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Has anyone used Kagi Search (search engine)?
(kagi.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Privacy Guides
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My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I've paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it's great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi's results pages are very light. It's also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I'm de-ranking certain sites so they're pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.
There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.
Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google's API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.
I've found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn't handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.
Just FYI: They ditched the Bing API completely ca 2 months ago. See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1685-no-tears-shed-after-losing-bing
I actually do remember hearing about this somewhere, but even though I have their blog/updates in my RSS reader, they never officially mentioned this before this user brought it up—maybe in their Discord server? Thanks for pointing this out! I can imagine they really wanted to get away from Bing after the price surge, as that was only a signal of more to come. Duckduckgo seems to be paying for that with the massive increase in ads.
However, it is still disconcerting the degree to which Kagi is hugely reliant on Google. Doesn't change any of the positive aspects about Kagi, though.
I thought I read in one of their feedback threads that Kagi doesn't use Bing anymorel, but I could be wrong.
You are correct.
Have you tried brave search? Why do you choose mojeek over that?
I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2
Pros for Brave Search:
Cons for Brave Search:
Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don't even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it's cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the "smaller web" and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html
Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I've had with them. I just don't have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.
Lastly, I've learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don't use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html
Yeah I might try out Mojeek. I use brave for my searches and do !s [query] to get startpage results for my images
If you're using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit "Add [Search Engine]". And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.
So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do
@w query, because@wis my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.It's especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it's also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you're using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn't really something you can do (yet).