This. Kagi is absolutely awesome.

I pay for Kagi so that I'm not being peddled ads or junk when I'm trying to be productive, as my ADHD-riddled brain can get easily distracted. It gets quite upsetting when I've wasted non-trivial amounts of time on those distractions that I subconsciously fall into.

I absolutely cannot use Google because of their seemingly endless attempts to distract me from what I'm searching for.

The final nail in the coffin was their actions to get rid of uBlock and other effective ad-blockers. It's a serious anti-pattern, and (I strongly argue) is effectively discrimination for those who struggle with ADHD.

I hope that Kagi can one day effectively filter out GenAI slop websites that look like legitimate content, but I can understand the significant technical challenges in such a feature.

Today is the day you find out whether you're the 1% of the 1%!

I give a shirt! Contact support@kagi.com until you get it.

We're finally going to find out if he gives a shirt!

> Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results.

The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either.

That said, I often turn off localized results completely and just use the international results. Those tend to be more diverse and more useful, at least for the sort of searches I tend to do.

Might depend a bit on your desired experience. I find Google to be too aggressively localized, where (from Canada) I’ll search for (made up example) e.g. “Eiffel Tower” and instead of the results that I’d want to be #1 and #2 (wikipedia and toureiffel.paris), I’ll get (after a pile of ads) “JimBob’s Eiffel Towel Of French Fries”, “kid builds scale model of Eiffel Tower for local science fair” and some tour company offering Eiffel Tower tours.

I once had weird results with searching specifically in the Switzerland region, it didn't find an obviously Swiss site. IIRC it was solved it by switching back to international search. I'm using Kagi exclusively, and I don't remember having such trouble recently. Maybe they fixed it.

I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)

Works very well in the UK. Local news, government websites, etc.

You can easily change the country in the results page, which is useful for people who speak multiple languages. With DuckDuckGo, I sometimes had to resort to !g to use Google, but I haven't done that in Kagi for ages.

Seems fine here in Australia, though I tend to use global results.

I find Kagi pretty good - I'm UK based.

I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.

It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.

The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)

As a non-US-ian, yes, it does, for search.

There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.

You'll still need Google Maps though.

That’s my issue too, as a Brazilian. For anything more localized, Google is the only choice that has usable results. I leave DDG as my default engine and intentionally go to Google only when I need something that’s more “Brazilian context”.

Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?

Maybe another company will take over at time. Why does one company have to stay perfect and on top of game for eternity?

Since they are subscription based and not ad based, their incentives are inherently aligned with customer preferences. This doesn't mean that they are immune from getting worse, or just becoming complacent, but it does at least make it less likely. Ad-supported companies succumbing to enshittification is virtually guaranteed thanks to the misalignment of basic incentives between the company and users (note: not customers).

Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.

Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.

Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.

The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.

The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.

Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.

It's really us who have to change our mindset about companies. It's foolish to expect them to retain the quality or purported ideology they claimed to have when they were trying to win customers, after they reach a point where they can exploit and extract money and suppress choice and competition. A CEO will say anything now and might even mean it, but it's empty words really, and not even their choice in the long run.

We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.

Kagi is unlikely to ever be as popular as Google. Free is always more popular.

"How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top?".

Don't get too greedy. There must be examples... 37Signals?

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