[HN Gopher] Kagi/Orion status update: First three months
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi/Orion status update: First three months
Author : darthShadow
Score : 291 points
Date : 2022-09-01 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
| bithavoc wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for three months now, and 27 queries per day
| sounds about right, it could be more but when I open incognito
| tab on Brave it asks for a login which is super irritating, so
| about 15 queries a day still go to google. So far Kagi results
| are so good I forget about it until the end of the month $$$.
| burkaman wrote:
| They have an extension to fix the incognito issue, I assume the
| Chrome one will work in Brave as well?
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kagi-search-for-ch...
| bithavoc wrote:
| I tried but it doesn't work in Brave, I added the Token but
| no luck. Thanks for the suggestion through
| lalopalota wrote:
| If the extension doesn't work, set the kagi search url to
| include the token as given in kagi settings.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Satisfied customer here. I like being the customer, not the
| product.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Congrats, Vlad & team. You seem to be off on a good trajectory!
| freediver wrote:
| Thanks Viktor!
| manca wrote:
| I've been following Kagi's development for some time now and the
| idea looks promising. Not sure if the team plans to develop its
| own crawling engine and index that won't depend entirely on
| sources such as Google/Bing/Wikipedia, etc. Right now, it seems
| like the results are 90% google results without the ads (which is
| still a big plus). However, I'd like to see if they can pull off
| indexing of (maybe a smaller part?) of the web on their own --
| that way they can completely get decoupled from Google and not
| put their fate in the hands of much bigger players.
|
| Anyway, exciting stuff and I wish the team best of luck!
| [deleted]
| throwaway23236 wrote:
| Been a paid Kagi user for 3 months and it's been a wonderful
| replacement.
|
| If I could ask for one thing, though I don't think it is up to
| Kagi. I use my Android phone with the Microsoft Launcher and Edge
| and I for the life of me cannot figure out how to make it Kagi
| the default search engine.
|
| Besides that, it has been a great service and well worth it! I
| wish the Kagi team well and I look forward to buying a shirt or
| hoodie in the future! :)
| knoebber wrote:
| Another happy, paying kagi user here. I find the search results
| for dev related queries MUCH better than google. This is mostly
| because I set official documentation sites to have a higher
| precedence (No more w3 schools appearing above MDN, for example),
| which is a feature google lacks.
|
| Here's to hoping it gains more traction! I love the competition
| in the search space.
| gostsamo wrote:
| In regard to anonymity, I'm curious if the kagi users can form a
| closed tor-like network that will insure that all queries come
| from an authenticated user and at the same time the query source
| is obfuscated.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| Orion looked (and still looks) amazing but when I tried it a few
| months ago 1Password refused to work with it (and any non-
| authorized browsers). This is 1Password's choice and entirely
| their fault, but I haven't found an alternative (though at the
| current rate of decline other options will become better by
| default soon).
|
| Does Orion work yet with 1Password, or are there any workarounds
| yet?
|
| Edit: found the thread on the 1Password forums and sounds like
| Orion has tried to reach out but are getting completely ignored
| by 1Password.
| vladstudio wrote:
| Not sure about 1Password extension, but Orion support for
| Chrome extensions is getting better with every update - so you
| might want to check it from time to time!
|
| (P.S. Let me also recommend BitWarden - password manager UX is
| highly subjective topic, but it worked well for me, and it does
| not require subscription).
| jonpurdy wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. I avoided BitWarden for two
| reasons: - No Safari extension - Electron app
|
| But now that 1Password is Electron and doesn't seem to work
| with Orion, I will give BitWarden a try again since the
| 1Password advantages were wiped out.
| vladstudio wrote:
| Bitwarden does have Safari extension now. As for Electron
| app - yeah, that sucks :-) I found that web version -
| https://vault.bitwarden.com/#/ - works just fine (again,
| for me personally).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| AgileBits' behavior as of late has been generally
| disappointing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Kagi has been worth the money for me. It's got a lot of room for
| improvement, but compared to DDG (which I like) it's given me
| everything I could ask for. I don't like the subscription
| business model most of the time, especially for software, but in
| this case there is a definable cost associated with me using the
| product, so it makes sense.
| handity wrote:
| While I am a happy paying Kagi customer, their stance on privacy
| is nonsensical and amounts to saying "We super duper pinky
| promise that we won't use your data"
|
| From the Anonymity section: "For example your parents can know
| everything about you and still fully respect your privacy."
|
| Ok, but if anyone thinks I trust a company the way I trust my
| parents they are sorely mistaken, and I certainly wouldn't want
| my parents to have an easily searchable record of everything I've
| ever searched for online, the same way a search engine provider
| does.
|
| The complexity of accepting crypto payments is totally
| understandable. If that's the reason Kagi does not prioritize
| anonymity then that is understandable, but the justification that
| "you don't really want privacy anyway" is unnecessary.
|
| "We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by
| design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don't
| need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable
| this in case of a court order."
|
| "Software architecture decision" is meaningless. The only
| guarantee that data will not be collected and stored is a
| technological, probably cryptographic one.
|
| If an organization is in a position to gain intimate knowledge of
| your life and habits, they have the ability to influence your
| life and that of others. Pinky swearing not to do so is a lot
| like following someone around with a camera while repeating "it's
| just for a video". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg
|
| I don't expect Kagi to accept crypto, and I'll keep paying just
| because I'll jump at an opportunity to pay with my money rather
| than with my data. However, given that they decouple their
| service from the need to track users, I would have expected them
| to prioritize anonymity wherever possible as the next logical
| step.
|
| If the justification was technological it would be
| understandable, but their reassurance that there is nothing to be
| concerned about is itself concerning.
| ukd1 wrote:
| It's unsovlable - even if cryptography could solve it, you'd
| have to trust the implementation.
