Comment by leonidasv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leonidasv | Hacker News Reader

Kagi, a paid search engine.

I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking.

Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains from results in one click - a refreshing experience. The AI quick answer is on par with Bing's (more accurate than Google's), but the best feature is the possibility of banning/re-ranking websites (such as those SEO-spam ones).

This feature is probably the one any family member will find useful: prioritising websites they like the most and blocking/down-ranking those they dislike. For example, I hate Pinterest and have banned it. My girlfriend, on the other hand, loves it and gave a better ranking. Guess that's what customisation is for...

The lenses are probably also family-worthy, since you can quickly create personalised results pages for good sources for homework research, safe online games for children, trustworthy news for your grandma, etc. But I've never used it extensively yet.

There's also some minor features (auto-login link for anonymous tabs, bangs, news, etc) that you pretty much expect from a search engine nowadays, too. IMO, the most complete and efficient search engine I've used so far.

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences.

I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as my default in the browser.

Maybe I'll give it another go in a few months, but for now it's not for me.

I had the same experience. I really tried to use Kagi as my main search engine but it just was not good enough for me. I did like the feature where you can exclude domains from the results. It couild work nice as some kind of addon to Google search results.

I will give it another try in the future and hope my experience is different. I do like the company and the vision behind it.

Google either finds my results or hides it with SEO spam. Kagi either finds it or doesn't.

In either case I need to re-search, but at least I didn't contribute to adtech and have some control over the results.

what does !g do?

It lets you search the current query on Google. It's also a bang on ddg

Honestly wondering why you'd send the query through Kagi if it is only going to ping ddg/google anyway? Does Kagi do some filtering on the responses?

Maybe I phrased that badly. You would have set kagi as your default search engine, but sometimes you want to search something on a specific site only. With bangs, kagi will redirect you to another search engine instead of running the query itself. If you append !w to your query, you will search on Wikipedia instead. If you append !g, your query is redirected to Google. There is no advantage over searching on Google directly, but it is much faster than going to the Google page if kagi is your default. And I meant that the !g bang works on ddg as well, though there probably is a ddg bang on kagi too.

Also it skips the dumb ads when you search via Kagi.

maybe it's the industry I'm in or the languages I use, but my experience has been the opposite. Being able to filter out all the SEO gamed crap at the top of the results has been great for me and the results are at least on-par with Google.

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