[cube2222]

To repeat myself from a recent HN thread:

I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent!

Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on.

The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well.

All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.

[__jonas]

I really wanted to like Kagi, I'm onboard with paying for search, but I've had had a big issue with its speed when doing the trial to be honest, am I the only one bothered by this?

Perhaps this is because I'm in Europe and it's faster in the US? A search request to Kagi seems to take around two seconds for me (shows as ~1s in the Kagi UI), it just feels really unpleasant compared to Google, I'm used to firing of a couple searches with different wording / terms and go through results quickly, feels like I'm being held back.

Maybe I'm spoiled, but if I'm paying for search I would really like it to be at least on par with Google, the search result quality seems ok from what I can tell, lenses don't really make sense to me, they seem to filter out too many results I would have liked to actually see, but the customization like adjusting the rating of individual websites is fantastic.

If they can manage to bring the speed to match that of Google, I'd be happy to pay for it I think.

[Modified3019]

I’m a US based user, I’ve never noticed a difference in speed between Kagi and Google. If there is one it’s below my threshold for annoyance.

You may consider reaching out to them about what you are seeing, it might be something they could investigate and resolve if they know about it.

[joshstrange]

US Kagi user here

I can confirm that the search is randomly slower than it should be. Sometimes hanging indefinitely and I have to refresh.

The added second or so to search is manageable but noticeable for sure.

To be fair/clear, it’s often unnoticeable but when it does hang it drives me crazy.

[pps]

There's no noticeable difference in search speed between Kagi and Google for me in Poland.

[szszrk]

Wow, this shows how personal search is. For me it's dramatic.

[ddingus]

Interesting!!

I'm not slamming you, or your experience or preferences. That said, I find very little difference between 2 seconds and one second or less than that.

Search taking a small fragment of time just isn't a big deal and I search sometimes many times per day.

What is the gain for you that makes 2 seconds an exception to using the product?

Just curious. Peace, live well.

[__jonas]

I feel like search is probably one of the most common things I do with a computer, I would say I often search many times per minute if I’m actively looking into some topic or issue.

Because it’s such a common action for me, it feels like such a strong regression to go 2/3 times slower than before.

[ddingus]

Thanks. I have a couple of thoughts to share:

Back in the day, IBM did a usability study. An application requiring the user to specify operations and fields for data input was setup two ways:

One way was manual, lots of clicks, and or input sequences. Each one did a specific thing quickly.

The other way was highly automated and the user was only required to click a few times. The tasks were the same. This way had more flow, fewer discrete commands, more functionality woven together.

To their surprise the users felt they were more productive with the software they clicked more, despite the automated version being less work and the workflow more efficient.

I bet the effective reduction in your search is minor, but the delays do accumulate and demand attention.

Given that, a small change to your flow may well change things!

What you should do is rapidly input your first queries and then as they appear, drill down on those, and when that appears, start to eliminate dead query windows, or drop fresh queries into them.

What you prefer, to use a car analogy, is one that corners like no other. Then you find yourself in one that lacks corner cases.

So you maximize your time in lane, straight road, batching the corner driving and flooring it on the straights.

I used to experience a similar thing running a browser on IRIX vd NT. The NT browser was quicker to respond where the IRIX one would delay a little and then just render it all quick

I just started working with a few windows. Changed everything. I would be typing in new queries while one I waited for was about to render.

It was a change from rapid fire to a more batch mode. Soon, I rarely had to think and my flow was fast all around.

I put this shared experience here in the hope you may be inclined to try different things.

[temporarara]

But do you seriously think you should get serious results in one second? I would understand the complaints about slowness if searches were taking like ten seconds, but a few seconds, I really must be getting old.

I still remember when google was giving relevant results in page 2. Now it's pretty much useless for me, and the fast search makes me think they are throwing away tons of potentially good stuff just to make it fast (and place more ads and rubbish scam/ai sites).

[chipsrafferty]

Kagi is pretty much useless past the first 3 results.

[MrOxiMoron]

I haven't found that, but even if that is true, it saves you tons of time having to filter out all the sponsored results and get to the things that actually give you the information you where searching for.

[temporarara]

That's not my experience, but I guess that depends on the use case and how specific things you are searching. However, in general I much prefer good search results to saving a few seconds and getting delivered absolute rubbish like google does these days, that was the main point of my post. Like I said I still remember when just plain google search without any thought on how to word the search was phenomenal.

Google fully pivoted from prestigious tech-company to lame ad-company and that's a shame really. Business as usual.

[mthoms]

It doesn’t seem intuitive at first but this is a well researched phenomenon.

https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20...

[jcul]

Really strange, I'm in Europe too and I've always found it pretty snappy.

[spurgu]

Yeah same.

[freediver]

Kagi should be around 800ms mean. Faster if you are closer to our DC. Something is wrong, somewhere.

[chipsrafferty]

Very slow for me too, East Coast USA

[fluential]

Very slow for me as well, Central Europe

[veb]

How bizarre. I'm not in the US either - I'm in New Zealand, and have been using Kagi since their beta I think and currently pay for Ultimate, and to me it's a lot faster than Google.

The other day I was using someone else's computer and used Google, and my goodness, the results were just awful and ... bloated?

[aorth]

Greetings from Kenya. Been using Kagi for two years here... never noticed any issues with speed on search.

[sweetgiorni]

Hrmm, I've noticed the same thing on the US west coast over the last year or so. Maybe I'll finally bother Kagi support about it.

