Probably a good pricing decision. To avoid hitting the 300/month usage I kept DDG as default and only used Kagi for more complex searches. If I upgrade to this I could then keep Kagi as default.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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How does ddg compare? I've tried kagi, but didn't find it much better than ddg. Perhaps I should try again.
Similar to what other people mentioned, I find it good at filtering out the obvious SEO spam. Otherwise the top 3 results of a search aren't really different.
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you'll be logging your own data. You'll have complete control, it's significantly cheaper, and it's far more private without having to even login.
No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
DDG proves literally all of that false. Also just use AdBlock with it. Elaborate on it working in private browsing without needing to login.
DDG is just a wrapper around Bing and substantially worse than Google, smaller index and less up to date. Not needing a login doesn't really guarantee you anything either, as they still can identify you by IP or device finger print if they want to. You basically have to trust their marketing that they don't do that.
What makes Kagi interesting is that it's actually right up there with Google in terms of results, while surpassing it in terms of features. Would I pay $10/month for Kagi? Nope. It's good, but not magic. It's still just regular Internet search and you'll find most of what it finds with other search engines as well, especially when you hop between multiple. But if you want a better search engine and have the money, Kagi does feel like an upgrade, which the other alternatives just don't.
DDG has ads in the search result. Laginis honestly a great service. You can easily filter results and it removes BS SEO spam..
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:
- Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
- 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.
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.
This says they index
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
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.
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
@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
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.
what search engines are actually good these days?
because that's the problem, they aren't
search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
I don't think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Explain how they're better.
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login.
Just because something requires a login, doesn't mean searches are logged. That's something you and I simply can't know.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported
Explain.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance
And you easy do you think this is for the average Joe?
Unless you can actually explain your points, you should stop arguing in bad faith.
Yeah if you literally just scrolled down, I elaborated on everything. Keep your "bad faith" bullshit to yourself when you're doing it to me. Quit the astroturfing. Also yes, having an account means they objectively can track you since queries are coming from an account. There is zero guarantee they are not logging. You are shilling. "If it's free then you're the product" is just not a thing that's true in reality. DDG has ads based off of search keywords. Wikipedia is entirely donations. Services exists without the user being the product.
There is zero guarantee they are not logging.
There is also zero guarantee that they are logging. Both are equally true.
DDG has ads based off of search keywords.
That's still using the general DDG userbase as a product. Just because the ads aren't personalized, doesn't mean you're not a product for ad placement.
Wikipedia is entirely donations.
Wikipedia is run by a non-profit organization. If something offered by a business is free, then you are the product.
Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?
@sculd asked the same question further down and got a couple of good responses.
Seconding this
EDIT BEINGS HERE
So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded "enshittification", Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.
This does not mean that it's not problematic that their code is closed-source.
EDIT ENDS HERE
I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.
For one, it's based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.
Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.
It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
https://kagi.com/privacy at least sounds pretty good.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification.
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round this sound good as well.
The part that I don't get is how they can match Google in terms of search results quality when Microsoft couldn't even get close with Bing and a heck of a lot more time and money.
Don't think you will find a better search engine than Kagi. They can't even see what queries users are running, according to their own comments.
That'd be weird if they couldn't, there's no way they can improve their search engine other than by watching the way users use it.
Otherwise it exists in a vacuum.
I would guess they mean that they can't see which queries belong to which users.
What's wrong with simply switching as soon as enshittification starts? You're not making any permanent commitments to it.
There is no law in the requiring data logging in the US, nor is it required to comply with FBI security data requests. and beat out gag orders over the subject. It is also deemed a violation of the first amendment.
Does Kagi support languages outside of English? One issue I have with DDG is the lack of results outside English sites. If Kagi is similar then it would be a big issue.
It does, I search in languages other than English quite often and the results are still high quality IMO.
That's a curious project and I hope they succeed. But I have to wonder. On their "Why pay for search engines" page, they state the following:
Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use.
So, will they dial the price back up or do they currently just hope that most people pay for the "unlimited searches per month" plan but use it less than an average user would?
They probably haven't updated the page. This blog post says:
With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.
So it sounds like they have made lots of efficiencies to make it cheaper per search. I'm sure more subscribers helps as well.
But I'm really curious about the "new search sources" part. Where do they source their searches from?
They probably have a lot of potential infrastructure savings. $1/80 searches is an absolutely astronomical cost.
I'm imagining there are quite a few gains they can get by way of optimization, different technologies, and optimizing hot paths to bring that number down.
It really depends how they built this thing. For instance, if they built this on the AWS ecosystem, using more than straight compute/K8, their costs are going to be an actual order of magnitude higher than if they didn't.
Their operations are very small scale still. I imagine as the economy of scale does its thing, that price/search will fall drastically.
Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.
Ah this is fantastic! I've only been using Kagi for a few months, and have been concerned about running into the search limit, but this means I can go and set it as the default everywhere now.
Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!
That is actually great thing for now was using you.com might finally move
So how is you.com? I tried using it several months ago was not impressed with the results. That time brave and ddg was better.
to be suprising works kinda fine though still sometimes needs to fall back to other search engine. Though using AI chat is great with Pro plan.
Hmm I hope this one will live on. I remember Neeva which never let their users know that they could sign up and then shut down because they didn't have enough income..
Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.
Kagi has better search results than any other engine I've used. That is why people pay for it.
No it doesn't. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.
This is literally "nuh uh" quality discussion. We get it, you like SearXNG, are you actually trying Kagi?
I just tried a few SearXNG instances and the quality is the same as what I get from Google or Bing anyways.
Trying out Kagi now to see if it's better or not.