A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)

Google search is almost useless for anything but the most basic queries now. Anything technical and it ignores half of the search terms like you said.

And for Android, the Brave widget with Kagi search makes it all just a bit more convenient!

I love it too, and I do think it's expensive, too.

A lot of people laugh at thinking $10 (USD) pm is expensive, of course it's not huge money for most people. The problem is Kagi is a kind of "vote" towards moving the internet away from the ad-supported crapware trying to spy on your every click and capture your attention non-stop. If you're trying to replace a lot of free services with paid services to cast said vote towards shaping the web into what it should be, these costs really add up.

After paying for search, email, supporting a creator or two (e.g. a podcast), and some software here or there, you can easily end up in the hundreds of dollars, then you look back and notice that at best you've saved yourself from a few annoying ads and maybe gotten a fractionally better service and at worst your experience is unchanged and you're just deriving some intangible satisfaction from having not been spied on (which at the individual level doesn't make much difference unless millions of people follow your lead) or supporting a creator you admire.

It's tough.

> That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.

It is more expensive than $0, but if you value your time more than a dollar an hour, the time saved is worth more than $10. I've found I scroll a lot less and have fewer false positive sites where I click in and look around only to find it isn't what my search was looking for.

That is just for the basic search feature. TBH, I haven't even investigated its other features, like lens and the ai stuff.

Can't say I understand how $10/month is expensive.

Quality search results ultimately save time digging through poor quality search results. Add up 300+ searches per month and surely you're hitting minimum wage value at least.

The value proposition is absolutely there at $10.

That (25 usd for Claude + Kagi) is the best sales pitch ever. I'm switching :)

Not sure what I'll do when Grok 3 comes out (I expect it to beat every other LLM out there hands down) but we'll see by then :p

> [...] incredible that a small team [...]

Here, this. Small, focused teams usually deliver more output per person (or even overall) than larger ones. Less management overhead, clear goals and responsibilities, tendency to employ people with cross-disciplinary experience, hiring for talent and not checklists, etc.

> [...] can somehow use LLMs more effectively [...]

LLMs are an incredibly effective tool for the few areas where they do fit the problem. But there's so much "AI" hype going on, everyone is trying to cram it into anything and everything, running around with a hammer trying to smash things just in case they turn out to be a nail. Even the old-time players (who should know better) can't resist the urge.

It's almost like oligopolies faced with changing markets tend to start collapsing under their own weight.

Unless you're a really heavy user, you can possibly save a lot on those LLM bills by using the API and some third party app. (Like Msty for example)

There was a time when it was incredible that a small team like Google could somehow implement search more effectively than a company that has years of search experience (i.e. AltaVista)

> Side note: incredible that a small team like Kagi's can somehow use LLMs more effectively in search than a company that has years of search experience (i.e. Google)

But Google is not a search company. It used to be, but now it's an ad company. I'm sure their LLM use serves their purposes right.

Kagi seems to genuinly have a good mission when it comes to the internet.

I want small web search. I want good results. I will pay for search!

I do not want to support Russia.

What do you use now? I mix Perplexity and Google depending on the query, I wondered how that compares to Kagi. Yandex is a no-no for me as well

why? yandex is not just a great search engine but also a very promising company - at least was before it was brought to the dogs by US/EU.

It's already dirt cheap at $10 per month. Businesses who want to be successful do not bargain on their prices to try to satisfy cheapskates who are never satisfied with anything else than free anyway. They set a fair price for their product and continue to improve the value they bring to real, paying customers.

With that said, they should of course reduce their operating costs when they can, just like any business.

Funnily enough I quite like my Kagi t-shirt. Especially because it does not look like a tech company shirt at all. Could they do better things with their time and money? Probably. Do I care? Not really.

But, I don't care about AI integrations either. I just like having decent search. And happy to pay for it as they seem to be doing things in the right spirit.

> I think their focus should be to reduce resource usage on their side and make servers cheaper to run.

I'd like for them to expose their result cache. Lately I've hit a run of pages that have updated my result away. I have a result-blurb with the search result; I could use what comes before and after it.

It’s highly annoying to me as well. I’m still paying for now, but since they started (I was using them in Beta), they’ve been slowly using towards the mainstream "implicit" behavior and away from "explicit" behavior. I now see myself quoting terms far more often, which has other disadvantages (no typo correction, diacritics becoming relevant, etc.).

It’s the same for regional searches. Used to be (until Dec 2023) I could search for an ambiguous term (e.g. a product name that’s the same in English and German) with "!de" for German regional search and get German results. Now that’s impossible as most results will be the same English pages I’d get with my normal international or US region.

Overall just not a fan of the direction they are moving in (which seems to be DDG with personalization and no ads, but no more expert search)

I find it interesting that another comment states that they love Kagi exactly because Kagi uses all their search terms as opposed to Google. Not doubting your experience here, but I wonder how those experiences can differ so much.

I agree. Perhaps you could help me add examples to this Feedback thread? https://kagifeedback.org/d/5354-kagi-ignores-search-terms

I've added a few, but I worry that adding more is counterproductive. Maybe it would help them prioritize if more people chimed in.

I use DuckDuckGo or pretty much anything else that feels suitable at the time, but I never think about searching this hard. It sounds like using Kagi inserts a conscious awareness of the product you're using. You're not just in the middle of an activity (whatever you're searching for), you're consciously Doing A Search.

Switching to unlimited searches sounds convenient if you can handle the price, but then a sort of Amazon Prime conundrum emerges: since you're paying for one option, why would you want to go anywhere else?

Maybe that's why I see so much enthusiasm for Kagi: when people use it, it's conscious.

This is so true. I only exceeded the 300 queries once but the following anxiety around hitting the limit was really bad for some reason.

On unlimited for a few months now and it is so much nicer to not worry about it anymore.

> Google’s interests aren’t aligned in the same way Kagi’s are, but if Kagi can’t keep blogspam out of its search results why are we blaming Google when they also fail to do so?

Because some of Kagi's results come out of the Google index, so Google could be doing at least as good a job as Kagi is and they are not.

> people talk about Google getting worse is, is the Internet just getting worse? Maybe it’s both?

I've had a lot of experiences where I've inputted a search in Kagi, gotten crap results, tried the same search in Google and gotten the same crap results.

It's starting to feel like the internet is getting worse. Either that or I've been too coddled and I expect direct answers to my questions.