Often times it does not make sense to serve free users who are often causing more hassle than it's worth. Having a free trial and then either converting users or not makes sense, but serving a user who uses it for a few queries every month ("I check every few months and only do a few searches at most") potentially does not exactly make sense business wise or even warrant the time building that free tier for an audience that's not willing to pay anyway.
The AI results were bad beyond all human understanding - the sort of product that I thought only a walking corpse like Microsoft could release so broadly. But, that is essentially what Google Search is now. Clearly no one in a position of responsibility knows or cares about product design or performance and it only continues to exist through sheer inertia.
Switching to Kagi is how it felt when I first used broadband internet in college , or when I switched from Alta Vista to Google: the internet works like it should.
Nearly ironically, because the site is already created for low vision, it had issues with the things that I do. Dark Reader froze up (uncommon) and the font was, for the first time, too large.
I am glad to see someone else enjoying Kagi.
Legally blind here too o7
Having done plenty of text to speech testing of my own website, I've never thought to turn it onto a Google search results page. It's abysmal.
Of course Google is an accessibility nightmare.
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> Name: Kagi
> Shortcut: k
> URL: `https://kagi.com/search?q=%s`
looks like one can do this and use search without needing to be logged in. pleasantly surprised to see this. i wonder how they would rate limit users this way.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970105191743/https://kagi.com/
Clearly inferior to Google though.
I also noticed that Kagi does not ever return more than 250 results. Just 250. Kagi is not the kind of search engine that is useful for someone who is used to web surfing in the kind of style that emerged in the 90s/00s. It is more of a curated corporate search engine that tells you what it thinks you want to see. You are never allowed the resources/results to actually look for yourself.
In the end it was the later that put me off using it. Even though other search engines have been gimped as well (Google only returns a maximum of 400 search results these days, Bing 900, etc) 250 was just far too small to be useful.
If you want to hear from a happy Kagi user, I can say that I used Google thrice in the last two years, and it didn’t bring better results than Kagi.
I push docs.rs up because otherwise I often get the crates.io page which I never want.
And I push GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg sites up so I get actual repos instead of product pages.
I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.
The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.
What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.
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tbf, those are common in every Kagi or Search Engine in general article on HN ;)
- A happy user since the beta days before you even had to pay.
Kagi allows personalization, the difference is you as a user control it. If you used kagi for decade (assuming this is what you used Google for) I am sure the results would be fine tuned to your preference too.
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040521
Yes and yes, since you you apparently aren't capable of reading for yourself
-edit- I decided I didn't like the tenor of the comments I made. This tone serves nothing but to degrade the quality of online discourse so I will say this:
I don't personally have the technical chops to verify the claims that Kagi is making. And no one should blindly trust the statements of faceless companies. For me personally, the claims, discussion in the linked hacker news post, and the direction of Kagi's economic incentives are enough to satisfy me personally. Nothing says that someone else must be satisfied by that level of evidence, which is definitely not proof positive. However, I also very strongly believe that the level of paranoia that it takes to decide that all of that is not enough would also 100% disbar one from using google, even without an account. I do not think that one can honestly say that, with the evidence we have on hand, that Kagi is less privacy protecting that google. They may not be privacy protecting enough, whatever standard that is for someone, but they are absolutely doing more than google.
No privacy-related concerns were raised back then.
It is a german blog (sorry, couldn’t find an EN-version), and a very trustworthy source for me.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/besser-als-google-bezahlsuchmasch...
You can pay anonymously[1]. You can also authenticate anonymously, as someone else already mentioned.
Meanwhile Google retains everything forever and does everything in their power to track everything you do across the web and tie it back to you, logged in or not. This is their entire business model.
And it is not like you marry kagi and once you sign up you can never use another search engine again.
But as I read the OP it is that he objects to the barrier of entry. He would prefer (possibly very harsh) rate limiting over the hassle of registrering an account. Maybe combined with a weak "nag" screen.
It might be hard implementing in a bulletproof way as IP restrictions are easy to circumvent. But it might be "good enough" to drive more adoption.
I'm a bit on the fence. It would be an interesting experiment.
I am not paid to design kagi architecture nor I know the internals, but let’s say I can host that mentioned anonymizer myself (say in Canary Islands), and it pulls the queries from kagi who you have paid for by monero, then the company knows nothing about the user, no profiling, no tracking, nothing, that’s a great starting point.
If this doesn’t exist, using something like searxng is far better (privacy wise), not just as mentioned on how it’s more anonymous, but also it gives you the ability to blend in, rather than looking like a sore thumb in the logs.