Technology

It shows up for me in the UI. I imagine that it works, and if it doesn't, it'll be debugged.

I think that the bigger question is whether the rate of spam website creation will outpace the rate of human flagging of them.

Kagi's process involves humans. I bet that the spam website stuff runs autonomously.

Try the free trial.

They give you enough searches for free that you should be able to figure out if there is value for you and the type of searches you do.

I find it a much better experience than Google which was what I was using before.

Is Kagi worth it?

I've heard differing accounts. Some people definitely swear by it. But if you're just using search as a portal to Wikipedia or Generic News Of the Day, it still points you to the same catalog of high profile sites as everyone else.

$5-10/mo isn't a wallet buster. But is it really any better than searching Google with udm=14 turned on? YMMV.

Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me how much Kagi is cribbing from the other search engines and how much is their own internal web crawling and sorting heuristics.

I think so. I’ve been using it for over a year, as another poster said Kagi feels like Google did 15 years ago, before it destroyed itself.

Every time I use a search on another machine, my first reaction is “oh my god what is all of this shit everywhere? ads, spam, AI slop, shopping garbage, etc”, then I quickly realize it’s not my computer and that’s just what Google looks like now.

Absolutely. I've been using it for a month and it feels like Google, but before they enshittified. DDG was my previous goto search engine, but it's gotten really bad as well. Especially the aggressive keyword replacements drove me almost insane.

Yes

I enjoy it. They have a 100-search free trial so you can test it out for yourself. Between them down ranking sites full of trackers and allowing you to put your own preferential ratings on sites, I find myself getting the results I'm after so much quicker.

You are paying for search, just differently.

https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth

https://wallethub.com/blog/bad-google-results-for-0-apr/157511

Maybe Cory Doctorow can? https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/

Your money, or your personal data, used for whatever damned purpose they choose.

That’s really the choice.

Running services costs money.

Can anyone here convince me it's worth the price?

Depends on what you want from them and your financial situation.

For me, yeah, it is. I want to pay a service fee and not deal with ads or someone logging, profiling, and trying to figure out how to monetize my searches. For me, the $10/mo for unlimited searches tier is what I want. I'm principally concerned about privacy.

I don't really take much advantage of most of the extra stuff they do other than the Threadiverse (they call it "Fediverse Forums") search lens and sometimes their Usenet search engine. Maybe this effort to suppress AI-generated spam websites will be nice, but have to see what happens, as I expect that the SEO crowd creating spam websites will also aim to adapt if it becomes sufficiently impactful to their bottom line.

If one of their extra features particularly fits your use case (say, the ability to fiddle with website priorities or blacklist or pin them in your search results) that might be valuable to you, but I can't speak as to that. I've seen people on here say that they really like that, but I don't use that functionality. Or the ability to easily download images in results from their image search if you're on mobile and are hitting something like pinterest, which is obnoxious on Google Images. Search bangs. Depends on what features you use and what each is worth to you.

It makes sense it costs them something, but if it helps at all I've been paying for kagi since before the ai assistant stuff was included, it was the same price.

Wait, 2-person

Edit: oh, my dad and I both subscribe. I might even do the family plan and bring my wife into it.

Then I have great news for you! Kagi accept bitcoin, does not validate email addresses (so you can register as fhhdsbgwg@hrjesbgwgw.com if that appeals to you), and they implemented privacy pass tokens that fully anonymize your searches. They also allows searching through tor!

Just use their third party crypto payment service. It doesnt transmit any of this. Perhaps look this kind of thing up prior to insinuating these things are required for Kagi.

They have a no-log, no-profile policy, which is why I use them.