This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).

Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

  • Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
  • “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
  • All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
  • Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better

    Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That’s very expensive to do. There’s two options as to how to pay for it:

    1. Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
    2. Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do

    The latter is what people mean when they say “you’re the product”. The advertisers are the customers.

    self-host a searx instance

    Two totally different things.

    Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Kagi doesn’t index, it’s Google results as a proxy. That’s literally what Searx does, and it’s free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn’t, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they’re profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.

      Searx could use Kagi though.

      Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi’s ToS. You’re running a self hosted proxy through a service that’s just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.

      “If you aren’t paying for something, you are the product” sounds nice, but isn’t true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.

      Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn’t work in private search.

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

          But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.

          They just proxy searches and then sort them lol. Definitely caching thrown in there too, as if that even changes anything. You’re paying $10/mo for that when DDG does the same thing for free.

          • abaci@discuss.tchncs.de
            3·
            1 year ago

            It says right there they have their own index, that they are pulling from Google et Al and also their own. Whether it’s worth $10, I dunno. But it sounds like more than just an aggregator

            • Peter Bronez@hachyderm.io
              1·
              1 year ago

              @abaci @mojo 100% worth it for me.

              I switched from Google to #DDG to #Kagi. Even if the results were exactly the same, Kagi is FAST. The whole experience is very snappy.

              Beyond that:

              - All your DDG bangs work, and you can add custom bangs

              - They have some neat AI summarization features.

              - You can manually boost/penalize/block domains

              - Lenses focus your search on particular kinds of sites

              • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Comments like these really make this feel like this is astroturfing. It makes no sense to shill for a product this hard, let alone a really privacy invasive one that is worse the free alternatives.