|
| Thought; Just periodically rotate your account, and use a new
| cc number. There is no bonus to me for keeping a particular
| account over the long term, as there is no history etc.
| However, I love the service and want to pay.
| handity wrote:
| I much prefer to trust an implementation over someone's word.
| I use Signal because I agree with their stated goals, and
| their implementation seems to align with those goals. I don't
| use Facebook because their policy is awful in the first
| place, and implementation is nonexistent. Kagi is in between.
| I am happy with their policy, but their implementation is
| lacking. This wouldn't be a problem, but they don't seem to
| admit that their goals are fundamentally in conflict with
| their mode of operation.
|
| This is the first item on their FAQ:
|
| "Our goal is amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity
| and self-expression and provide the user tools to fight
| against the web of greed, ad-tech and user tracking."
|
| To pretend that company policy is the best way to achieve
| that goal is insulting. We will never have an ad-tech and
| tracking-free future without technological measures. Offering
| a service on the basis of "Pay with your money, not your
| data" is a fantastic step in the right direction, but
| obviously not enough.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Wow, 26.000 USD MRR within a couple of months, that's really
| impressive.
| latchkey wrote:
| As someone who used to sell shareware through the original Kagi
| (that went bankrupt), it is so nice to see the name live on!
|
| https://kagi.com/faq#kagi-old
|
| https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
| dklsf wrote:
| I'm really surprised how much a single search query is costing
| them in terms of compute/infrastructure (1.25 US cents). That
| buys you more than a minute of compute time on the top vps on
| hetzner. What's happening behind the scenes during a query?
|
| Getting the compute costs down will probably be a major obstacle
| to growth, since they'll have to keep prices high (19 USD/month)
| to pay for their infrastructure.
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| Happy paying customer here, and agreed. Their cost per search
| feels very high to me, but I don't know enough about the search
| space to know what is normal.
| maxnoe wrote:
| Much of that will be the crawling and indexing that has to be
| done independent of the number of users, right?
|
| So costs per user will go down with the number of users as this
| fixed cost is shared between more requests/users.
| burkaman wrote:
| Some of that comes from using Bing and Google search APIs. They
| have their own index as well but can't fully rely on it yet for
| all queries.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I'm guessing the query itself will be a very minor percentage
| of the total cost with just costs coming from crawling, data
| moving, storage, redundancy and resilience etc.
| wooque wrote:
| They wrote about it before. They use various paid third-party
| APIs to power their own search. I guess that is the majority of
| the cost.
| [deleted]
| Melatonic wrote:
| It is not compute that is killing them - it is using the Google
| and Bing API's for many searches. They charge a lot for those.
| In your Kagi account you can see exactly how many searches you
| have done and how much you have cost them (and it could easily
| be higher than your 10$ a month if you do a lot of searching)
| badrabbit wrote:
| DDG was always better when I tested Kagi and Orion was not
| performing any better than brave either. Both products are far
| from terrible but based on the merit and value of the product
| alone I could not pay for it. The privacy angle is worth paying
| for but why won't I just use DDG? I use private tabs a lot and
| having to login to kagi or searching the internet logged in with
| an account tied to a payment method isn't a positive thing for
| me. Good idea but bad business model is my experience with both
| products.
|
| But YMMV so don't let me discourage you from trying them.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I'm interested in alternative browsers that aren't google
| based/owned and have found myself limited to use Firefox. But
| that I mind it, it does everything I need, But I'd be open to
| Orion, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's not cross platform?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Not on Windows yet no
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Haven't used it yet, but very impressed with what I'm
| seeing/reading.
|
| $10/mo could work (I think many people would go for it for $5/mo,
| though I understand that may not work for Kagi). More than that
| it starts to be very niche I think.
|
| A family plan is interesting, and I would pay for a Kagi for Kids
| that works and filters out garbage without dumbing everything
| down to a "kiddie" level (like Google does). My young kids have a
| great deal of scientific curiosity and I'd like them to be able
| to explore freely and learn interesting stuff that might go way
| over their head at first but isn't "kiddish", without worrying
| about them stumbling into a cesspool (and I don't mean just a
| "safe search" porn blocker, but just all the horrible stuff out
| there you don't want them to stumble on).
| disqard wrote:
| Being niche is okay, but being sustainable is vital. There are
| many ways to articulate this, and I'm not an unqualified fan of
| pg, but he did capture this wisdom very well in "Do Things That
| Don't Scale" [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| for sure, niche is okay. would just be nice if it became more
| widespread because it's a good tool
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I pay for Kagi after a recommendation here on hn.
|
| I have been very happy with it and how clean/fast it is to find
| what I want.
| S6eUL wrote:
| I joined the Kagi beta two weeks before it ended and have been a
| paying user ever since. I find the price to be quite steep but so
| far it have no regrets and will most likely continue my
| subscription. I average over 2000 queries per month.
|
| - Search result quality is at least equal to Google for most
| queries and far superior for queries involving discussions or
| technical topics. Sadly, it is inferior for queries in my area of
| expertise (Swiss law).
|
| - Kagi is the only alternative to Google that I know of (and I
| have tried many) which is able to produce good regional results
| and mix them - when appropriate - with international results.
| Most privacy focused search engines are very US centric.
|
| - Blog spam and copy cats are not completely gone but the
| situation is at least bearable, especially after continuosly
| filtering them and boosting credible sites instead.
|
| - Customization options, filtering options, speed and site layout
| are also far superior when compared to Google.
|
| Apart from the lower quality results from queries involving my
| area of expertise, the only thing that still keeps me using
| Google Search are the reviews from Google Maps.
|
| All in all, I recommend supporting this product.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Odd you say the price is steep - I have been using it mostly
| exclusively for a few months now and I haven't even thought
| about it cost. It must come out to under 0.1C/ per search.
| vosper wrote:
| > It must come out to under 0.1C/ per search.
|
| I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it
| costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD
| $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average
| use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta
| testers will do more searches than average users, and I think
| that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing
| and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I
| search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just
| during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money
| on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see
| how they're going to avoid that.
|
| [0] https://kagi.com/pricing
| S6eUL wrote:
| I can afford it but when compared to other stuff it just
| seems steep:
|
| - Half the price of my fiber subscription
|
| - Double the price of my VPS subscription
|
| - Same price as my mobile subscription
| niemenmaa wrote:
| I also have been using since beta, and agree with you. For me,
| the ability to boost and block certain domains is a killer
| feature. (There are probably solutions for other services, but
| to have it built-in is great.)
|
| For developer-related queries I`m pleased with the results!