[dperrin]

Sorry to hear your experience hasn’t been great. I’ve been using it from NZ for the last six months and haven’t noticed any speed differences. Just did trips to Canada and the US recently and I didn’t notice any difference in performance.

[darreninthenet]

UK user here, no speed issues at all

[Lazare]

I'm using it from NZ and Australia and found it blazing fast. No lower than Google certainly! I wonder if it'd be worth reaching out to Kagi support.

[sodapopcan]

For me, any downside of Kagi is worth dealing with to not support Google.

[ochronus]

I can second the 2s-ish response time (just did a couple of measurements) from Germany. Doesn't bother me, though.

[TeMPOraL]

Same for me in Poland right now - it takes around a second more for Kagi to produce the result than Google (with the delay happening after the interface of results page is shown). Doesn't bother me either.

What does bother me is the occasional failure to load anything at all, solvable with F5 key. But, being able to rank pages, or rewrite reddit.com to old.reddit.com more than compensates for this.

[__jonas]

Ah I’m in Germany too!

Interesting, as I see a lot of other comments from Europeans saying they don’t notice this delay, maybe it’s Germany-specific?

[probst]

I am also based out of Germany, and experience the lag too. I find it very annoying actually, to the point where I am contemplating switching. The lag isn't always there though...

[nbenitezl]

Using it from Spain, and speed is good.

[shepherdjerred]

I have experienced slow searches with Kagi. Usually if I refresh it fixes things

[bboygravity]

Are you using Ziggo by any chance? With the white modem?

If so: that's your root cause.

[beretguy]

Possible reasons Google is faster for you is because

1. they simple pull ads from database on the first page instead of actually searching for what you need

2. They load marginally relevant answers instead of doing a better search for what you need

3. Google is multibillion company and can afford faster servers

With Google you waste a lot more than 2 second scrolling down past the ads trying to find answers, assuming you can even find it, and doing another search(es) if you don’t, wasting even more time.

But do what you want.

[andreagrandi]

I'm based in Italy and my lag is very low:

Status Connected to: EUROPE-WEST2 Network latency: 47ms

[eli]

Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that Reddit only lets Google crawl them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

[msmithstubbs]

Kagi uses Google as one of its sources for search results so should be able to return the same reddit results as Google.

[eli]

Doesn't seem like it. Can you get it to return a reddit result from the last 6 weeks?

[msmithstubbs]

Try this:

https://kagi.com/search?q=remarkable+pro+site%3Areddit.com

It includes Reddit results from less than 24 hours ago.

[eli]

Ah hmm. Maybe they are doing something special with "site:reddit.com" queries.

If I search for that exact Reddit post using the lens it isn't there. https://kagi.com/search?q=ReMarkable+Paper+Pro+hands-on+revi...

[littlecranky67]

Well, there never was any law that required robots.txt to be honored. Big players like Google do, but I am not aware of any consequences if they wouldnt (of course UNTIL it is then regulated).

[darby_nine]

Curiously this link seems to show the "Academic" lens. Switching to the "Forums" lens pulls it right up for me.

[aequitas]

For me it doesn’t show up in your link with the full article title but with this one it’s the 3rd result or so: https://kagi.com/search?q=remarkable+pro+hands+on+review

[kelnos]

I don't think there's anything special; I very often get new-reddit results with no 'site:' qualifier. I can't think of a specific query offhand, but it happens multiple times daily for me.

[ezekg]

I'm able to search a post I made a couple weeks ago: https://kagi.com/search?q=%22union_of%22+site%3Areddit.com

[ulrikrasmussen]

I really think it's crazy how a big site like that can get away with locking out everybody else but the search giant with a monopoly.

[Sakos]

Yeah, it seems blatantly anti-competitive to me and I'm surprised we haven't seen the EU say anything about it yet.

[lotsofpulp]

Old Reddit (and other website) content might actually be more valuable given the higher likelihood of newer posts being spam/AI bot posts.

[DoughnutHole]

That disregards the fact that facts change over time.

If you google “best DSLR camera reddit” it’s much less valuable if the results are 5 years old, even if they’re LLM free - the cameras on the market may very well have changed in that timeframe.

[inquirerGeneral]

What? Old reddit isn't using old facts.

I skimmed down and if this was about Kagu indexing being out of date then sorry I just realized that

[klez]

Not "Old reddit" as in https://old.reddit.com. "Old Reddit" as in "Older stuff on reddit before they gave access only to Google".

[kelnos]

I've been using Kagi for a while too (wow, 2.5 years, didn't realize), and agree that the experience and search results have been excellent. I don't use lenses, but make heavy use of bangs, and I like that I can up- and down-weight domains and even ban domains outright.

But I don't really care about AI assistants. If these AI integrations will improve the bog-standard search experience (I type something in the search bar, get a list of results, and click the one I think will give me what I want), that's great. But if not, this is just noise to me.

[leokennis]

I was on the $10 a month plan for a while, but I canceled. Overall the experience of using Kagi was great but not "$10 per month" great compared to free alternatives. On top of that I got the feeling that Kagi is not a super "professional" company; for example by spending huge amounts of money on self-printing useless t-shirts (https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k) or haphazardly suddenly charging tax on subscriptions.

What I want most of all from a search engine is to be "internet plumbing" and mainly stay out of my way, and with Kagi I always had the feeling they would suddenly remove/change/add things because of some strong opinion their founder holds. In which case I don't want to be $108 committed for a year.

[adhi01]

Relevant HN thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314