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by pookieinc 414 days ago
For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?
4 comments

I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases.

I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)

What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.
To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity).

If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.

Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...

If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.

That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).

Thanks for taking the time to explain; what you say makes a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to give Kagi a try.
If you believe ChatGPT is good for such usage, no. But personally I think it sucks at that and have no idea how anyone can stand it.
how do you tolerate the sheer latency of running the "vast majority" of your web searches through an llm
How many searches previously to find the right question to ask x search time = total_search_time

# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops

For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.
The LLM can read through the results quicker than you can and provide the information you were looking for.
Well, it provides something at any rate. Whether or not it's the information you were looking for is very much a matter of luck.
Just try it, it's free to try.