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I was thinking that something like this sounded interesting, and
| certainly couldn't cost more than $20/year for unlimited
| searches. But $10/m, and already being raised to $19/m?
|
| Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems like
| this product doesn't have long left to live. And the price is
| already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be
| considering it.
|
| And for anyone saying free plan, 50 searches a month is just too
| low. If I have one issue I'm trying to resolve, it's very
| possible I use half of them right there, and who wants to worry
| about how many searches they have left.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy
| enthusiasts would be considering it.
|
| Their plan is actually to compete on quality. Just for privacy,
| I was happy enough with DDG for free.
| Shank wrote:
| > Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems
| like this product doesn't have long left to live. And the price
| is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts
| would be considering it.
|
| Well, early-adopters seem to be grandfathered in. But, if this
| model stops them from running out of money and helps them
| actually reach sustainability, I'm fine with it! I think that
| if they can't find 10,000 users who want to pay $20/mo for a
| really excellent search engine, there's a bigger problem here.
| There are surely 10,000 privacy conscious people who would pay,
| right?
|
| The $9.99/mo pricing model is kind of a meme, because no matter
| what the service is, people seem willing to charge the exact
| same cost. At least Kagi is being up-front and saying "hey, our
| service costs more to operate and we aren't making enough money
| yet".
|
| People willingly pay Superhuman $30/mo for an alternative
| interface to Gmail. If that niche exists, surely a paid search
| at $20/mo niche exists?
| BenderV wrote:
| I'm using Kagi in France. First time I'm not actively looking
| back to be on Google (which sometimes I still do). Congrats and
| continue your effort !
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Another happy early adopter here: I use Google tech for a lot of
| things, but not for search for many years. DDG is really good,
| enough that I've pretty much given up falling back to Google
| Search if DDG can't find something. Kagi is even better.
|
| I particularly like the ability to lower and raise domains. I
| don't have many in my list, but the ones that are there are there
| for a _reason_.
| ss48 wrote:
| "For example your parents can know everything about you and still
| fully respect your privacy."
|
| This was raised in a flagged comment, so I still felt it was
| worth highlighting. I don't find analogies work well for
| technical decisions. I usually prefer that a company tell me what
| is and is not private and anonymous so that I can made a decision
| on if I should use an application and on how I will use it. There
| is no need to justify the decision you made and in some respects
| lecture us on why the decision was justified. Just be transparent
| about what is and is not and that's enough.
| freediver wrote:
| Removed the analogy from the post since, agreed it can sound
| condenscending and wrong (missed that in the initial draft).
| Semaphor wrote:
| Heh, I actually raised that on their discord because it's so
| cringy :D
| milgrim wrote:
| Any way to disable the ,,auto correct" feature? No, I don't want
| to search for ,,mind journey", I want to search for
| ,,midjourney". Without additional clicks please. But apart from
| that I really like it, thanks for offering a real alternative.
| freediver wrote:
| That sounds doable, you may post a feature suggestion to
| kagifeedback.org
| Melatonic wrote:
| Big fan of Kagi - I was part of the original completely free
| testing period and recently bought in to the subscription and
| changed all my devices to using it. Results are great so far. I
| really like that you can customize your results (and "up" or
| "down" regulate certain websites and especially like that it also
| searches some lesser indexed sources like smaller personal
| sites/blogs. Probably the coolest thing though is that it will
| also search old offline websites (archive.org) for results in
| super niche stuff - this makes it super useful for some things.
|
| I am not on MacOS so I have no opinion on Orion but Kagi +
| Firefox is a great combo.
| dcow wrote:
| I pay for Kagi on principle. I'll just come out and say it
| though: Kagi is missing 30% of the internet, at least. It may
| just be that Kagi is in the landing phase of "land and expand",
| but I do think that long term, and generally, search engines need
| to be indiscriminate. Sure, interpreting queries and providing
| flavored results is fine _especially_ when I'm paying so I know
| the flavor is in my interest, but excluding entire categories of
| content is not.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Can you elaborate? What is missing?
| sivakon wrote:
| $19 per month for single user without regional pricing is just
| insane given localised results (here in Japan) are really bad.
| Yeri wrote:
| $19? Kagi is $10/month. Family and business plans coming soon.
| sivakon wrote:
| Individual Plans
|
| Kagi Unlimited - $19/mo or $180/year ($15/mo) or
| $288/biennial ($12/mo) - Original Kagi experience, with
| unlimited searches
| ulimn wrote:
| Edit: I see I misunderstood the original comment. Disregard
| my message. :)
|
| I don't know where you live but for me it's 10 USD per
| month.
|
| Says Premium | USD $10 /per month | Unlimited ad-free,
| private search.
|
| On their /pricing page.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I was hoping there'd be a conversation here about the
| price increase but so far every comment is about Kagi in
| general without ever reading the actual blog. They also
| list a $5 a month plan. What's not clear is when they're
| launching this and if they'll grandfather in the current
| customers.
