Some people like them, they do have at least some ties to a Russian company which is a no from me at the moment.
Is Kagy web browser worth it?
Submitted 3 days ago by fdrc_lm@lemmy.blahaj.zone to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
socphoenix@midwest.social 3 days ago
specialwall@midwest.social 3 days ago
Paying for access to Yandex APIs is a product of their goal to be the best search engine available. They pay for access to nearly every major search provider and wouldn’t want to lose access to Yandex results just because of the country they’re located in.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Just had a conversation about this. I’ll copypasta what I said there.
tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.
I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Appreciate you linking in your blog post. I’ve been on the fence about Kagi and you bring up a lot of good points informed by sources I’m unlikely to delve into.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
To put you back on the fence, it had the best algorithm when I tested it some time ago. It showed me things I wanted by default. Google always needs some massaging and ddg needs a !g
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 3 days ago
It depends on what you want. I use Kagi but I have not sold it on my friends and family because for most of them, it doesn’t really make sense.
I’ve found it to be the best search engine, but I also think DuckDuckGo is generally fine. The $5/month plan with 300 searches per month is too limiting, IMO. I feel like anyone who searches that lightly will struggle to justify paying for Kagi over using DDG. For unlimited searches you need to step up to the $10/month plan.
When I started using Kagi, I did the free trial and every time I did a search, I’d do it in both Kagi and Google or DDG. It quickly became clear to me that Kagi was better, but I suspect this will vary a lot by your field, your tastes, and your personal search style. I mean, maybe there’s someone out there who actually wants to look at Pinterest results. I guess?!
If you ever considered paying for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro ($20/month), then Kagi’s Ultimate plan ($25/month) is probably a better value. It includes unlimited search, plus access to all the major premium models. On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro gives you access to image generation too, if you care about that.
Kagi’s research agent is legitimately great. It is nothing like the bullshit generator Google has. It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations. It shows you the exact search queries it uses, along with the results it pulls from. I’ve used it to find accurate answers to problems that I realistically could not have found with traditional search engines; in one case the actual answer was something like 18 results deep in the 5th search it performed. I think most people would give up before digging that deep in search results.
This is what AI is good for: automating gruntwork. Not doing things I couldn’t do myself, but doing things I don’t fucking want to do myself because they are tedious and frustrating. 99% of AI applications are pure garbage. Kagi’s is part of the other 1%.
dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
DuckDuckGo pro is $10 a mo but you get advanced model, on top of vpn and other crap.
DDG sounds pretty compiling ngl
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.
But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.
To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.
Ulrich@feddit.org 3 days ago
still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding
How so
cabbage@piefed.social 3 days ago
Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription-based model.
I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks.
Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.
They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.
To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 3 days ago
Every SearXNG instance I’ve tested has been terrible for my test queries. Any chance you can account for that?
Samsy@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Did you change something at the settings? Searxng is just as good as the source it’s using.
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 3 days ago
Up until a few weeks ago I was running my own private SearXNG instance and it’s not just you, even I noticed on my OWN instance that it had progressively gotten worse. Initially it was great so I just left it be but then the performance and results just became horrible. It was hit or miss if the thing would even load or not when other instances on my server like my akkoma, piefed, redlib, forgejo, etc all ran smooth as silk.
Eventually I ditched SearXNG and switched to 4get which much better and faster results. thing never goes down and the search results have been fantastic.
tal@lemmy.today 3 days ago
I think that you submitted the wrong URL. The submitted URL just points to Kagi’s home page, not to an article talking about the Orion browser.
fdrc_lm@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
You’re 100% right, I corrected the title, thank you
tal@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Oh, okay, I didn’t realize that you were trying to just ask people here, rather than link to an article about Orion.
Well, I use Kagi’s search engine. They basically do what I wish Google and YouTube and suchlike would do — just make their money by charging a fee and providing a service, rather than trying to harvest data and show ads. I use search more than any other service online, and there isn’t really a realistic way for me to run my own Web-spanning search engine. I don’t really make use of most of their add-on features (other than their “Fediverse Forums” thing that can search all Threadiverse hosts, which is helpful, and occasionally their Usenet search functionality).
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.
truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 3 days ago
Yes absolutely. The results are actually useful, they don’t have an incentive to keep you from finding what you are searching for. There is way less copywritten content and if there is, you can just block it.
Whenever I have to go back to “free” alternatives I am shocked by how much worse it is.
mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I’m running a local SearXNG which still provides usable results. I don’t see the point in paying for what’s basically a smart phone book. If everything fails, I’m going full #oldweb and use #webrings or some of those retro lists.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 days ago
I’m not paying for a search engine. Duck Duck Go for everyday usage. Yandex when I’m looking for media.
blattrules@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah, no way do I need another subscription in my life when there’s a suitable substitute.
Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 3 days ago
They added AI which I thought was one of the main points of using an alternative search engine so you could get away from that nonsense?
blitzen@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
It’s an optional service, not baked into the core product.
I’m the “anti-ai” person in my group of friends. Which isn’t strictly true, I’m bearish on AI, not wholly anti. I find Kagi’s separation appropriate, and actually finds some use (and better results than ChatGPT) with their AI assistant. It’s particularly useful for me debugging simple scripts and excel formulas.
