HN is the ONLY place I've seen Kagi recommended as useful. So much so I bought it for a year and had to move back to google. I was missing so many search results.
Maybe I didn't configure Kagi enough? But I don't want to configure a search engine.
This is interesting to me. I've done basically no configuring (except frequent use of a "site:reddit.com" lens) and it's been great. Now when I see Google or Bing results it's jarring how bad they seem.
For search I'm increasing just using Claude + web search tool, it's better than Google has been in years. I have my own local ollama-powered RAG setup as well which isn't as good but may serve alright if/when Anthropic starts with ad insertions.
I find doing more focused searches with bang patterns work well for me, I.E searching wikipedia, manpages, mdn etc directly. Sometimes coupled with LLM to more quickly understand the syntax because docs tend to be sparse with examples.
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
2 days ago I was making multiple searches looking for the websites of specific hotels and spa facilities, and none of them showed up in the first 4 pages of results, even when searching by exact name.
Out of desperation I switched back to Google, and, surprisingly, it was willing to give me what I was looking for on the first page. (But not as first result, of course..)
> DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
True, but DDG seems, at the very least, no more afflicted than other engines. If I'm supposed to pay for a search engine, I expect something better than DDG.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
I find it to be more reliably useful than the other non-Google alternatives I’ve tried. I find its “PDFs Only” filter to be awfully handy too. Proudly not a bot, but I freely admit that, because I pay for it and our incentives seem aligned, I’m biased toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
I share the same sentiment. I know many people praise Kagi, and I respect the effort behind it too. I tried it for three months and realized it was not for me. Google works just fine for my needs.
Haha… no bot here. Been using Kagi for years now. Not sure what you‘re searching for. My own tests, admittedly early, found no instances, where Google gave better results.
