Kagi has been one of my all time favorite products. It has enriched my search experience drastically. One of my favorite features I don't see talked about enough is the keybindings. Using vim keys for navigating search results is such a fantastic user experience, and much like normal vim I'm not sure I could go back to navigating search any other way. I also really appreciate their AI quick-search feature is explicitly opt in and trigger by adding a "?" to the end of search. Their selection of widgets is also quite nice and I find my self reaching for them quite a bit.
I just don't understand how they can think that not giving me a single free search per month is a good idea. I used Kagi when they still had a free plan and it was fine but I still preferred Google. Now I can't even try it again to see if it has additional value.
Not promising it would work, but I would email support and ask to have the trial reset for your account. Companies are usually cool to restart trials if you ask.
I really appreciate clearly custom websites. My eyes are also quite bad (legally blind.)
Nearly ironically, because the site is already created for low vision, it had issues with the things that I do. Dark Reader froze up (uncommon) and the font was, for the first time, too large.
I love when people make personal websites (seemingly) purely for themselves. The design of this website really reflects the perspective of the author in a way that was immediately apparent. I've never seen a website with a menu that large.
Observation on the author's site: it's cool you can tell their site is designed for them by them, or other people with low vision. big font, high contrast, etc...
I love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that.
I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.
The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.
What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.
I agree, I found it hard and frustrating to read on my (small) phone because the text is just too big. I usually skim long articles to some extent to focus on reading the parts I'm most interested in, but this format makes that impossible. I can't skim anything because barely a sentence is on my screen at one time.
I know it's a completely different thing- but the neurodiverse face similar struggles of having to wade through reams of completely superfluous content to get to anything usuable.
Having done plenty of text to speech testing of my own website, I've never thought to turn it onto a Google search results page. It's abysmal.
I don't have low vision (yet), but do a fair amount of my reading sitting ~3m from a 65" screen, and I gotta say, the UI of this blog is lovely for that.
the thing I really miss when I use magic, is recommended places from Google maps, where to watch certain movie/series, a lot of things like that, where you can infer recommendations based on your location. Kagi might be good to filter everything scored "bad", but makes you work more.
How do you feel your data for Kagi Maps compares to Google Maps? It's the kind of thing that's harder to test than switching web searches over to Kagi. I need to already know that the business and transit data is reliable which is why I still go to Google Maps.
Kagi is one of the few services that I will never use, it’s a privacy nightmare. Imagine all your search history are tied to one account, an account that id you with your payment information, and is hosted in the US? Google is better at this point, at least you can use it without an account.
Is it open source? Audited? It is like back to how vpn services try to establish some sort of a trust relationship, which imo is more dangerous to have a false sense of trust than none, I prefer no trust at all, zero trust, especially when the service is SaaS in the US.
Yes and yes, since you you apparently aren't capable of reading for yourself
-edit- I decided I didn't like the tenor of the comments I made. This tone serves nothing but to degrade the quality of online discourse so I will say this:
I don't personally have the technical chops to verify the claims that Kagi is making. And no one should blindly trust the statements of faceless companies. For me personally, the claims, discussion in the linked hacker news post, and the direction of Kagi's economic incentives are enough to satisfy me personally. Nothing says that someone else must be satisfied by that level of evidence, which is definitely not proof positive. However, I also very strongly believe that the level of paranoia that it takes to decide that all of that is not enough would also 100% disbar one from using google, even without an account. I do not think that one can honestly say that, with the evidence we have on hand, that Kagi is less privacy protecting that google. They may not be privacy protecting enough, whatever standard that is for someone, but they are absolutely doing more than google.
Great, Can I host it? A memory injection server side exploit can leak/track/ID any person of interest. This is Signal server way all over again. If I can host it, AND the payments in something like monero for the server that aggregates the queries, we have the foundation of privacy, not perfect as there are a lot of other stuff to go through, but good starting point.
They don’t store search history linked to accounts. Logs are only retained for 7-90 days[0].
You can pay anonymously[1]. You can also authenticate anonymously, as someone else already mentioned.
Meanwhile Google retains everything forever and does everything in their power to track everything you do across the web and tie it back to you, logged in or not. This is their entire business model.
I’m certainly not joking. Google when it started it wasn’t as evil as now, but the bigger it gets the more evil it becomes, who knows what kagi will turn into if they got as big as google. But again on principle, can you use google search in the library without an account? Yes. Can you use kagi in the library without an account? No. So whenever and whatever you do, your queries are logged and tracked back to you, only waiting for xyz to be pulled out.
Google still lets you do some things without logging in but that doesn’t mean that they don’t build profiles or try to link them with other activity sources. Most of their revenue comes from advertisers paying for targeting.
So make a new account every once in a while if you are that paranoid. The whole value proposition of kagi is that it moves you from being the product(eyeballs for ads) to the customer of a product(search results) This flips the incentive of the search provider from abusing you to serving you. Hard to say if it actually will work. But I applaud kagi for trying.
And it is not like you marry kagi and once you sign up you can never use another search engine again.
Kagi has been one of my all time favorite products. It has enriched my search experience drastically. One of my favorite features I don't see talked about enough is the keybindings. Using vim keys for navigating search results is such a fantastic user experience, and much like normal vim I'm not sure I could go back to navigating search any other way. I also really appreciate their AI quick-search feature is explicitly opt in and trigger by adding a "?" to the end of search. Their selection of widgets is also quite nice and I find my self reaching for them quite a bit.
I just don't understand how they can think that not giving me a single free search per month is a good idea. I used Kagi when they still had a free plan and it was fine but I still preferred Google. Now I can't even try it again to see if it has additional value.
Not promising it would work, but I would email support and ask to have the trial reset for your account. Companies are usually cool to restart trials if you ask.