| davv wrote:
| "If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan
| to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current
| and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing
| them to keep their existing subscription price as long as
| they don't cancel it."
|
| It mentions on the blog post that they'll grandfather in
| existing customers.
| cm_silva wrote:
| It says on the announcement that they will grandfather in
| existing customers.
| przemub wrote:
| That's what they want to increase to, but they say they'll
| grandfather old users into the old prices.
| [deleted]
| duiker101 wrote:
| It is currently, but the article linked here mentions that
| they are considering an increase because the current price is
| likely to not be sustainable.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Hadn't heard of Kagi before this, but seriously considering it.
| $10/mo I might be able to swing. I would not pay $19/mo but
| that's just me.
| [deleted]
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| First I am hearing of Kagi. I'm impressed with what I am reading
| though. The company seems very transparent about their business
| model, which is refreshing.
|
| Reading their pricing page, it says it costs them about one
| dollar for a single search query. Holy moly, that seems wildly
| expensive. I would really be interested in knowing why a single
| search query is so pricey.
| Semaphor wrote:
| You are misreading something, it's about $0.0125 per query.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I have been trying out Orion for the last few months and have
| found two features to be very valuable:
|
| * vertical/nested tabs
|
| * sharing tabs between desktop/mobile
|
| My daily driver has been Brave for the last few years, but the
| lack of TST has me looking for alternatives. If I'm not able to
| find a decent TST solution, I'll be migrating more of my browsing
| to Orion.
| dannywarner wrote:
| Three things:
|
| 1. You don't know what privacy is. "We believe that Kagi has the
| most user-friendly privacy policy of any search engine out there.
| However, privacy and anonymity are not the same things. For
| example your parents can know everything about you and still
| fully respect your privacy." Ask any kid if privacy is their
| parents knowing everything. You're using it as a marketing term.
|
| 2. This is illegal public solicitation and an SEC violation:
| "anyone passionate about Kagi and our vision for the web will
| have the opportunity to invest as little as $5,000 USD and join
| the ride with us. It would be structured as a SAFE note and we
| would use the funds to expand the team and accelerate our product
| vision."
|
| 3. Stop abusing HN to shill your paid search engine. "We are
| pleased to see that Kagi is propagating fast through Hacker News,
| Reddit and Twitter with word of mouth from existing users." Kagi
| shills hijack every single Hn discussion thread about search. You
| is just as bad. Just. Stop.
| dang wrote:
| It looks like you have some substantive points, but can you
| please not be aggressive like this on HN?
|
| I appreciate that you're watching out for the quality of the
| site, but you broke the site guidelines here, which is no doubt
| why users flagged your post.
|
| Beyond that, your points would be much more persuasive if you
| made them more neutrally, without this kind of attack.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| t0bia_s wrote:
| 10 USD/month is too much for me. 5 USD/month in family sounds
| reasonable but if that means 250 searches for month for one user,
| it's not enough.
| freediver wrote:
| It is N x 250 searches total for the entire family, where N is
| the number of users. Some family members will probably search
| less.
| osener wrote:
| Both Kagi and Orion are deeply impressive products. Even though I
| try every new general purpose web browser and search engine that
| comes out, this combo is the only one that stuck.
|
| Orion: Finally a non-chrome based web browser that can compete
| with the likes of Brave and Arc. It works much better on Mac than
| the alternatives, with the same engine as Safari it also benefits
| from deeper system integration such as native Sign-in with Apple
| and password management. Also, like Brave, comes with powerful ad
| and tracker blocker so you don't need a separate extension. I
| also love its built-in tree-style tabs implementation.
|
| Kagi: It is Google without all the bad parts. It is user centric
| like some other alternatives, without the poor index and search
| results.
|
| Props to the team, I am looking forward to what's to come. It is
| mind blowing how a single small company can make one of the best
| desktop browser AND search engine AND mobile browser on the
| market. Hope they are not spreading themselves too thin and can
| fund the development of all these for a long time!
|
| My only complaints are the slow performance of Orion on iOS, and
| its poor handling of app urls. Latter caused some issues when I
| had Orion set as the default browser on my iPhone and some
| payment flow that used app redirects between my banking app and
| the store app got stuck. I was lucky and I could manually launch
| the app by pasting the app link in Safari, but I hope it can
| handle these cases as well as Mobile Safari in the future.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Orion browser currently has around 1,800 active users. The
| way we measure this is through auto-update "pings" to our
| updates server.
|
| I'm happy for them, but is this an accurate measure of active
| users?
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Next 2 sentences:
|
| >This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates
| (Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are
| disabled by default). It may not be an accurate portrayal but
| is the best we got.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| The intro video for Orion is what convinced me.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Is there mention of other OSs for Orion? I can't use it until
| it works on Linux/Windows, unfortunately.
| burkaman wrote:
| They've said they don't have the resources for other OSes
| yet until they can hire more people.
|
| https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-linux-windows-android/5
| tra3 wrote:
| Thanks for the review. I used Kagi for a bit and then forgot
| about it, time to try it again.
|
| If Orion is based on webkit, what other advantages does it
| offer over Safari that you found?
| Shank wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but Orion supports extensions from both the
| Firefox and Chrome ecosystems. It also supports the
| WebRequest API in blocking mode, meaning you can use uBlock
| Origin, which you can't use at all with Safari.
| tra3 wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for highlighting the extensions piece.
| That's huge! Going to give it a go as well.
| DavideNL wrote:
| So is all uBlock Origin functionality supported, 100% ?
| osener wrote:
| Web Extensions support, built in adblocker and tree style
| tabs (can be enabled using the option under View menu) are
| the biggest ones for me.
| selectodude wrote:
| I wish I loved the browser. It's just close enough to Safari
| that I use it the same but it's just different enough where
| it drives me absolutely nuts.
| tjungblut wrote:
| I can't stress how much better Kagi is than Google, I'm a paying
| user. No more scrolling through tons of ads. Filtering by time
| and language is great, no more GitHub and Stackoverflow clones in
| the result. Thank you, I actually haven't realized how small Kagi
| still is, given how polished that product already is.
| samstave wrote:
| Does it block pinterest by default? ;-)
|
| -- Aside - why dont we have a keyboard key to switch an entire
| line from ALL CAPS to all caps or to All Caps... (This would be
| a great key)
|
| -
|
| Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and
| ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones
| based on which ones users click in the results in addition to
| whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works -
| because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it
| not?)
|
| Serious questions, as I do not know...
