[wkat4242]

> With Kagi, for the first time in history of search engines, you are the customer and everything is built around you and your needs alone.

There have been several others that attempted this. They didn't succeed. But they're not the first.

I'm using SearXNG myself, which is quite similar to Kagi in that it combines search results from the other big parties (google, bing, brave). It's not quite as configurable (e.g. choosing to omit certain sites from the search results is not possible, but you can tune the relevance of each source search engine) but it serves me well and it's fully self-hosted. It can also easily integrate with more 'grey area' sources like torrent sites which is nice.

I try Kagi once in a while but I'm not yet conviced to pay for it - it is quite expensive by European (Spanish) standards. And I like to keep things under my own control. When I spend money I prefer it to go to hardware, hosting, knowhow etc. I even run an ollama server just so I don't have to use ChatGPT (for most things).

I try Kagi once every few months to see if it's significantly better than my own setup which so far hasn't really been the case. But I wish them well! :)

[freediver]

> There have been several others that attempted this.

Interesting, for my information, which companies are you referring to?

[nickpsecurity]

My memory is fuzzy on what I used way back in the day like this. One was a meta-search engine across general engines (eg Google) and specialized engines. It had boolean operators to let me drill into the search. I think it was Turbosearch.

Regardless, I wanted features like that on top of Google, Bing, etc. It could be free and ad supported with a user focus like DuckDuckGo.

Also, a Kagi vs DuckDuckGo comparison might be more fair than Kagi vs Google since DDG is still serving the users despite being ad driven.

[benhurmarcel]

Neeva was one.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-eng...

[freediver]

Aware of Neeva - Kagi was founded 3 years before it.

[wkat4242]

Yeah that was one I was thinking of. I didn't know it was more recent, it feels like ages ago. But also altavista, it was very customer centric, though it was free. But it was basically just a demonstration of digital's expertise and it did feel like they wanted it to serve the customer as well as possible.

And I thought DuckDuckGo had plans for a paid search experience at some point.

But now that in think of it I'm not so sure, sorry. Sorry for positing incorrect info.

[freediver]

Thanks for confirming, I was just genuinly curious if I missed one. I know browsers had a history of being paid, but no search engines before Kagi.