Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Flip side how much does Google pay you to defend their monopoly? Kagi is a solid product with a team that clearly cares about what they’re building. They’re transparent and post change logs when things update. I simply trust them infinitely more than Google.
Kagi customer here. Not getting paid to shill. I think it's worth occasionally mentioning alternatives that are good enough to pay for so that other people know there are other people using other options.
But full disclosure, sometimes I'm using DuckDuckGo and it's also good enough most of the time that I occasionally forget until I go down some rabbit hole and realize that I'm using the wrong search engine.
Whenever I fall back to Google and see how terrible it has become I feel sorry for everyone still using it as their main search engine so I tend to link people to kagi because it's just so much better. Especially the customization aspects. I also like the idea of mainstreaming to pay for critical services like search. No paid shilling whatsoever. Back in the early 2000s people used to drop links to Google whenever search engines where discussed because the alternatives were mostly bad.
Today we have Brave and the alternative Bing frontends but Kagi is still unrivaled because how easy it is to remove shitty results.
Nope, it's just a nice thing I like. It is nearly the platonic ideal of a search engine for me. It causes me no problems and doesn't try to sell me garbage.
It's like discovering that there a better pair of shoes that're more comfortable. Everybody can use a slightly improved more comfortable pair of shoes, so it comes up frequently.
I just don’t understand people who get so upset that someone might like something enough to talk about liking it. So upset that they won’t ever try the thing. Like … ok I guess? You do you. It’s just a strange way to make decisions.
At least this is just a consumer product. Worse is when people here say they make technical decisions using the same process. They’d black list certain tech because they’ve heard people talking about how it solved their problems. Also ok, but now I know I should avoid them professionally.
I get the impression it's the volume of the folks who sing its praises. There was a web3 crowd for a while, Bitwarden champions would show up to any mention of a password manager, and (ahem) some AI champions can be over the top
In all of these cases, a reasonable counterpoint is that if it were that applicable for all audiences, one wouldn't need to sing its praises, it would sing its own praises
I tried it, it's slow and bad and free tier is only 100 requests, and it's too expensive, and price is unjustified. I use gemini with google search grounding.
I understand skepticism in the age of LLM-generated content and CAPTCHA-solving bots. What I don't understand is why people choose such weird hills to die on and think that posting about it will accomplish anything. Do you think people will read your comment and go "gee, I was going to use Kagi but now I won't because this random person has a bad feeling about a series of comments they remember seeing"?
I signed up for a specialist forum not too long ago and posted an honest review of a product because I hadn't been able to find one anywhere on the internet. Immediately a bunch of people accused me of being a "shill" for a direct-to-consumer business that's been powered by a Yahoo storefront for the last 20 years, as though a business that's run by a guy with an AOL e-mail address is sophisticated enough to figure out Fiverr and astroturf their reputation on a phpBB forum.
Think about it for just a moment - do you really think that the Hacker News audience is large enough or full of enough tastemakers to sway an alternative search engine's market share? It isn't. If Kagi wanted to do that they'd hire TikTok influencers.
tomhow|5 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dawnerd|5 months ago
hamdingers|5 months ago
foobarian|5 months ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification
datadrivenangel|5 months ago
But full disclosure, sometimes I'm using DuckDuckGo and it's also good enough most of the time that I occasionally forget until I go down some rabbit hole and realize that I'm using the wrong search engine.
jasonvorhe|5 months ago
Today we have Brave and the alternative Bing frontends but Kagi is still unrivaled because how easy it is to remove shitty results.
lelandbatey|5 months ago
It's like discovering that there a better pair of shoes that're more comfortable. Everybody can use a slightly improved more comfortable pair of shoes, so it comes up frequently.
testdelacc1|5 months ago
I just don’t understand people who get so upset that someone might like something enough to talk about liking it. So upset that they won’t ever try the thing. Like … ok I guess? You do you. It’s just a strange way to make decisions.
At least this is just a consumer product. Worse is when people here say they make technical decisions using the same process. They’d black list certain tech because they’ve heard people talking about how it solved their problems. Also ok, but now I know I should avoid them professionally.
mdaniel|5 months ago
In all of these cases, a reasonable counterpoint is that if it were that applicable for all audiences, one wouldn't need to sing its praises, it would sing its own praises
koakuma-chan|5 months ago
alexjplant|5 months ago
I signed up for a specialist forum not too long ago and posted an honest review of a product because I hadn't been able to find one anywhere on the internet. Immediately a bunch of people accused me of being a "shill" for a direct-to-consumer business that's been powered by a Yahoo storefront for the last 20 years, as though a business that's run by a guy with an AOL e-mail address is sophisticated enough to figure out Fiverr and astroturf their reputation on a phpBB forum.
Think about it for just a moment - do you really think that the Hacker News audience is large enough or full of enough tastemakers to sway an alternative search engine's market share? It isn't. If Kagi wanted to do that they'd hire TikTok influencers.
throwaway290|5 months ago