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I think that sort of auto-ranking would require more tracking
| than they want to do.
| malikNF wrote:
| > Does it block pinterest by default? ;-)
|
| One of the first things I tried with them. I have the option
| to down-rank websites I don't like. I can block or lower
| their ranking.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I saw that in the video on the front page. It looks like a
| killer feature. I use DDG currently and am starting to get
| annoyed how Wikipedia is almost always the top result for
| any broad term.
|
| I'm not sure it's a $10/mo killer feature, though.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I believe it does search using multiple other engines
| (google, DDG, Bing?) and lots of other ways as well
| (archive.org searches) but for ranking you have to choose to
| do that yourself
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google
| and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant
| ones based on which ones users click in the results in
| addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that
| how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard
| to replicate is it not?)
|
| They don't connect any searches/clicks to user accounts. But
| you can rank sites yourself like this:
| https://i.imgur.com/Po7mG7Q.png
| malikNF wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Hated what g! was becoming, so I started using ddg, liked it at
| first but had to often modify my queries with a g! but I still
| used it, the experiance was't great, but it somehow worked,
| then the controversies around ddg started to come out. At the
| end of the day you gotta keep the lights on, if your users are
| not your customers then someone else is going to have to help
| you pay the bills.
|
| Used kagi since it was recommended here on hn. Used it for a
| week(-ish) and instantly fell in love with it, the lenses
| feature, the ability to rank search results meant I could block
| out websites I hated seeing on my search results and boosting
| the ones I cared about. Now I am a paying customer.
|
| Oh yeh, one more thing, for the past few months I don't
| remember a single instance of me modifying my queries with !g.
| Now I promote them every chance I get, I even got called a paid
| shill on reddit a few weeks back :D .
| plugin-baby wrote:
| What are the DDG controversies?
| lalopalota wrote:
| Not a controversy, but my gripe with ddg is whatever they
| do when I click on a result that puts the title and icon of
| the target page in my history, but when I click on the link
| in history it takes me to the ddg search results page, not
| the actual page.
| prh8 wrote:
| This drives me crazy but I thought it was just my
| computer
| malikNF wrote:
| The CEO and founder of ddg announced on twitter that they
| will start moderating content on the Russian invasion of
| Ukraine [1]. While I agree disinformation is a problem, I
| want my search engine to treat my like an adult, just do
| your job of retrieving the information I asked for and let
| me decide what is mis-information and what is not.
|
| It starts with a cause we all can get behind, sometimes its
| "think of the children", another time it's regulating
| information from people supporting orcs, and who knows, how
| do I know things I care about might get suppressed in the
| future? Stop the nonsese, let me be the judge of what I
| consume.
|
| The other instance I remember was the whole ms tracking
| situation[2], if your whole selling point is "Privacy
| simplified" then do just that without all the nonsese.
| There were a few others (#duckduckgone) before I stopped
| using them.
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 [2]h
| ttps://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072
| Quenhus wrote:
| For those still on Google or DDG, here is my uBlock filter with
| hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats:
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
|
| It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines.
| You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as you. The results and polish justifies
| my monthly payment to them.
|
| Given how impressed I am with Kagi search maybe it is time to
| check out Orion.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Eh, ads are not something one has to put up with unless one
| chooses so, and filtering by language worked well for me with
| DDG (can't remember about google, it's been so long). I do
| enjoy their actually unique features, though ;)
| vorpalhex wrote:
| By ads I believe the parent means junk domains
| "top10cameras2022.com" and not intentional ads.
| tjungblut wrote:
| Actually, I meant both. The junk domain part is also easily
| solved in Kagi with Website ranking adjustment and
| blocking.
| duiker101 wrote:
| Some searches with Google have become absolutely unusable, a
| flood of paywalled quora and random blogs that blabber
| without answers just to try and sell you a solution to a
| problem you don't actually have.
|
| Kagi allows you to remove all that trash and actually find
| what you need.
| bfors wrote:
| I really like how listicles are compartmentalized to one section
| of the results, instead of taking over the entire page.
| COGlory wrote:
| >We are also considering a pricing change for our individual plan
| which is currently $10/month ($120/year). It is clear to us now
| that providing superior search quality at the current price will
| not lead to sustainability and that we will need to increase it.
|
| I guess I will be part of the 70% that will drop. Back to
| DuckDuckGo it is. Great product, enjoyed using it, but $10/mo for
| searches was tough to swallow, there's no way I can double that.
| I was really enjoying it but their cost per search is waaaaaaaaay
| to high and they need to seriously look at which APIs are costing
| them so much, and just drop those. I don't necessarily need
| infoboxes with my search. I'd be happy with just the indexing.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and
| just drop those
|
| Well, that would be bing and google. And combining those
| results is a good part of the magic. Currently, the searches
| are actually paid for by subscribers, but the founder is paying
| everyone's salary out of his own money, so that's a bit of an
| issue ;)
| Melatonic wrote:
| I wonder if Kagi could be a 501c and and there might be a way
| to get funding from other large providers?
