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Comment by schaefer | Hacker News Reader

Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was.

And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.

I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.

Kagi is an aggregator for other, some paid, search APIs. They have, at least in the past, served some percentage of their results from Bing's API among others for example. Kagi seems to me to be dependent on these APIs being available, if they were to go away, so would Kagi.

I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.

I'm not sure Kagi has ever used the Bing API, because (according to Kagi) Bing prohibited changing the results, or merging them with others. Apparently Google is expected to provide access to its index via API soon.

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year.

I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.

Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.

I’ve been using Kagi for about a year now and I genuinely get worried that there are no alternatives if it goes out of business. The results are extremely good, especially in the last 4 months. I like their opt in AI summary as well, just add a question mark at the end.

I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.

I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.

I had tried Kagi a few years ago but it didn't stick. Tried it again now and it feels like a breath of fresh air, which is probably less of a statement about Kagi's advancements and more a statement of what Google has become.

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