this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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That's why I use Kagi. It's a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.
This whole thread reads like astroturfers
Nobody ever likes anything
If you really don’t believe me, check out [no longer available] - my Searx instance which I stopped using because of Kagi.
Edit: I realize now you didn't reply to me, I came back to the after seeing people downvoting my (honest) comment in this thread and your comment kinda pissed me off so I just wrote a response quickly.
When we're talking about the issues of search engines, and a whole bunch of people come in and "organically" promote a paid service, then my astroturfing detection rises up. This is how modern advertisement works and it fucking sucks.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s not very nice to accuse people of astroturfing when you can quickly look at their other posts/comments.
Literally every person in this subthread who said something positive about Kagi is very clearly just a normal user who has recently posted things completely unrelated to it, judging by their history.
Maybe I’m being naive about how sophisticated these campaigns have gotten, but it seems unlikely that a small company will invest the effort in making it seem this believable on such a niche platform.
Yes, this is exactly how it works. This behavior is well documented.
Not saying 100% all these users are astroturfing accounts, but I'm just pointing out this looks like it
It's tough, because people also like to recommend things they like. If a friend in real life told you about the new CastX® Iron Extreme™ cast iron skillet that they got and how they love its rich iron flavor, you would just think they just like their new pan.
I haven't used kagi, but the service being paid is not the red flag you think it is, as long as the privacy policy and ToS make sense.
Do they already have their own index? Last time I used it (when it was still beta) it was quite okay, but it was basically yandex or whatever with a different front-end and site-pinning
Look at https://kagi.com/faq .
They basically query other search engines and APIs in a privatized manner and they use their own indexes as well. I used Google, Ecosia, StartPage, DDG, a self-hosted SearXNG instance and then Brave. I liked DDG and I kinda liked Brave Search, as well. But in comparison to Kagi, they're all not that good in my opinion.
The image search of Kagi is especially what blows me away. It just shows relevant results for my queries and I'm satisfied.
I love kagi. I use it mainly for work, where it gives much better results. It even has a programmer lens so that it shows results that are relevant to programmers. But its image search didn't work that well for me. Not sure if I'm just not formulating the queries right though.
Kagi is actually awesome.
I just started using it this month and I’m blown away by the results.
I just started my trial, so far it's looking good!
That’s why I use brave search, it’s a free search engine and the results are actually really good
Even if it's good, their long term goal will always be to appease their advertising customers, not you. Google has the ability more than anyone else to make the perfect search engine but they're not spending their time and resources on that because that's not what will increase their revenue. That model is just fundamentally broken.
I used it before and unfortunately, it sucks in comparison to Kagi.
Idk, I found it to be quite good but it may be just me knowing how to search stuff (even tho Google just gives shitty results and DDG is hit or miss)
I also know how to use keywords, etc. And maybe I went a bit overboard when I said Brave Search sucks. It doesn't suck, but with Kagi, I don't feel like a product any more and the search results make sense again, like with Google a couple years ago. Most free search engines just don't work that good any more.
If you would've told me 2 years ago that I'll be paying for a search engine in the future... Well, I would've thought that you're crazy. But here I am now.