How I Use Kagi

> You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.

I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.

That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.

So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.

But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.

Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now.

Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.

> In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.

To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]

[1}; https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/advertising-in-ancient...

I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?

The increased fuzzy interpretation is Google's greatest downfall. It takes away any ability to use it as a power user or for super-specific stuff. No Google, you don't know better than me. I need something really specific and you're "smoothing" the results to what some average random searcher might want!!

I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.

It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.

I'm curious, how is the AI assistant experience different from Perplexity or even ChatGPT's search feature? Is it just the convenience of having several models there or are the outputs inherently better because the results are from Kagi's engine instead of google?

Imagine if they analyzed all the user-blacklisted domains and deranked them from other (new) users' results. Death of SEO!

Try anything related to visas. "us esta", "canada eta".

On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.

I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.

Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.

[delayed]

I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.

I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.

I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.

I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".

Based response, I support that view.

Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.

Would you ever consider switching out Yandex for something like the Brave Search API or Bing (if they aren't already part of the mix)?

While I do understand your position, it's important to understand including Yandex in your index doesn't mean that politics aren't influencing your results; it's not an apolitical position.

Thank you for creating Kagi, sorry that you're dealing with misguided folks and thanks for the in-depth explanation.

Dang, this is a refreshing take. Going to take a look at Kagi.

Would it not be possible for the user to disallow certain sources for searching, so as to not pay them for the API call?

If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action, you should reconsider your ability to do so morally

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.

Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"

It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.

Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?

If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"

So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.

Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.

For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.

For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.

I live in the Eastern Bloc. I fear Russia. We still see the bulletholes in the old houses in the inner city that were done by the "liberators".

Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith.

Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.

It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.

Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.

I do not accept simply doing nothing.

Yes, Yandex, they pay them for some of their search results. Here is their own statement, where they refuse to stop, even though people keep asking them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

You can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query.

It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.

Not a great look. Even if you somehow believe partnering with Yandex is justifiable, you should stand by the decision.

My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.

Good links. Him making out that hiding it is to help users is a bit gross.

It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.

Thats not at all what he said.

All countries pay for their militaries. Russia invaded Ukraine and is actively comitting genocide.

There is a difference.

I doubted this but it's true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)

> Country of origin: USA

I think they are referring to this changelog item:

> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.

https://kagi.com/changelog#5340

They were asked to stop and refused:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

See for example https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

> Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore

The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.

Yep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.