep my privacy. As opposed to a company who "doesn't know who I am". (Apart from unique fingerprint https://amiunique.org/ over many queries over many months)
They try to. But every time a browser gets better at existing methods, it also gains new features which become new methods of identification. The web browser environment is broken. And if you get to fight it by using something with better protection, you're only exposing yourself more because no other users do the same thing.
99% of people are probably signed into a google account when they search google. If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools.
To maintain your level of privacy requires a drastically different lifestyle than most of us have or want.
They didn't state anything about their desired level of privacy other than not wanting a username attached to every search. That's not equivalent to needing to use TOR for every search.
>99% of people are probably signed into a google account when they search google
What is the relevance of this statement? Obviously this wouldn't apply to the parent poster, it doesn't refute anything the parent said, and at least anecdotally it's not true at all.
>If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools.
Privacy is a spectrum, not some binary choice between having a username (and often real name) attached to every search vs. using the dark web for every search. You can land somewhere in the middle, for example: "I don't want a username attached to every search".
There is no technical reason Kagi needs usernames, but they choose to require them. For some people, that points to the company not being as privacy-friendly as other people seem to think/claim.
I dont browse signed in to my Google account, which I barely use. But Google has an open account on each of us, even if we block their servers at the firewall level
Oh well I don't assume I'm in anyway "anonymous" no matter if I got a username/ipadress/cookie/deep-state-monitoring attached to my searches. Things I html-POST to the web is no longer private.
Check it out for your use case. (Have you used up the free searches?) I've not noticed any degradation for my searches. It's going to be different for everyone.
I used them when they first announced their service. Was a nice experience afaik. QWANT is more like internet on hard-mode.. They don't really give you what you're looking for but close enough.. But I've become more dissatisfied with the results of late.
I'll mull the decision for a while but I'm probably going to give Kagi another try.
I noticed that search queries required more thought and perusal to get desired results than normal. Kagi previously would give good enough results that I could figure it out without having to think about Kagi itself. More recently I noticed that I wasn’t able to find answers like this anymore, and compared the query to Google. The results were pretty much identical. I kept using Kagi for another month but it persisted so I stopped my sub. I was an early adopted with Kagi and initially was very happy.
Since Kagi became Google for my purposes, I started using Google again. I don’t have much motivation to curate the customization features personally.
I would imagine that it could depend on the general type of query. As a developer I definitely noticed a decline in quality.
I’m quite privacy focused but for whatever reason don’t care if Google knows that I want to know how to write a helm chart or eat pasta later
I'm still using & paying for Kagi, but I have noticed a sudden drop in search results quality in the last month or two. Unfortunately I didn't take note of the specific searches, but I jumped over to Brave Search and everything I was looking for was right on the top, instead of down around page 2 of Kagi.
There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.
Nope, I don't think so? I'm going through my settings now, and I have Safe Search and Image Safe Search both enabled. Which makes it even more surprising that it was returning hacked government sites mentioning porn in the search snippet.
(Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I would have always had Personalized turned on instead. Seeing those results would be the first time I even encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the domain until then. Since the domain is still in my blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian government sites.)
I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked results, it's only common at times when I'm really researching something and need to get to a second page of results.
I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too. Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN, that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can block those domains from my own personal results.
I haven’t had an issue. I recently started getting GPT results, in addition to the normal search results, and they have been very helpful for quick answers to questions.