|
| Google finances a lot of Firefox, for example, so there is
| not a monopoly in browsers. One could argue that means
| Firefox is beholden to Google but in an ideal world it would
| not be. Mozilla probably gets lots of other donors too. Kagi
| may be able to do something similar or at minimum get some
| big donations / endowments from wealthy people who support
| the cause.
| darthShadow wrote:
| You may have missed this in the same section:
|
| > If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to
| grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and
| future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to
| keep their existing subscription price as long as they don't
| cancel it.
| layer8 wrote:
| > There are some incredible discussions happening here, like for
| example this one about should Kagi include a suicide prevention
| widget.
|
| That seems a weird topic to highlight, quite far on the long tail
| of what is important for a functional web search engine.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| A few things rub me the wrong way here... first, they don't
| accept cryptocurrency. Then they go on to say to be anonymous you
| can use services like SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ, and they state
| "We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by
| design."
|
| The issue here isn't whether you log searches, but whether you
| log payment transactions and it is almost a guarantee that they
| do and is probably by law. SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ offers no
| guarantees of anonymity when it comes to government agencies. In
| fact, you can almost guarantee that virtual debit card providers
| are logging your transactions and from experience usually require
| you link a bank account.
|
| So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay,
| it can still be tied back to your search history if for some
| reason you are suspected of searching for something that may be
| investigation worthy. I don't think it is fair to simply trust a
| company that claims they don't log things, when history has shown
| that they do in fact even when they say they don't.
|
| So why would they even try to market themselves as more private
| or anonymous? If you want privacy or anonymity then you'll use a
| free search engine that doesn't want payment; and you'll search
| from behind a reliable VPN or via Tor.
| redavni wrote:
| I am not Kagi, but $10 a month would not be anywhere near
| enough money for anyone to provide you with protection from the
| law.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| So Signal provides encrypted communication for free but
| should be charging $100/mo?
| freediver wrote:
| > but whether you log payment transactions and it is almost a
| guarantee that they do and is probably by law
|
| We don't log payment transactions. We receive notifications
| from Stripe to our webhook which updates the billing state.
|
| > So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email
| relay, it can still be tied back to your search history
|
| That is why we make the point of not having any search history.
| Think about it - what would we use it for? It would just be a
| liability for us.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| > We don't log payment transactions. We receive notifications
| from Stripe to our webhook which updates the billing state.
|
| So then you have a Stripe account with the transaction
| information. It is ridiculous to think that you have no
| information about payments coming to you, not even a
| transaction ID or reference number.
|
| > That is why we make the point of not having any search
| history. Think about it - what would we use it for? It would
| just be a liability for us.
|
| "Trust us bro, we don't log."
|
| Yeah, no thanks... I don't trust you because you told me to,
| and I've seen other companies saying the same thing that did
| in fact comply and keep logs but had agreements with agencies
| that made it "okay" to lie.
| bogwog wrote:
| I started using this when it was in free/public beta, and signed
| immediately once it required a subscription. Zero regrets.
|
| The results are _excellent_. Definitely better than Google and
| DuckDuckGo in my experience. I've been telling people to use it,
| but it's kind of hard to convince them that $10 /mo is worth it.
| A family/group plan would probably help get more people on board.
|
| Also I completely forgot Orion was a thing until this post. I
| went to check it out, but unfortunately it's Mac only. A port to
| Linux would be awesome.
| neoromantique wrote:
| I've been just considering signing up last week, and this blog
| post has tipped me into pulling the trigger.
|
| I am worried though, due to their high query cost, are they doing
| the full pipeline with external sources for simple queries too?
| Like I am accustomed to using google instead of my brain for
| literally the tiniest and pettiest of things, from just googling
| website name just to open it, spell check, conversion of anything
| into anything etcetcetc.
| Melatonic wrote:
| They have a simplistic answers AI that will answer some stuff
| (like if it can pull direct from Wikipedia or if you were to
| for example use Google as a simple calculator) that supposedly
| helps them reduce these costs. I am not affiliated and I am not
| directly involved but this was my first concern as well -
| because I am used to search engines being "free" I use them all
| the time for everything. I know most casual users are even
| worse - I hardly know anyone who types in an actual URL into
| the address bar even if they know exactly where they want to go
| and what the URL is (for example I type in "mail.google.com"
| when I want to go to my email but most would just search
| "gmail" into google)
| geraneum wrote:
| Paying user of Kagi here. I recommend it to all my friends. They
| have a family plan on the roadmap which is great for me. I have
| left Google search altogether and never looked back.
|
| Over time I have managed to block most of the websites which
| annoy me the most from the results. For example I have blocked
| w3schools and boosted MDN or the annoying ads disguised as blogs
| or websites which pollute the search results by mere SEO
| enhancements.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| W3Schools is not as bad as it used to be.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They mentioned that for family plans, parents could share
| "lenses" with other parents. I would love for this to be
| extended to everyone so there's a "lens marketplace" that
| people could share their curated lists of sites so that filter
| lists of shitty websites can be crowdsourced.
| geraneum wrote:
| That would be great, for example if I could find a lens that
| helps me search in topic I care about. Imagine Google's :site
| but for a specific and custom group of sites with custom
| rankings.
| duiker101 wrote:
| I tried many search engines, but I always ended up going back to
| Google for many queries. Kagi it's the first one that I really
| feel like Google doesn't add anything any more. Sometimes if I
| can't find something I will try google, but I never actually got
| better results, which means my query was just bad.
|
| I am just so happy with Kagi I can't explain. I am not a huge fan
| of subscriptions and I carefully curate what I pay for monthly. I
| love paying for Kagi! I wish them only the very best!
