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- cross-posted to:
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Basically the title.
I’m interested in any opportunity to inprove the way I navigate the internet. What I’ve been for a few years now is DDG, which works fine. Not great, not amazing, just fine. And that’s ok considering how they opperate.
I just heard about kagi and was really cosidering it. Makes sense as a business model (pay so we don’t have to sell you data), seems privacy respecting, and claims to strive for best search results in the market. Some test searches from the trial seem promising.
If you’ve used it for any amount of time, what has your experience been with it? What plan are you using? What are you mostly searching for?
Even you haven’t used it, any thoughts / opinions are welcome.
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Haven’t used it, but according to their Privacy & Terms they started using FastGPT which is a dealbreaker for me. I’ll stick to SearX which allows more curation.
they started using FastGPT which is a dealbreaker for me.
Care to elaborate on why? I haven’t being keeping up with all the AIs, and a 3 second search isn’t returning anything nefarious.
Accuracy. They are known to hallucinate. Sifting through various sources to verify information is already time consuming task without AI created nonsense that is impossible to source check.
FWIW, the AI features are not used to provide search results; they are all on-demand and triggered by the user (via Quick Answer, or Universal Summarizer, or the “discuss this site” feature).
The founder is well aware of the problems with AI and that is taken into account when deciding how to use it in Kagi.
See this link: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
Generative AI is a hot topic, but the technology still has flaws. Critics of AI warn that “[AI] will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge”.
From an information retrieval point of view, relevant to our context of a search engine, we should acknowledge the two main limitations of the current generation of AI.
Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details (confabulating). This can easily mislead people who are not approaching LLMs pragmatically. (This is a product of auto-regressive nature of these models where the output is predicted one token at a time, and once it strays away from the “correct” path, for which the probablity grows exponentially with the length of the output, it is “doomed” to the end of output, without the ability to plan ahead or correct itself).
LLMs are not intelligent in the human sense. They have no understanding of the actual physical world. They do not have their own genuine opinions, emotions, or sense of self. We must avoid attributing human-like qualities to these systems or thinking of them as having human-level abilities. They are limited AI technologies. (In a way, they are similar to how a wheel can get us from point A to point B, sometimes much more efficiently than human body can, but it lacks the ability to plan and the agility of human body to get us everywhere a human body can)
These limitations required us to pause and reflect on the impact on search experience, before incoporating this new technology for our customers. As a result, we came up with an AI integration philosophy that is guided by these principles:
AI should be used in closed, defined context relevant to search (don’t make a therapist inside the search engine, for example) AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it (similar to how we use JavaScript in Kagi, where search still works perfectly fine when JS is disabled in the browser) AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)
That is better than most other cases, but far from perfect. It can still be wrong and that’s even more harmul in “Quick Answer, or Universal Summarizer” as people are more liekly to trust it’s result instead of double checking with another source.
That’s completely understandable.
In my experience when I have tested the summarizer it has done well at summarizing only what is there. It also splits it up and cites the sources.
Most people likely won’t look at the sources, and you are right that is putting a lot of trust in it, especially if they don’t understand how the tech works.
I find it good for saving time on something I just need a quick answer on to solve an immediate problem at hand.
For example the other day I asked it for the rules to Stratego. It listed it all right there and pointed out where there was any disagreement between various versions of the game. The stakes were low if something was wrong, and I saved several minutes trying to piece together and remember all the rules from various sites.
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Most of the price goes to search engine API costs like Google
If you like google’s engine without all the trackers and other garbage, check out https://startpage.com
I wouldn’t trust Startpage anymore since they were bought by an advertisement company. Better use Whoogle fo get results from Google.
Oh damn, good to know. I’m still kind of newly figuring out better privacy-minded options for myself. Thank you!
FYI: I’m not affiliated with Kagi, even though my opinion seem very biased
Been using Kagi for so long. Currently I’m using their unlimited plan. It’s really helped me with my research because kagi can summarize pdf directly on the search result. You can also ask about pdf like what chatgpt premium version did.
