This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).

Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

  • Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
  • “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
  • All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
  • Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.

  • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    The results aren’t always perfect, but its more of fighting with SEO.

    With DDG I’d often have to switch back to Google for a query. Now when switching from Kagi to Google when I can’t find a result the results are usually worse. For a niche topic I’m vaguely familiar with I’ll usually do ChatGPT so I can get the proper search terms and then find what I want on Kagi.

    It tends to improve the more you adjust your personalized weights. I was pretty lazy with that the first month and found it slightly subpar compared with Google. Now it seems way better.

    Lots of UI customizations if you don’t like a particular feature. As an example I don’t like their Listicles feature (groups top X type of results). Mostly because that content is poor quality. Disabling the feature just removes those crap results that would go in the widget which is a bonus for me.

    The ability to switch lenses (topic contexts) that you can customize those result weights for instead of one global context Google assigns you.

    I wish they had a better solution for anonymous searching. There is a pay as you go API I could use with a second account funded from cleaned bitcoin. Would be great if I could use the website though from a pay as you go funded source.

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.

        with DuckDuckgo (and I’m not a DDG fan to be honest) I can just change my IP and clear browser local storage to make several anonymous searches.

        with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.

        • shortwavesurfer@monero.townEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.

          Good point

          with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.

          Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.

          • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.

            I didn’t mean to your real identity (if you’ve managed to do payment well enough and never leak your IP while using it), I meant that even if you create a new pseudonym every month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single pseudonym, which can reveal a lot about an individual.

            • shortwavesurfer@monero.townEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Ah, i understand now. They “say” they dont record search history.

              From their Privacy & Terms page:

              • Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
              • We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
              • We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
              • We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.

              But they totally could