[gaazoh]

Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out

* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your

* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.

* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.

[jjice]

> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around.

I also generally have this mindset, but I've come to think of it through the lens of me getting a better experience for a while and going back down to what I had before vs having never had that better experience.

Before I paid for Kagi I worried "what if it's great and then they go under?" But then I'd just go back to Google and move on, having never had that better search experience. I guess it's kind of like "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" Except that quote seems a bit over dramatic for a search engine...

[wiether]

User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going

Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations

[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/

[Havoc]

The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends

[benhurmarcel]

> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around

Why does it matter for a search engine? It's not a tool in which you store your data and need to be stable.

You use it now, when it's available. If one day it stops being available, or stops being good, then you stop using it. Nothing lost compared to not having used it in the first place.

[rkangel]

I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.

I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.

It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).

[jorams]

> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out

You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.

As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.

[promiseofbeans]

To be fair, privacy policies are worthless. They could have a squeaky clean privacy policy and still collect data on you illegally. I did request a copy of all my data under the relevant consumer law for where I live, and it looked like they weren't collecting anything they shouldn't^. That's still not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.

^ They did still have a copy of all my old assistant threads, including deleted ones, but a mate who works there says that was just a bug with the system and should have been fixed. This was about a year ago.

[lostlogin]

What search engine do you use?

[gaazoh]

Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.

[lostlogin]

> Mostly DDG

Why do you trust what DDG says but not Kagi?

> require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world

https://kagi.com/pricing

There is a free tier (no card required) and the billing is done per search. It’s that simple.