| disqard wrote:
| Same here. Perhaps your happiness is due to Kagi being (right
| now anyway) an entity whose incentives line up with what's best
| for its end-users?
|
| This could definitely change, but today, it looks like a
| genuine attempt to break out of the terrible local maximum (ad-
| supported Internet) we're stuck in.
| girzel wrote:
| Exactly the same here. Every once in a while I think "let's see
| if Google has anything better for this query", and it never
| does.
| justusthane wrote:
| I would really love to use Kagi full-time. I'm currently on DDG,
| but something about them that I can't quite put my finger on rubs
| me the wrong way. Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on
| advertising, or maybe it's that they're just sourcing their
| results from Bing.
|
| Anyway, at $10/mo I'm not quite prepared to put my money where my
| mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess
| they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user
| cost them?
|
| Edit: Thanks everyone for the pricing info! I guess in a world
| where we expect search engines to be free, we don't realize how
| expensive they actually are to run (at least at smaller scales
| like Kagi).
|
| Intuitively I would have expected the expensive part to be
| building the index and for each query to cost fractions of a
| cent. I am extremely surprised to learn that each query
| apparently costs them $0.125.
| bigwavedave wrote:
| > Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth
| is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess
| they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each
| user cost them?
|
| Not really. Between free and paid users, TFA says they average
| roughly 27 searches per user per day; 1000 searches costs them
| $12.50. If each user (TFA says roughly 10% of searches come
| from the free tier) is averaging 810 searches in a month, that
| puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not
| including salaries and other operating costs.
|
| I'm one of roughly 2.6k paid users at the moment; they estimate
| the need for 25k users to be sustainable. There's so much about
| google and most of its current alternatives that legitimately
| disgusts me- voting with my wallet is the only option I really
| have.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per
| month, not including salaries and other operating costs.//
|
| You're saying it costs then 1 1/8 cents per search
| _excluding_ wages and other operating costs.
|
| That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for
| something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the
| wages+operational costs?
|
| Edit: this comment [0] indicates every search is actually 3
| searches, two at commercial resale rates (Google, Bing) and
| one against their own index; that probably explains it.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678059
| mminer237 wrote:
| It says it costs them $12.50 in computing costs per 1,000
| queries. It says the average user makes 27 searches per day,
| including the 10% of free users limited to 50/month, so
| probably about 30 searches/day for paid users.
|
| $12.50 x (900 / 1000) = $11.25/month/user
| duiker101 wrote:
| One thing that I actually love about Kagi, is that they tell
| you how much you cost them. In the settings, under billing,
| there is a usage tab where it says how much your queries cost.
| Apparently last month I "used" $2 more than I paid, hopefully I
| am making it up with the word of mouth I spread.
|
| There's more info in their FAQ https://kagi.com/faq#cost
| bogwog wrote:
| Wow I'm more than $10 in the red so far after being subbed
| for 3 months, with an average of around 1200 search per
| month!
|
| I really hope that their high costs are due to some
| inefficiencies (e.g. with their current scale) they haven't
| been able to work out yet, otherwise that does not bode well
| for the concept of a paid search engine... or maybe I'm just
| an extreme outlier? I pretty much only ever search for
| documentation and things like that while I'm working, but I
| apparently do that a lot lol.
|
| The price they're using seems to be $0.0125/query. I'm
| assuming that includes business expenses, like
| dev/admin/salary costs, and not just the raw costs of
| executing a query.
|
| I guess a price hike to ~$15/mo would cover my particular
| usage, and I might be willing to pay that much, although I
| don't think many others would. $10 is already more than a lot
| of people are willing to pay just for search. Maybe if they
| bundled some other services into the subscription it would be
| more appealing? People expect search to be free, but are
| willing to pay for other services that are probably much
| cheaper to operate (VPN, password manager, cloud storage,
| etc)
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I'm assuming that includes business expenses, like
| dev/admin/salary costs
|
| It actually does not, it covers infrastructure, but not
| salaries. Salaries for Orion/Kagi devs are currently paid
| by Vlad out of pocket, he mentioned that on Discord.
|
| I'd say with 1200 you are slightly above average from what
| people shared on discord (I only hit $10 in costs in August
| for the first time).
|
| When the post was discussed on discord, I mentioned that
| $19/mo would be too much for me, on the other hand I could
| do $12/mo with a 2-year pre-pay (not that I have to, thanks
| to the grandfathering)
| freediver wrote:
| You are, that is a fantastic way to look at it!
| prh8 wrote:
| Based on other data here, it seems like it's $0.0125 / query
| aendruk wrote:
| I feel the same about pricing; $5/mo is about what I'd expect
| to pay. I've been trying it at the current rate though to see
| how it goes. A fantastic thing they do is tell you how much
| you're actually costing them. My billing page says:
| Month Searches Cost Jun 2022 875 $10.94
| Jul 2022 773 $9.66 Aug 2022 842 $10.52
| Sep 2022 10 $0.12 Your total payments:
| $30.00 Your total usage: $31.25 Your payments to
| usage balance: -$1.25 [Tip the difference]
| jkestner wrote:
| This is fantastic, and I hope it can be a sustainable
| practice whether it's them or other larger companies.
| Transparency is positive when they're the little guy with a
| nerd audience, but most companies depend on information
| asymmetry to mess with our sense of value.
| flas9sd wrote:
| made me curious how many search queries I'm doing: averaging
| 2000/month: sqlite3
| ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select
| strftime('%Y/%m', last_visit_date/1000000, 'unixepoch') as
| yearmonth, substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) as
| hits from moz_places p where (p.url like
| 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like
| 'https://www.google.%/search%' or p.url like
| 'https://www.qwant%') group by search_backend,yearmonth order
| by yearmonth asc,hits desc;"
|
| add any search engine you use with another 'p.url like'
| nottorp wrote:
| > Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth
| is.
|
| Starbucks coffee fallacy :) I.e. it's cheaper than a Starbucks
| coffe so it must be cheap enough.
| freediver wrote:
| > Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on advertising
|
| Hm not sure what you mean, because that amount is currently
| zero [1]? Kagi is kind of anti-thesis to digital advertising.
