Review of The Search Engine Kagi
The date is currently 23/11/2023 as I write this and I have been using the Kagi search engine since September 30th 2023, meaning that I have been using the Kagi search engine for almost 2 months now and this is going to be my review of this search engine.
I like Kagi and have been using since September. Just wish they could prove they aren’t logging anything.
Are there independent groups that audit that kind of thing?
I‘ve been using Kagi since September as well and I can only recommend giving it a try.
Being able to personalize search rankings is something I definitely wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.
One thing I’d like to mention is that they‘re also really great at listening to feedback. For example, they recently added an indicator for potentially paywalled sites to the search results, because users have suggested it.
I've been using Kagi for a little over a month now and I would not want to go back to before that time. As a matter of fact I switched to their yearly paid-plan less than a week after I started using their free trial version. I was hooked.
Tried kagi due to all the yapping here on lemmy, 99% of the results are exactly the same as ddg, no matter what their "x% unique kagi results" says, which just strikes me as dishonest. If they're going to lie to me about things I can check, why would I trust them when they say they don't log or track?
There's definitely some kind of astroturf marketing campaign going on here, this guy's only interaction with the fediverse is posting a link to some softball piece review of an incredibly underwhelming service.
I can tell you that I've been using Kagi for a few months and it hasn't been life changing or anything. But I would say that it has been useful enough to keep around. I honestly like the info dense layout over the other search sites, and I use the ability to push down or block sites entirely so I don't see the spam sites I don't want to see. Also, "quick answers" is actually pretty useful sometimes when I don't want to click on any of the search results. Plus, with the $10 sub, you get unlimited uses of the summarizer, which has been great for arxiv papers.
I wouldn't say it's for everyone and I don't know if there's astroturfing going on, but it's been useful enough for me to keep paying the $10 a month
I was wondering about the astroturfing. The support didn't seem super organic. I'm not dumb enough to not understand how modern marketing works. I tried it and was not impressed too. It's also stupid expensive. Thanks for the confirmation. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only person here that wasn't paid to use it.
On my second paid month. Still trying to decide if its worth it. Biggest plus is that its not jammed with sponsored ads and seo'd websites full of garbage matching the search keywords. Downside is that $5 a month just feels like a lot for something that you can almost get for free (outside of the sponsored stuff the results are pretty similar unless you turn up the small web setting)
I'm able to stay under 300 a month by using ff shortcuts to route simple repetitive searches (weather, sports scores, etc.) to ddg while sending the rest to kagi
Anyone able to compare this with your own SearxNG instance ? I recently set one up, bit of pain in that, but being able to blacklist content farms has been really nice (bye fandom) and the list provided really improves coding search. Choosing what search engines I like (and adding new ones) really helps deshittify search results, bangs, pipe it hrough a vpn etc... Haven't dived that deep and it's already leaps and bounds better than my previous search experience.
For reliable results today it is essential to use several search engines. The one who crawls the web the longest is Google, it is therefore advisable to use search engines that use this engine, such as Whoogle or Startpage.
Even so, it is also necessary to use search engines with alternative engines, such as DDG (Bing), or search engines with several engines, such as Mojeek or MetaGer, which use their own crawlers, such as Groot or AstianGo.
Search engines that use AI are also now proliferating, but, although practical, so far none are truly privacy oriented, with one exception, the one that was the first to use this technique with AI, Andisearch, which uses its own language model, not logs, no ads, no tracking, anonymous.
You search, although more private than others, requires activating privacy in the settings, also questionable due to its other AI functionalities that it incorporates, apart from the registration requirement to use them.
or search engines with several engines, such as Mojeek or MetaGer
Just a flag, we don't use several engines, all Mojeek is Mojeek, you might be conflating this with Search Choices. AstianGO seems to be inaccessible now, but it wasn't an own-index search engine,
It's been pretty good here for a couple of months. The ability to rank up/down, block/pin sources is a really good feature. When it fails, there's always !g.