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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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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dawnerd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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hamdingers 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you considered it's a good product that causes its users to become advocates?

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foobarian 2 days ago | parent [-]

Could also be a form of effort justification. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification

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tolerance 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The effect is most likely to occur when there are no obvious reasons for performing the task. Because expending effort to perform a useless or unenjoyable task, or experiencing unpleasant consequences in doing so, is cognitively inconsistent (see cognitive dissonance), people are assumed to shift their evaluations of the task in a positive direction to restore consistency.

I’m not following you.

https://dictionary.apa.org/effort-justification

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immibis 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's not limited to physical effort. Wikipedia's example has embarassment in place of effort; presumably, money could also work.

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tolerance 2 days ago | parent [-]

I interpreted to mean that using a search engine is “useless or unenjoyable, or experiencing unpleasant consequences...”, with attention given to the last two feelings. And I can't figure out what that has to do with people who like Kagi and why it’s wrong or irritating for them to do so.

Granted I’ve been annoyed by similar occurrences with other services, but not to the point of suspecting collusion between the service and the public like the GP comment did.

Searching on the web takes effort. I don’t think this sentiment is controversial. Especially not on HN.

But do you think that because/if searching on the web takes effort and because people have to pay for Kagi, they are compelled to exaggerate its usefulness in public to justify the cost?

	▲	immibis a day ago \| parent [-]
		Switching to a nondefault technology takes effort and switching to Kagi in particular also costs money, which is also effort for the purpose of the psychological effect known as effort justification. Therefore, people would be likely to rate switching to Kagi as a good thing even if it was exactly the same as Google (says the effect). Therefore, people who say Kagi is good find it exactly the same a Google (implies the commenter).

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glenstein 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

TIL about effort justification! I think signing up for Kagi is not particularly effort-intensive however.

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datadrivenangel 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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jasonvorhe 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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lelandbatey 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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testdelacc1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Disclaimer: Not a Kagi user. Unlikely to use it.

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.

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mdaniel 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	ufmace 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It sings its own praises... how exactly? Maybe by a bunch of happy users talking about how they like it and it's a better solution to the problem that the thread or article is about without being explicitly paid? Which is exactly what's happening here and some people are complaining about it?
	▲	testdelacc1 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How does a password manager sing its own praises?

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koakuma-chan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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alexjplant 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	throwaway290 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		no one else would pay for search. people on HN is probably 90% of their total possible market.