Search for everyone

Can you expand upon this? Why is there an AI block?

Either way, ultimately the result of not offering the option will more likely be getting blocked entirely, than workers being freed from the shackles of SafeSearch.

It's not just porn, it could be a way to prevent successful phishing through employees filling out a malicious form or whatever.

"Trust your workers" is bad infosec.

Some companies just know their workers, i.e. if you have a bigger company you will have some idiots. We heard things like "you shouldn't be paying an escort with your company credit card" and the reason was because it was done, multiple times.

80% of the time the search results were perfectly fine, but that small amount of time would royally annoy me and my breaking point was this: https://i.redd.it/r4q6y3vl5vdh1.png

So I went back to Kagi and appreciate it a little more (they've also rolled back on Translate to some degree).

Come to think of it, one of my boxes is not logged into kagi, and is mostly ai nonsense.

I guess I’ll keep paying them. :-)

What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.

(Also Marginalia for deep search)

The last time kagi failed me, I flipped on claude research mode. It found a microfiche archive, OCR’ed it, then started retro-stalking obscure 90’s celebrities (read old interviews, found coworkers, etc).

It took 15 minutes, but it produced an accurate 20-30 page report, then converted it to machine readable form for downstream use. I tried doing the same research myself a few years ago and failed to find anything at all.

As the kids say: Google’s cooked.

(Does Chrome on mobile allow it? I use Edge on iOS which also only has a hardcoded list, so while I don't know for sure, but I assume not)

[1] no doubt i will be waiting until i am dead

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

But it seems Ecosia does really help around the world, at least looking at their reports certainly seems so. Even if it's not a huge impact, isn't it better than nothing? How does NOT using it help anyone?

I genuinely don't care about their "green marketing". I use Ecosia because it is European, and it works for me as a search engine. As I said I tried Qwant but for some reason it was not working for me.

I do care a lot about ecology, but my choice of search engine is not really impacted by that. People who think that "planting trees" is helping the environment need to get informed about the problem.

Still better than using Google directly.

A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.

I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.

I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.

I was just really surprised.

I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.

1. Transit. I'm in NYC, and Google Maps does a great job of showing the MTA, trains and busses. Every route, all the stations, which trains stop there and when, even where the entrances are. Kagi Maps has no train routes or layers. There's stations, most of them at least, but it's basically the Wikipedia entry for that station. No up-to-date info or routes.

2. Mobile apps. At least half of the time, my maps use is an Android intent for address or directions, which only an app can answer. And the only really good way to get your location and see what's around you.

I don't really notice latency at all personally, but fixing those things might bring my Kagi Maps usage from 0% to like 50%+.

I know, it's probably a pain in the butt to integrate with the transit systems of hundreds of cities for up-to-date info, but OSM does at least have the stations and routes. Not much point trying to beat the official MTA app in functionality, but something is better than nothing.

It's also weirdly hard to get to. Why isn't it an option in the main list of Kagi things? To get there from the Kagi homepage, I have to click on search options, then maps.

But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...

I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.

- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.

- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.

- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)

- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)

I guess the biggest problem is and will always be the quality of data. The reason I can't use CoMaps much is because OSM just doesn't have the same accuracy and recency of data on businesses and POIs in my area as compared to Google/Apple.

1) navigation

2) give me more info about this business that I tapped on

3) reviews; find related businesses, yelp style

I cannot figure out how to do any of those things with your UI.

Ideally, for (1), it’d let me choose to open in organic maps (reliably works at all) or apple maps (better when it works, which is rare offline, even with offline maps turned on) on my phone.

This might he fantasy land, but if it could send the location to BMW’s app, then that’d be awesome too. (The bmw app can send the location on to my car.)

One other thing: Lot’s of people are asking for an app. “Add to homescreen” works well on first glance, at least in iOS. The big thing is integration with the other apps. (Something like avenza would be cool for parks.)

> For example, searching Kagi for !w Monty Python will search Wikipedia directly for "Monty Python" and take you to that Wikipedia search result. [1]

If you're on a plan with limited searches per month, it does not count against your quota.

DuckDuckGo has bangs as well.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

For those that are looking for it, you can track your current month's billing/ai-usage here: https://kagi.com/settings/billing

But since I'm on the Ultimate plan, for stuff that matters I usually use Fable with a custom assistant (prompt), and sometimes the stock "Research" assistant. Both work really great for me. I use the "Research" assistant for more technical questions, it tends to dig up information from forums and cross-reference it with the source-code file it digs up from github and quote the RFC that it has directly fetched too.

Though I usually prefer my custom assistant prompt, which Kagi seems to combine with their general prompt in the background. This works really, freaking great most of the time. My custom prompt is an elaborate version of "answer the question, but then try to second-guess what the user is doing and also provide a different perspective that could be more useful than a direct answer". This has derailed my narrow train of thoughts a few times and turned me around into the right direction.

That said, I haven't played around with my own local agents for search yet to compare (in part because Kagi does a very good job at this), and this is something I want to try, in a "own your tools" sense. But the first thing I'll make sure that it uses the Kagi API for its search.

(The instructions you linked are for Firefox)

https://kagi.com/pricing

There are also real downsides, like needing to be logged in all the time. I can visit ddg.gg on a customer's laptop in 0.2s, but won't be logging into my Kagi to do a quick web search

I also don't need anything but search and image search: for maps I use OSM, for LLM inference there are various free and paid providers, for videos one sadly doesn't find much outside of youtube anyhow (save for specific genres like conference talks at media.ccc.de, in which case I already know where to go). All this stuff included in the ultra fancy plus version incurs costs for them so it makes sense that it's not in the base product, but I won't use it so I feel silly paying for it

Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription

If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.

Afaik DDG sources from bing and their own indexing.

There are options. Uruky is a great European search engine where you can use an European search index (EUSP) alongside other smaller ones. Their entire stack is USA free.

EDIT: Also technically Russia is in Europe ;)

Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.

Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.

- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.

- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).

Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.

Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.

Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.

Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?

OP in the linked thread wanted to boycott Russia and Russian businesses. The “context” is that Kagi gives money to Yandex.

"The moment 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I stop working on a search engine."

I'm having a very hard time equating what's happening in Ukraine to "politics", as if we're talking about the next election or something...

"Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use."

So it should be easy to cut then. It's literally an argument for removing it, not for keeping it. God.

If a country goes into a neighboring country and starts killing people there, the natural reaction from a civilized planet would be to, at the very least, ostracize the aggressor. It should never pay to invade other countries. Invading other countries should be an obvious path to a total destruction of domestic economy and prospects for the future.

In other words, it doesn't matter if your money paid to Yandex goes directly towards bombs and drones (it actually does, if you look at the ownership structure). What matters Russian economy as a whole.

(Not OP)