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-
| months#marke...
| nvrspyx wrote:
| I think they were talking about DDG with that part.
| freediver wrote:
| Oops, thanks I got it wrong!
| SyneRyder wrote:
| > I'm currently on DDG, but something about them that I can't
| quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way.
|
| Have you given Brave Search a try? I honestly didn't expect to
| switch, but after trying it out for a while I ended up making
| it my default and haven't looked back. Brave is mostly using
| its own index (in my case, for 87% of my search results).
| kevincox wrote:
| > Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled
| by default
|
| This is a very surprising choice. I'm also leaning towards the
| side of irresponsible. Web browsers are probably the biggest
| attack surfaces users have. They are running untrusted code
| thousands of times a day. That isn't even counting all of the
| other attack surfaces such as HTML rendering, media decoding and
| playing, WebGPU type stuff and more. The stream of
| vulnerabilities has been constant so far and there is no evidence
| that the stream is over.
|
| If this was my product I would disable everything but auto-
| updates, and make a clear policy about what data I track on
| update downloads.
|
| Trading security for privacy likely results in less privacy once
| you get pwned.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I have used Orion to test it out and it prompts you if you want
| to update when a new update is available. Coming from a Unix
| background I prefer this method over a forceful update.
| kevincox wrote:
| Hmm, something is wrong with their wording then.
|
| > The way we measure this is through auto-update "pings" to
| our updates server.
|
| > This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates
|
| > auto-updates are disabled by default
|
| This seems to say that they won't do auto-update checks by
| default. But I guess they are doing auto-update checks but
| not tracking the checks, just a "ping" (whatever that means
| if it isn't an update check).
| freediver wrote:
| We are not doing auto-update checks by default (as that
| would be a form of telemetry). The pings we count will
| originate only from users that manually enabled them.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > This is a very surprising choice.
|
| I believe that it's not too surprising if you know that most of
| their users are from HN.
|
| The HN comments on every telemetry-related post that I've seen
| have been violently, overwhelmingly, _religiously_ against
| telemetry (not tracking - telemetry proper) in any form.
|
| Even if those comments aren't representative of the views of
| the readers as a whole, if you're building a company and those
| comments are your biggest insight into your users' feelings -
| you're going to do stuff like this.
|
| (and yes, it shouldn't have to be said that this inhibits
| security, but then again most of the anti-telemetry HN
| commentators are fine with that)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Google has a search API. Does Kagi use this on the backend?
| llaolleh wrote:
| This is the most important question. Are you piggybacking off
| of existing search providers, or is this a search engine from
| the ground up?
| function_seven wrote:
| Looks like they do. From their FAQ[3]:
|
| > _Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional
| search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources
| like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own
| non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI
| for instant answers._
|
| [3] https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from
| Semaphor wrote:
| They use bing and google APIs (that's where the cost mainly
| comes from as every querye requests from both), their own
| search index, and smaller indexes.
| wtcactus wrote:
| As a macOS user, I was very well impressed by this project
| (mostly Orion browser) but, I simply can't use the basic plugins
| I need with it.
|
| Been trying to get Workona plugin to work with it (both the
| Chrome and Firefox versions) on every Orion beta update, but
| nothing, it just doesn't work.
|
| I'm starting to wonder if it's Orion that doesn't support some
| API call, or if I misconfigured something, but, there's no
| documentation that shows either.
| ajgraves wrote:
| Orion has not fully implemented every API call for both plugin
| architectures, that is likely why you have experienced
| problems. Have you filed a bug report on
| https://orionfeedback.org?
| jdiez17 wrote:
| I think competition in web search is desperately needed and Kagi
| is promising. I used it during the free public beta and the
| search results were comparable to Google - sometimes better,
| sometimes worse. I sincerely hope they continue improving their
| search engine and other products, and make a well deserved profit
| from that.
|
| However, this seems a little disingenuous to me:
|
| > We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by
| design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don't
| need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable
| this in case of a court order.
|
| I have no reason to doubt this that their software is like that
| _currently_. But I also know that you don 't need to change your
| software architecture to log user queries.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Yes, but let's not yet again confuse "search engine" with
| search service (proxy or metasearch if you prefer). I'm biased
| so will resist the temptation to say more and only point you to
| the comments which are currently at the bottom of this
| discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32677872
|
| Having said that I congratulate Vlad and his team. Competition
| and innovation, in browsers and web search, is indeed needed.
| We welcome, and are willing to support, all new challengers
| making genuine efforts.
| chomp wrote:
| I've been a subscriber for a while now - completely replaced
| Google, even for esoteric tech queries.
|
| Only feedback I have is, if someone on the team gets some free
| cycles, please make the calculator a little more user friendly.
| Mostly looking for the ability to Kagi search an equation, and
| then tack on additional operations to the equation in the results
| page. Right now I have to reach for the mouse, click the small
| text field and type ans*. Would be nice if it just inferred that
| I want to use the previous answer.
| frees1111 wrote:
| I love this browser but I have problem with missing autocomplete
| on text inputs and with latest update I can't play any video on
| youtube. Also would be possible to not animate address bar when
| entering url?
| freediver wrote:
| You can post these to orionfeedback.org
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Love Kagi, can't remember last time I!g something. I admit $10 is
| a bit steep but there was a week after they changed the free tier
| when I was on the fence but I realized I can't go back to Google
| or ddg. Thank you Kagi team, the web is usable again.
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