Can't agree more. I was skeptical that Kagi could be that much better. I felt a little silly paying for a service that had always been free. After using it for a week I can't imagine going back.
Too many times I used to google my vet by name and the response would be some random other vet in next town over. I'd end up calling them and immediately hang up realizing google fed me bullshit again.
Kagi just focusing on a doing a good job. It's their singular focus and its worth ever cent.
Hi, Kagi team member here. We made this page for a simple reason: plenty of people still haven't discovered Kagi, and the ones who have often want to share it but don't know where to start. The landing page can only do so much, so we wanted a place that captures the "magic" people talk about when they use Kagi. Since so many describe the experience as magical, we figured we'd double down on that, and give it a page of its own. We gotta have some fun along the way, no harm in trying!
It's more of a pitch. It's something you can share with your friends to show them why they might like Kagi. It's not exactly something for marketers to put in front of strangers, like normal ads.
It's not that either. I just explained what it is. It's for those who already want to share Kagi with others, and who didn't have a good way to pitch it before. It's not really an advertisement to those who don't already have a Kagi advocate locally. It's also not really "wanting" you to distribute anything. It's merely a convenience that is available. That's all.
Early adopter and subscriber (I think I saw the link here on HN), have been happily paying for 4 years now.
It does one job and does it well, and you have additional features if you want/need to configure them or tweak the results to your liking.
AI is an add-on that you can elect to use or not, and I enjoy just adding a "?" at the end and getting a proper AI response instead of an hallucinated AI summary by default that covers the entire page.
i might be a minority but ai overviews are genuinely very cool.
they are promoting the "you can turn them off" as a feature, but what is actually lacking is the ability to "turn them on by default". in like 90% of my queries i DO want an ai overview.
but in kagi it's tucked away behind a button, you can very easily burn through your allowance, and the models they have are.. subpar to say the least.
and as a long-time (2+ years) kagi user i find myself using google more and more just for the ai overview/ai mode, bc its just genuinely faster.
in my experience, the majority of "ai overview/mode sucks" crowd never actually tried to use it in the past months. its genuinely gotten really good. it's still an llm, of course, so it does have its quirks, but its a very useful tool to have, and its sad kagi aren't very good at doing it.
I tried Kagi, but it never had the results I wanted, while Google did. If Google didn't have them, Kagi wouldn't either. At some point Kagi refunded my subscription price (due to my non-usage) enough times I canceled it -- I love the idea, in fact I purchased Orion Plus Lifetime and I wholeheartedly support their cause, they just simply don't have Google's breadth of index.
(Speaking of Orion, I used it as a daily driver for a while, but it was so unstable I had to switch away because it kept crashing, glitching and exploding in memory usage. Again, I respect the idea so much I made the maximum donation, but it just didn't work well enough for me.)
That was my experience as well. Paid for it for a year, it was a clean presentation of a subset of Google results, but when I was really looking for something I would fall back on Google. It's a shame their execution does not match their brand promise.
I don't even think it's an issue with their execution. Google just has a moat -- a huge index they won't give to anyone else, developed over nearly three decades, including multiple Internet eras already past -- which would take an inordinate amount of investment (including multiple more decades) to even hope to recreate.
Kagi probably won't get there -- in fact it's likely no one else even can get there -- but they're already somewhere and should only continue to get better.
Too many times I used to google my vet by name and the response would be some random other vet in next town over. I'd end up calling them and immediately hang up realizing google fed me bullshit again.
Kagi just focusing on a doing a good job. It's their singular focus and its worth ever cent.
It's a night and day difference.
If you don't try kagi for a while, you won't realize how much you've given up with Google.
I get so frustrated by finding the exact phrase I'm looking for on the third page of results after 99 paid results.
Or if I search for a specific brand and the first sponsored link is their competitor.
With kagi that all disappears. And you get search results that are ranked based on how well they match your search query.
Also, be sure to try their LLM research tools, and you'll get a taste of how great it could be.
It does one job and does it well, and you have additional features if you want/need to configure them or tweak the results to your liking.
AI is an add-on that you can elect to use or not, and I enjoy just adding a "?" at the end and getting a proper AI response instead of an hallucinated AI summary by default that covers the entire page.
i might be a minority but ai overviews are genuinely very cool. they are promoting the "you can turn them off" as a feature, but what is actually lacking is the ability to "turn them on by default". in like 90% of my queries i DO want an ai overview. but in kagi it's tucked away behind a button, you can very easily burn through your allowance, and the models they have are.. subpar to say the least.
and as a long-time (2+ years) kagi user i find myself using google more and more just for the ai overview/ai mode, bc its just genuinely faster.
in my experience, the majority of "ai overview/mode sucks" crowd never actually tried to use it in the past months. its genuinely gotten really good. it's still an llm, of course, so it does have its quirks, but its a very useful tool to have, and its sad kagi aren't very good at doing it.
(Speaking of Orion, I used it as a daily driver for a while, but it was so unstable I had to switch away because it kept crashing, glitching and exploding in memory usage. Again, I respect the idea so much I made the maximum donation, but it just didn't work well enough for me.)
Kagi probably won't get there -- in fact it's likely no one else even can get there -- but they're already somewhere and should only continue to get better.