A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)
90 comments
·January 10, 2025unlikelymordant
jazdw
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.
wahnfrieden
intext: and quoting solves this…
unlikelymordant
I haven't found quoting helps much. I also feel like i shouldnt have to craft search queries with a lot of inurl or other tags or quoting. Kagi just seems to work better. Its worth 10$ a month to me to not have to worry about it, I use search engines a lot.
vindex10
I used Kagi for a year. It was a great experience, no ads, decent search results. I quit recently, when I discovered that they integrate with Yandex. I think it is unacceptable in the todays reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
fishbacon
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.
freehorse
And I do not want my search experience and product I pay for be dictated by US foreign policy and relations in a given time. Why should a search engine company get involved in international relationship affairs?
llamaimperative
“Wars of aggression are bad” is more of a moral/ethical position than a US foreign policy position.
puszczyk
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
vindex10
I explored the landscape and didn't find good alternative yet. I basically fell back to Google.
One interesting initiative I discovered is that Qwant and Ecosia are teaming up to develop a new independent European search index:
https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-j...
Very much look forward to see this :)
tessierashpool9
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.
puszczyk
Because some of their taxes will fund human safari in Kherson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaig...
tessierashpool9
that's a pretty indirect contribution. if we start to boycott companies because of what is done with the taxes they pay then there won't be many companies left to use or do business with.
mulderc
My brief review of Kagi: I’m never going back to ad-supported search.
I rely heavily on internet search for my job, and Kagi has made everything so much faster that I’ve almost stopped thinking about the search engine entirely. Google search had become frustratingly ineffective, often requiring me to dig deep to find what I needed. With Kagi, it just works. I rarely have to scroll beyond the first few results. In fact, Kagi’s effectiveness has made me search even more—now, I use it naturally without considering other services.
While this article highlights some valid concerns people may have with Kagi, I think the service is solid enough that everyone should give it a try.
yowayb
And for Android, the Brave widget with Kagi search makes it all just a bit more convenient!
abc123abc123
I use duckduckgo and I get great search results. To get summaries of stuff that interesting, but not important, I use duck.ai, perplexity.ai or iask.ai.
Since I am happy with the searches, and it takes very little time, I do not want to pay 10 USD per month.
I do find it interesting that so many people have such great problems with their searches, but I suspect it is because they are searching for very complicated programming problems. Maybe then, duckduckgo does not work.
hooli_gan
For me duckduckgo works great for programming stuff, but for searching local events and restaurants it does not perform as good.
Kokouane
Kagi is a tough pill to swallow. Their search is hands down the best around, there's no other way around it.
That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.
The workaround I found is using Kagi Ultimate. I get access to Claude (and I'm still able to attach files + access a dozen other LLMs) for $25/mo, so I was able to cancel Claude and keep Kagi and get the best of both worlds from either product.
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)
nottorp
> 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.
pcchristie
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.
fhd2
It is tough.
For my company, it's easy: I pay for the tooling my devs need. Overly simplified, I only pay 50-65 % of that, because expenses lower taxes. And compared to salaries, a few hundred $ is not a big deal. If I think about the time it saves us and how much money we can make in that time, it's a no brainer. Even just having people enjoy their work more pays off.
There's opportunity cost. Ad supported services are not overly incentivised to provide a quality product in the long run, so it's a safe assumption to make that they will waste your time to some degree, at least as they mature and enshittify. Some are great, eventually they all become bad, in my experience. It can be smart to use free stuff while it's still good, with an eye on migrating.
I don't know how much sense it makes to apply this opportunity cost thinking to your personal time. I don't really do that, but I do try to reduce time spent on anything that annoys me, and to do more stuff that brings me joy or pride, even if it's not economical. Life is short.
tasty_freeze
> 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.
viraptor
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)
SV_BubbleTime
This is true for me, except I don’t want to run another app, and I like using Claude on mobile.
But the API is tempting for a cost savings.
I put $5 in API for “Continue” extension in VS Code and it’s been months and haven’t used it all up yet.
kevin_thibedeau
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)
BryantD
In that case -- and probably in the case of Kagi vs. Google as well -- it was entirely dependent on focus. In the hypothetical situation where your goal changes from "provide the best possible search" to "beat Yahoo," your available resources will be used on different things, and then...
bboygravity
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
dsissitka
> That being said, $10/mo is also expensive.
