[CobrastanJorji]

This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.

Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."

[sfpotter]

Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.

[eastbound]

On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do.

I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is it?”

[malfist]

Maybe you see different comments than I do, but I don't see many comments saying it's improved a lot lately.

As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If that's not something you care about then don't use it.

Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think so, but then, Google is trash these days too

[buzzerbetrayed]

I don’t understand.

The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is better than Google as of late. You’re not helping the “Kagi doesn’t use bots” case by ignore the context 2 comments up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948385

[malfist]

They said Kagi works "way better" than google, not that Kagi is better as of late (although they do ask if they've tried kagi lately). Which is consistent with my statement that Kagi is a consistent product and not really improving. They keep adding AI features, but I disable those and don't care about them.

You're welcome to check my post history, I'm certainly not a bot. Or if I am, I'm a very convincing one that runs an astrophotography blog.

[Velorivox]

> I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image

I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.

Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be shocked if the author of that “AirBnBs are blackhats” article was interacting with real users of Craigslist spurred on by some referral scheme.

[maleldil]

> one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well.

It's not so much validating, but I'm hoping they grow so I can keep using their service. It would suck for them to close shop because they never got popular enough to be sustainable.

[tshaddox]

> to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image

What “level” is that which couldn’t possibly be accomplished by humans? Are you seeing thousands of messages every day?

[buildfocus]

> On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image

Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.

As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).

That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).

[snackernews]

“Kagi is bad. As evidence I present Siri.”

[sdwr]

Then why do they want Google's search index?

[hmottestad]

Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.

[guhcampos]

Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE.

The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet.

In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawlers everyday.

[trollbridge]

I already get hit by literally hundreds of crawlers, presumably trying to find grist for there AI mills.

One more crawler for a search index wouldn’t hurt.

[cactusplant7374]

Bandwidth is cheap. I also like seeing more traffic in the logs.

[const_cast]

Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now about small, independent websites being essentially DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI crawlers.

[sfpotter]

So they can work even better...?

[tobias3]

Kagi is just a meta search engine. They are already using Googles search index. They just find it too expensive. Guess they need to show ads to pay for the searches.