Do you think the potential upside is worth the $5 it would take to explore?
They offer a free trial with 100 searches
I really appreciate clearly custom websites. My eyes are also quite bad (legally blind.)
Nearly ironically, because the site is already created for low vision, it had issues with the things that I do. Dark Reader froze up (uncommon) and the font was, for the first time, too large.
I am glad to see someone else enjoying Kagi.
I love when people make personal websites (seemingly) purely for themselves. The design of this website really reflects the perspective of the author in a way that was immediately apparent. I've never seen a website with a menu that large.
This author is excellent. I found their blog earlier today when relaying advice on setting up an iPhone for someone to use after a stroke. ( https://veroniiiica.com/iphone-accessibility-settings-for-st... )
Observation on the author's site: it's cool you can tell their site is designed for them by them, or other people with low vision. big font, high contrast, etc...
It's also nice for everyone. Like, very readable, pleasant, way better than the trendy modern designs.
I love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that.
I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.
The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.
What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.
I agree, I found it hard and frustrating to read on my (small) phone because the text is just too big. I usually skim long articles to some extent to focus on reading the parts I'm most interested in, but this format makes that impossible. I can't skim anything because barely a sentence is on my screen at one time.
I've been using Kagi for a while now and I'm never going back to Google. Everything is just so much better when you are not the product.
I know it's a completely different thing- but the neurodiverse face similar struggles of having to wade through reams of completely superfluous content to get to anything usuable.
Having done plenty of text to speech testing of my own website, I've never thought to turn it onto a Google search results page. It's abysmal.
Of course Google is an accessibility nightmare.
I don't have low vision (yet), but do a fair amount of my reading sitting ~3m from a 65" screen, and I gotta say, the UI of this blog is lovely for that.
I love Kagi, but it is soooo slow compared to Google. Really annoying...
the thing I really miss when I use magic, is recommended places from Google maps, where to watch certain movie/series, a lot of things like that, where you can infer recommendations based on your location. Kagi might be good to filter everything scored "bad", but makes you work more.
We have a big overhaul of Kagi Maps coming, stay tuned :)
How do you feel your data for Kagi Maps compares to Google Maps? It's the kind of thing that's harder to test than switching web searches over to Kagi. I need to already know that the business and transit data is reliable which is why I still go to Google Maps.
Looking forward to this.
Kagi is awesome! Good luck w the updates
The custom css is tight, love using inky blacks on my oled devices with just a single style sheet.
Kagi is the one and only product I will ever stan
One more reason to love Kagi Search.
Kagi is one of the few services that I will never use, it’s a privacy nightmare. Imagine all your search history are tied to one account, an account that id you with your payment information, and is hosted in the US? Google is better at this point, at least you can use it without an account.
Here ya go:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Is it open source? Audited? It is like back to how vpn services try to establish some sort of a trust relationship, which imo is more dangerous to have a false sense of trust than none, I prefer no trust at all, zero trust, especially when the service is SaaS in the US.
Man, if only the article I had posted had answered those questions. That sure would be nice
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040521
Yes and yes, since you you apparently aren't capable of reading for yourself
-edit- I decided I didn't like the tenor of the comments I made. This tone serves nothing but to degrade the quality of online discourse so I will say this:
I don't personally have the technical chops to verify the claims that Kagi is making. And no one should blindly trust the statements of faceless companies. For me personally, the claims, discussion in the linked hacker news post, and the direction of Kagi's economic incentives are enough to satisfy me personally. Nothing says that someone else must be satisfied by that level of evidence, which is definitely not proof positive. However, I also very strongly believe that the level of paranoia that it takes to decide that all of that is not enough would also 100% disbar one from using google, even without an account. I do not think that one can honestly say that, with the evidence we have on hand, that Kagi is less privacy protecting that google. They may not be privacy protecting enough, whatever standard that is for someone, but they are absolutely doing more than google.
Great, Can I host it? A memory injection server side exploit can leak/track/ID any person of interest. This is Signal server way all over again. If I can host it, AND the payments in something like monero for the server that aggregates the queries, we have the foundation of privacy, not perfect as there are a lot of other stuff to go through, but good starting point.
So you think being logged out of Google will keep you more anonymous than this Kagi Privacy Pass setup?
It should also work with the Cloudflare privacy pass extension [0] FWIW, since Kagi just implemented RFC 9576 [1]
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/
[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9576
They don’t store search history linked to accounts. Logs are only retained for 7-90 days[0].
You can pay anonymously[1]. You can also authenticate anonymously, as someone else already mentioned.
Meanwhile Google retains everything forever and does everything in their power to track everything you do across the web and tie it back to you, logged in or not. This is their entire business model.
[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
You must be joking. Google ties all of your searches to you wether you log in or not.
I’m certainly not joking. Google when it started it wasn’t as evil as now, but the bigger it gets the more evil it becomes, who knows what kagi will turn into if they got as big as google. But again on principle, can you use google search in the library without an account? Yes. Can you use kagi in the library without an account? No. So whenever and whatever you do, your queries are logged and tracked back to you, only waiting for xyz to be pulled out.
Let me get this straight. Your privacy plan is to alternate library computers while searching logged off Google? I'm impressed with your dedication.
Google still lets you do some things without logging in but that doesn’t mean that they don’t build profiles or try to link them with other activity sources. Most of their revenue comes from advertisers paying for targeting.
So make a new account every once in a while if you are that paranoid. The whole value proposition of kagi is that it moves you from being the product(eyeballs for ads) to the customer of a product(search results) This flips the incentive of the search provider from abusing you to serving you. Hard to say if it actually will work. But I applaud kagi for trying.
And it is not like you marry kagi and once you sign up you can never use another search engine again.