What’s questionable about Kagi? I switched to it last month and the search results are amazing, it works just like Google worked before the enshittification. Which makes sense, since they actually pay Google for access to their API.
I used DDG for a while, but they get increasingly bad. They started to aggressively replace keywords with similar sounding keywords, which really messes up the results. Absolutely unuseable garbage.
Thank you, that’s really insightful. Especially this:
As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days.
I’ll enjoy it as long as it lasts. Which probably won’t be very long, but we’ll see. :D
This one blog post (which is clearly a personal vendetta) is always cited when people dislike Kagi. The product itself is fantastic, and the optional AI-ish features are optional and not shoved in your face. As a subscriber, I get a yearly questionnaire sent to me which polls for customer priorities, areas for improvement, and general comments. I gladly fill it out every time, and this year I said “re-focus on search, the core product. Stop spreading resources so thinly.” I know I’m not the only one answering this way lately.
There will always be haters of a company and personal beefs which inform that. Vlad is no saint but he’s honest and direct. He believes in providing a great service and it’s worth every penny I pay for it. That can change in the future and I would rethink my stance; in the meantime, I pay for a product I like and use all the time.
Fwiw, SearXNG is using a very similar engine to Kagi and you can host it yourself and tweak it if desired. There are also a bunch of public instances if you prefer that route.
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.
What’s questionable about Kagi? I switched to it last month and the search results are amazing, it works just like Google worked before the enshittification. Which makes sense, since they actually pay Google for access to their API.
I used DDG for a while, but they get increasingly bad. They started to aggressively replace keywords with similar sounding keywords, which really messes up the results. Absolutely unuseable garbage.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Thank you, that’s really insightful. Especially this:
I’ll enjoy it as long as it lasts. Which probably won’t be very long, but we’ll see. :D
This one blog post (which is clearly a personal vendetta) is always cited when people dislike Kagi. The product itself is fantastic, and the optional AI-ish features are optional and not shoved in your face. As a subscriber, I get a yearly questionnaire sent to me which polls for customer priorities, areas for improvement, and general comments. I gladly fill it out every time, and this year I said “re-focus on search, the core product. Stop spreading resources so thinly.” I know I’m not the only one answering this way lately.
There will always be haters of a company and personal beefs which inform that. Vlad is no saint but he’s honest and direct. He believes in providing a great service and it’s worth every penny I pay for it. That can change in the future and I would rethink my stance; in the meantime, I pay for a product I like and use all the time.
Fwiw, SearXNG is using a very similar engine to Kagi and you can host it yourself and tweak it if desired. There are also a bunch of public instances if you prefer that route.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
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.