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I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.
SEO spam has been strangling the web for years. Now, genAI SEO spam has escalated that onto inhuman levels. To make matters worse, no one wants to post to the open web anymore because their posts are just going to drown in that sea of spam and only genai's data stealing bots will read them. As the amount of spam posted to the web increases, the amount of worthwhile content posted decreases. Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)
You can lay the blame for the web's death squarely at Google's feet for allowing SEO to hijack search in the first place (or maybe the government is to blame for not breaking up Google's ad/search empire fast enough). Either way, the big companies all know the end is here and are gambling on genai to replace search. Already, places of knowledge are closing their borders and charging fees for genai to access.
We have entered the internet's dark age.
Fun aside: I think it's hilarious and fitting that Google's genai model sucks. And I hope they lose the genai wars (just out of spite, not because I think any other genai is worth a shit).
> Eventually, nothing of value will be posted. (like facebook?)
I'm in a couple of dozen groups on Facebook and they produce interesting and thoughtful content every day.
Of course I wish they were on the open web, but don't blame the network.
Plenty of awesome old guard still around (for example check out this mind blowingly awesome resource on all things water: https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/) among many other small web folks who are moving back towards making and maintaining a personal website. All that stands between you and the small web you miss is you. Kagi is fantastic though, I started using it recently and it takes me back to mid 2000's google. they even have a section dedicated to small web; https://kagi.com/smallweb
> I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.
I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general.
Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?
> I think the web is dead
The web cannot 'die'. Everything and everyone moves online.
Point one: A return to pre-internet days is not likely.
Point two: Walled gardens had their peak moment. The dangers of everybody relying on them for our entire online existence are more than apparent to anybody with a firing neuron (and despite appearances, our species is not entirely inane).
Ergo. The only path is forward, a more sane, less monopolized web. Build it and they will come.
I think there may be a way forward for the internet. Why isn't hacker news being strangled by SEO spam for example? I think the way forward is a much smaller internet predicated on tight-knit communities approving everything that's shared. I don't know how this could scale but maybe that's the point, it must stay small to succeed.
I think that the core of the issue isn't "big corporations" but rather the fact that the internet is more accessible than ever, which means that the ratio of users who want to create content for fun, to the users who want to just consume content or create it for monetary reasons, is completely different than years ago.
Well, you could consider a 'search engine' to be a searchable curated website directory. You could manually curate this directory and only use scrapers to allow text search on these websites. This will always be a possible option and a way ensure that your search site is good.
You cite Facebook as an example of no meaningful content yet put all the blame upon Google?
Maybe content creators are just incentivised into giving 90 percent of the public what they want.
I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different.
Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall.
For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches.
Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.
A point I hardly ever see anyone bring up: I’m not a fan of the idea of doing all my searches while signed in, potentially creating a company-knows-me-better-than-myself situation. I do my searches in private windows mostly behind commercial VPNs so that it’s difficult enough to profile me that companies probably won’t bother. Public search engines have to get really bad before I move to a sign-in-required one.
But given that this community which ostensibly touts privacy at every turn seems to overwhelmingly support feeding everything (not just searches) into OpenAI/Claude, I guess my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe.
Btw I’m by no means a privacy maximalist.
To provide some counterweight to all the overwhelmingly positive reviews:
I've used kagi for 6 months and have over 7500 searches with them. It mostly works, but there are a few downsides compared to Google:
- The latency is a lot higher than google, taking over a second to display any results. - The results are often not as relevant, I have to frequently retry my search in Google. - The results for anything local (I'm not in the US) are abysmal. Searching for anything in my city instead only gives me results for the city's history.
Still, I persist in using Kagi, mainly because it's not Google and I want them to succeed. The results are frequently good enough for me to stay with them.
I would convert, but price is too high for me personally.
I'd be willing to pay up to 3$ a month for my searches, but also per-use.
If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay?
A replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap, it's so easy to ignore sponsored search results (for now).
Another Kagi user for a year or two. I've honestly never had a single negative experience. Since using Kagi, I've only had to use google a couple of very desperate times. I don't notice the subscription fee because I get excellent value from it.
Kagi simply does what you ask and stays out of the way. Because you pay them, they don't need to monetize every pixel on the screen. No tracking or data mining. It's just software that does what it says it does and does what you tell it.
It's tragic that "thing that does one thing well and doesn't spy on you" is a scary and alien concept these days.
Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet. Once Kagi gains traction I guarantee result quality will nosedive.
Why are there so many paying Kagi customers who feel the to write multiple paragraphs of testimonies? This is so unusual of HN.
Reeks of astroturfing.
People are sad over google demise, but we have more tools than before, and easily we can mitigate.
- there are other search engines, like kagi
- we have AI, chatgpt, which some people find use for. I use it to ask general questions about programming problem solving and it often helps me. I do not know every language, and when I needed to write browser extension it saved me a lot of time
- bookmarking software. I wrote my own self-hosted software [1], with search ability. I do not have to 'research' everything I find interesting. Google will not bury inconvenient news anymore, or filter it
I think we need is adapt. When Google entered, Yahoo was not able to change. IBM was not able to change. Old tech is replaced by new solutions. We need to reconsider how to find things online.
To be in the top 1% you would likely need to depend on search on a daily basis for your livelihood. As a reminder the Starter plan is USD $5/month with 300 searches included.
99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. That's interesting and hard to accept but might be true with many living in apps and wall gardens like facebook. I wonder what the mode number is for those 99%. 1 or 2 searches a day.