I went from $10 to $25 because I want to support them for making this beautiful simple search.
I’ve been using it since last year. It’s always been much better than the mostly unusable ones Google has given me for years now. It’s the best $10 I spend. It saves me time.
I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.
The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.
I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.
The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.
I’m actually in my first month as a paying subscriber. I’ve tried their 100 queries trial and was pretty happy with the results. However, with my current search profile I definitely need the $10 subsription, if not more. I’m honestly not sure their new pricing model makes sense at all. It seems way to expensive for the average person or poweruser alike.
I’ll decide whether I stay a customer after this month, when I have a better impression of all the features and shortcomings of the service.
I really like Kagi. Its text search is better than Google’s. Its image search still sucks though.
I have used Kagi for a few weeks now after hearing about it on Lemmy.
At first I wasn’t that impressed for the price. It is really growing on me the more I use it though. Where it really shines is the customizations. Once you rank up and down to your preferences the results are way better than anywhere else.
One way they rank results is based on how much tracking a website has. You can also see the number of trackers, check the archive or do an ai summary of it without even visiting the website. You find a lot of high quality nonprofit information with the commercial high tracking websites filtered out.
I also made custom redirects for sites like reddit and quora for privacy frontends.
I find myself actually using bangs now that I can customize them. You can also add other search engines so they are one click away if you want a second opinion. Lenses are great, I made some custom ones to search the top 10 websites for forums, tech support, news, etc.
When I don’t feel like sifting through a bunch of results the ai summarizes the results. When it doesn’t come up with a good summary it’s because the results don’t have the answer and you saved a bunch of time.
The free trial wasn’t enough time for me to decide if I liked it. I am glad I paid for the $10 plan. However, I seem to do about 3,000 searches a month. I was able to upgrade to unlimited at a prorated amount. $25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
$25 is a lot per month but it is saving me a lot of time and helping me to find better results so I find it worth it.
I justify the cost by relating it to how it helps me at work. I believe Kagi makes me more effective; my boss(es… :( ) and peers notice, and that translates to better performance evaluations and raises. I don’t hide my usage of it from my team, but I don’t think they realize how much of an advantage it gives me. Once you get the rankings and lenses tuned to your workflow, it’s amazing how it lets you cut through the nonsense of the internet.
My trials of it always seem outstanding, but the price with search limits has thus far discouraged me from signing up every time I think to do so. $5 for 10k searches (or some number that I wouldn’t have to think about as a human user searching for things) would get me over the fence. Even the family plan with up to 2 users seems stingy.
Interesting concept, curious if it does decent results. Wonder if it has any biases towards certain things. How is it indexing? Is it going to have searches full of link farms? I do see a trial of it that I guess one could test initially to see how it does. I do see they have a browser as well, but it’s Mac/iOS only.
To me kagi will always be the DRM supplier and shareware payments processor company.
I really like how it looks and how it performs, but I can’t justify the price.
I have not tried it, but I’m not a fan of logging into a search engine or providing an email. Mullvad, by comparison, just gives you an account number.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-does-kagi-search-require-an-email-address
I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…
On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.
Yeah +1 on Google Search becoming shit lately. I shifted to DDG for a while but settled on Brave Search for now. Their new AI summarizer is quite good and I like how they club Discussion posts together.
DDG was great a few years ago and has steadily become shitter and shitter with time. Its still my default but I find myself banging to others more and more.
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Well Mullvad can only offer that because they require you to be on their VPN. How would Kagi enforce their payment plan without an account?
Mullvad can offer that because they generate you a one time access token that’s good until a certain time for a set number of simultaneous clients.
Kagi could do a simpler version - an access token that’s good until a certain number of searches. In fact, they have that mostly built - the link they tell you to use in private sessions is literally it.
Add to that anonymized payment options, and you got yourself a hard to track design.