Back in the beta they planned on launching with a $20-$30/month unlimited plan and they didn't think they'd be able to bring the price down. That was a little too expensive for me so I moved on. I like what they're doing and I'd pay $10/month but I just don't have a use for it anymore.
tomrod
> a company that has years of search experience (i.e. Google)
From experience on the figurative side of this reality, I can attest that it is hard to build a track while the train is running on it.
akkartik
I'd pay $10 in a heartbeat if Kagi reliably used all my search keywords. But they don't, and I don't understand it. Just use all my words except stop words. I took the trouble to type them in.
I don't care if your coverage isn't as good as Google in its heyday. "0 search results" should be a mark of pride now.
Semaphor
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)
PhilippGille
Did you raise it to the Kagi feedback forum [1] already? Based on Kagi's release notes [2] they regularly fix things like this.
Semaphor
The issue thread about regional search has been open since January 2024 [0], with a lot of talk but no change at all. Some people like the change because they apparently always search in regional mode and want all results there. I posted several examples of my issues there.
I also asked on discord about the dropping of search terms and was just told to use verbatim search (quotes) if I don’t want dropped terms.
[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-ideas-for-improving-localint...
DandyDev
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.
pockmarked19
Say something positive about kagi, receive karma.
Say something negative about google, receive karma.
No place with this kind of system should be relied on for veracious claims.
mistercheph
It's not a system, you are just describing sentiment, people generally like Kagi and generally dislike Google.
Semaphor
That comment you refer to confused me, as I have a similar experience as OP (posted in a sibling comment).
kenanfyi
Long time Kagi subscriber here.
I think their focus should be to reduce resource usage on their side and make servers cheaper to run. Not other shenanigans like t-shirt or FastGPT or whatever. They can then offer a more attractive price for general public, who has never paid for search before and gets caught in the headlights when they hear you pay. Because right now, they don’t even have 40k users and if it goes on with this tempo, while also burning their resources for AI-things, I am afraid they will not stay much longer. Don‘t get me wrong, I am okay with the 10$ I pay, but, come on… who needs a t-shirt of a search engine and two different AI-thingy?!
WarOnPrivacy
> 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.
climb_stealth
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.
lucasban
I’ve been using Kagi for over a year now. I just don’t think about it most of the times, I search, I get what I’m looking for quickly, and I move on. That’s all I want and it’s delivered well, without ads.
UberFly
"The 300 search plan unfortunately just isn’t a very pleasant experience. I’d find myself wincing any time I accidentally typed a query I already knew the result of like Serious Eats Channa Masala into Kagi’s search during my metered month" "...do yourself a favor and jump straight into the $10 USD per month plan"
This exactly. I love using Kagi and felt the relief sweep over me when I went to unlimited. Well worth it to me.
climb_stealth
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.
janalsncm
I remember reading the linked Dan Luu article [1] when it came out. It was much more even handed in addressing the question, in my opinion. In particular, he includes comparisons and analysis of specific queries. For some of them (e.g. “download YouTube video” or “ad blocker”) none of the search engines were even passable.
That’s the kind of side by side analysis you should be looking for.
The second point when people talk about Google getting worse is, is the Internet just getting worse? Maybe it’s both? 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?
This is a genuinely hard problem and it’s interesting so I might take a look into it when I get a chance.
karlshea
> 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.
OldGuyInTheClub
Orion had an update recently that broke my autologin to HN. I posted a question to their forum and they fixed it within a few hours. Incredibly responsive!
sharpshadow
I would like to emphasise Yandex as free alternative for specific queries. It was really relieving actually finding what I searched for.
I have used kagi for quite a while now, and i use it pretty much exclusively. I was unhappy with google ignoring many terms in my search queries and giving me results that I generally considered to be 'intro' pages and generic content, even when my searches were very specific. I have found kagi much better. I dont use any of the advanced stuff like summarisation or ai stuff, i just want search results that have my keywords in them.