It isn’t perfect overall, but well worth the few bucks each month. It’s one of the only subscriptions I’m not actively trying to get rid of.
Notamoosen@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I’m a fan. It took me a few weeks of properly rating (raising, lowering, and blocking) to get truly customized results. Once I did though, I found I’m able to research far faster than before. I’ve also become a fan of their AI assistant. It has multiple llm’s to choose from and is more private than using them directly.
fleet@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I tried it, and liked it, but stopped using it based on cost. If it was open source or somehow contributed to the open web, I would continue paying for it.
I went searching for a new search engine. I tried SearXNG, but I wasn’t impressed with the results. So now I use duckduckgo and ecosia, because if I have to indirectly use google, at least I can get some trees planted in the process.
Engywuck@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
IIRC Ecosia and DDG use Bing as their backend, not Google.
TechnoCat@piefed.social 3 days ago
With DuckDuckGo around it is hard to justify paying for Kagi personally.
specialwall@midwest.social 3 days ago
Personally, it’s the only search engine I haven’t wanted to get away from
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 3 days ago
I tried it, paid for it, cancelled it. I tested it with the same queries with ddg, startpage, brave, and qwant via 4get. The results were essentially the same. Kagi did provide more context in the description of the results but it wasn’t anything I would pay a premium for. the majority of features I just didn’t use, the assistant and fastgpt were a waste, lenses were fine and having fediverse on by default is neat but nothing I’d call home about.
If it were cheaper sure, I might stick with it but I can’t justify the price to anyone wanting to use a search engine. $5 for 300 searches a month is a joke. I also don’t like the fact that if you want to pay with something other than a credit card (paypal, venmo, etc) you get charged extra cause Kagi doesn’t want to eat the fees. Also there’s zero option to opt out of paying for the “AI” features, you can turn them off sure…but you’re still going to pay for them.
If your internet usage consists of constant searching and LLM use for searching then sure, you’re going to be paying $10+ a month and be happy with it. But there was nothing Kagi offered that knocked my socks off. if anything, felt like I was getting scammed.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
… How did you mispell the name of the service in the thread title?
Aside from that: I think so, but you need to make that decision for yourself. There are a few demos that various influencers have made (I was sold by the one by Remap Radio… Fuck Capitalism, Go Home, and Pay For Google?) but what sold me is:
- I do a LOT of searching in any given month. I’ll use an LLM based “engine” for quick factoids (we’ll get back to that) but I really need the ability to search from my browser’s address bar or the steam browser without having to wade through all the bullshit.
- I REALLY like that I can prioritize, deprioritize, and outright block sites. No need for a sketchy anti-fandom extension that tracks everything I do when I can just click the dots and say to never show me warframe.fandom ever again. Also it is useful for blocking the REALLY chuddy news sites and misinformation blogs
- Speaking of Steam. I can just grab/assemble my login-less search string and use that with Steam so that all my in-game searches use kagi with my token rather than dealing with raw dogging google.
- And as for that LLM? While I wouldn’t pay for it on its own, I do like the kagi assistant. Mostly because it shows me what search strings it is running/emulating and gives me citations. So when it tells me that smallpox tastes savory, I can see how it came to that conclusion and even check if that is contradicted by the website it linked to
I have a lot of concerns with the techbro libertarian attitude of the company itself and am not really huge with where my money goes (in terms of API calls) but… I have a lot more concerns with google shoving and obfuscating gemini more every single day.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 3 days ago
For anyone curious how well it works, I just noticed they have a trial:
1984@lemmy.today 3 days ago
I have paid for it since it started so have to say yes. Never going back to Google.
sifar@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
It’s one of those organic produce items among the Internet things which happens to be in vogue these days.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Feels like this is an add, but in case it’s not, I use crypto to pay the lowest rate plan and this keeps me anonymous. I really like it but would strongly advise against giving a search provider your personal info which you have to do if paying by credit card. Its a much different thing having your searches linked to an IP vs your cc, name and home address.
classic@fedia.io 3 days ago
Do you then need to buy the crypto anonymously? I'm always confused about that point
nforminvasion@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You can buy it anonymously, mostly through P2P exchanges and markets. But simply buying bitcoin or some other popular coin with a credit card, then exchanging that to Monero and using that to buy your privacy things will work as well.
Monero is stupidly private and anonymous.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
You can but I don’t. You pay the crypto to Kagi through a third party pay service. Its not 100% untraceable but it’s enough to keep you out of any automated tracking that Kagi is or will eventually be doing.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I tried it and it was good, but not worth the money to me. Since that time, everything has been going more and more to shit, so while I am not there yet, everything else could eventually get shitty enough that I will maybe then be good to pay monthly for a search engine.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.
That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.
For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.
There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.
logi@piefed.world 3 days ago
Hey, Good job not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 3 days ago
How do you mean? I don’t think there’s any way to incur charges for AI usages beyond your subscription fee unless you are coding against their API.
specialwall@midwest.social 3 days ago
What specifically do you think is hard to avoid? I’ve never accidentally triggered a quick answer, personally