"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.
Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.
You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
Is it worth $10 so you don't have to search the Python docs directly? That seems terribly wasteful (monetarily, computationally), when you could use something like devdocs, among dozens of other options.
You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Sure, but given the shit state that Google is, I argue that normal users would rather have to curate their own blacklist a few times instead of being subjected to (at best) SEO spam or (worse) malicious websites.
Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.
I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
I haven't set up blacklist for my kagi account. Searched for "python sum", got a link to the python doc as the first result. So imo. you dont need a blacklist.
Google's customers are the companies who pay them to place adverts in search results. The results page includes them and it's not always clear at a glance which results are promoted/paid.
I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.
I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.
The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)