I can highly recommend switching to kagi. Happy paying customer here.
I’ve been an happy subscriber for nearly one year now. I even tried DuckDuckGo for some time but the quality just wasn’t the same.
Kagi is easily in the top tier of my subscriptions (along with JetBrains and my cloud backup provider), where if it were a local business, I'd go there to pay in person, and smile while doing it.
I feel respected as a customer and I feel like I'm getting great value from the service. A LLM-fueled storm might be brewing on the web, but I'm definitely riding into it with Kagi.
The idea of paying for services online that most people expect to get for free is great, actually.
There was a time when you simply expected to pay for anything that had value. Whether that was a newspaper, a magazine, a movie, music, or even an online service like AOL or CompuServe, you paid for it and you expected a certain level of quality in return.
In the early days of the Web, it wasn't clear at all that sites could pay their bills with advertising. Then in the mid-'90s, Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up ad (he's apologized since) and things progressed - or regressed, if you prefer - and we slid down the long slope to companies selling your data, hyper-targeting ads, and worse.
So many of society's ills right now can be traced to the ad-driven model. It's why clickbait is lucrative, why it's more profitable to run a populist site filled with misinformation than a trustworthy news org, it's how scammers and spammers are incentivized to flood social media sites with slop.
I'd love to see Kagi succeed, and others to follow their lead. I'd much rather spend an extra $20, $30, even $50 a month or more to subscribe to a bunch of ad-free sites that I can trust than to get it all for "free" at the cost of ads, data mining, and scammy clickbait.
Apart from search customizations, I also use the bang searches (a few mine and many from https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs). I also recently switched to ultimate and created a few assistants with system prompts for my various needs (coding, learning chemistry, etc.)
I use Kagi, it’s pretty good. I pay for it and would recommend everybody at least evaluate.
The worst bits, which aren’t even that bad:
The maps are a work in progress.
No shopping search. If I want something like shopping search I can use Google.
Not sure if it’s because I’m in Australia but sometimes it takes a while for the page to load. Subsequent searches are faster.
I would pay for Chrome Premium, as I pay for Youtube Premium. Prefer the Brave/YT Premium model where creators and sites get some share of your payment. The Kagi model, unless I missed it, seems to be "just pay us" with nothing going to creators.
I have signed up off and on. For me, the starter is just a tad to few searches per month. If I had 400 I would most likely just pay the $5 out of support for the team as I am also hoping to see Orion do better (bitwarden issue)
I have some months where I search for stuff I already know. Like I goto url bar and just type imdb which then initiates a search. I know the dang url but am lazy lol.
I wish the team tons of luck, I monitor the pricing page monthly usually, just hoping to see a small uptick in starter limits as unlimited is just not my use case. $8.00 for unlimited and again, I would sign up just to support them.
The interesting thing about their calculation of Google's $23/m revenue per user, is how much of that is simply by matching a user's query and location to ads? i.e. Is all the additional data collection and abandonment of privacy entirely necessary to reach anywhere near that number?
Also it's not clear if the numbers used in the article omits publisher ads from Adsense.
It would be great if G's advertisers were opened up to competitors, I think a CPA model would work out well since combatting click fraud involves a lot of profiling.
I love my Kagi account, and will continue to pay. It is too US-centric, something I've been asked to report in HN comments (I have), and something that continues to be a problem.
But as with all of these things, I'm paying to no longer be the product. That's the value for me, and so "it not working exactly as I expect 100% of the time" is actually a small price worth paying.
Generally speaking, I find the quality of results usually on a par with Google.
Paying customer here. Kagi all day every day
Quick questions por people that have used it: is it good for technical searches? Like math/programming? At some point I tried another search engine but I ended up going back to Google for those. For what type of topics do you find yourself going back to Google/other search engine?
Very serious question:
How is this better than using Google with an ad blocker?
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That’s my current solutions, why should I switch to paying for Kagi? Ty!
I am on Family plan for over a year. Very happy z including czech sites.
Never going back to FASS, Kagi is great. So much better than Google, and getting better every day now that Google is sticking made up nonsense into the results.
I like that I get to choose when to use GPT.
If you’re on iOS, the Orion browser is great, too - tldr chrome extensions on iOS.
I’ve considered using kagi before, but I think this blog post finally convinced me not too: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
The quick summary is that they aren’t really privacy focused at all, don’t comply with GDPR, and generally seem ok misleading their customers. The lack-of-privacy doesn’t bother me itself, but misleading customers really troubles me. Why would I trust them with X when I know they’ve lied with Y?
Because:
> If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. -- Andrew Lewis
I didn't have much success with Kagi for Spanish/local searches. Has this improved?
The only time I think about using or paying for Kagi is when I see these posts on HN and get FOMO. I think that's because I actually don't have that SEO garbage problem anymore. AI apps have made search, and learning in particular, a lot easier.
When I do a Google search for the example query "postgresql query analysis" on mobile chrome (no ad block), I get 0 ads.
Same thing if I select the "Example" filter as shown in the demo image.
i liked the idea but here in SEA the latency is just nuts compared to google.
As a bit of a socialist I guess I should at least suggest that in the information age search is infrastructure. IP addresses are the commons. Capitalism will, of course, argue it's right to make money where it can but ..
And I am sure it is not in the national interest to have another country in a position to turn off your infrastructure.
Another happy Kagi user here, I also love the fact they also give FastGPT as a bonus.
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