As someone who hasn’t used paid search services, what sort of problems has this solved for other HN users that make it worth it? How does it compare to “AI” based search tools like Perplexity?
For me, Kagi is super fast and provides high quality, customizable results. Web search Just Works. When I use a new computer/browser and accidentally search with Google, it is a viscerally unpleasant surprise.
As for perplexity - I got a free year of Perplexity because I bought a Rabbit R1. I tried it, wasn’t impressed. I use Kagi’s AI assistant all the time. It’s my primary way of getting information from the web. I just type a a free form question into my address bar, append !expert for general questions or !code for technical ones, and seconds later my question is answered and I’m back to work.
I use the internet basically as an extension of my brain. There's very little barrier between having a thought and seeking information. Search is the usual way those two come together.
Google, these days, seems to mostly ignore whatever I've tried to search for and instead return results that I'd call "more popular". So the top results are mostly generic, useless results and below that it's mostly blog spam or wildly unrelated things.
This is especially bad when I'm looking for specific technical documentation or trying to understand unusual or obscure problems. Usually it's returning nothing useful at all.
Kagi returns results actually related to what I'm looking for more often than not.
The thing that convinced me to pay for it was a single search. I kept hitting _something_ that was causing the Apple TV to stop showing how much time was remaining in a show and instead show something else.
I went to Kagi and searched "netflix apple TV showing wrong time remaining" (my incomplete but best understanding of the problem at the time). Kagi surfaced a result that explained what this was and how it was getting triggered as the fourth result.
I went back to Google and searched the same. Top result was "If you can't change the time or time zone on your Apple Device" from Apple. Second was "Netflix audio is out of sync" from Netflix. With the benefit of knowing what the answer was, I did find a single relevant result about 25 results down mixed in with some blog spam on removing a show from "Continue Watching" on Disney Plus, listicles on hidden ways to make the Apple TV app on your phone even better, and a link to a Google Books copy of a 2008 Men's Health Magazine (?!).
Every time I accidentally end up back on Google it's... jarring to say the least.
As for perplexity - I got a free year of Perplexity because I bought a Rabbit R1. I tried it, wasn’t impressed. I use Kagi’s AI assistant all the time. It’s my primary way of getting information from the web. I just type a a free form question into my address bar, append !expert for general questions or !code for technical ones, and seconds later my question is answered and I’m back to work.