Kagi and Wolfram (opens in new tab)

I never realized before that sentence, but the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content. I might sign up to Kagi just for that.

I configured Reddit as a "Lense" (similar to what Kagi uses for things like searching across Forums, or news). With that, now I have a simple toggle at the top of Kagi which allows me to immediately turn a search into a Reddit search.

I've been on Kagi for some months now (six-ish?). Best subscription I carry.

I originally signed up purely out of spite for the SEO scam that is Pinterest (Kagi lets you blacklist domains), but have since been repeatedly pleased with other rankings.

I love that MDN tops the list for DOM ish searches and w3schools is not even in the results.

Using Kagi often makes me forget how awful the Internet can be.

Kagi has a built in 'Forums' search that limits results to Reddit, HN, and other high-quality user discussions. It's probably my favorite feature.

This comment is now the second result for me, below https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/uhga1j/usb_mi... and above https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/comments/g6cm6q/waterproof...

Just entered this query as is, without configuring any lenses, and got a bunch of results from /r/synthdyi. I suppose it's good? I imagine if you use reddit a lot, you should bump its relevancy and add a lens for it, as other folks here described. But from that I see, it does decently even without that - even for topics where there's a lot of garbage contents, like reviews, it returns mostly the legit review sites, even though choosing which one do you trust would be a challenge. If you have your preferences, then bumping the relevance for these sites is easy.

> How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

I’ve started using their quick answers to sort through the crud. In most cases, it catches and filters out the obviously-bought Reddit recommendations, surfacing bloggers and niche industry publications that did their own lab work.

Really well, I just have Reddit pinned so it’s (almost?) always one of the top results, without having to add “Reddit”. HN is another. Similarly, I have lots of domains that I’ve always hated seeing in results, nuked, so I never see them anymore. Kagi is amazing.

With everyone saying how great the "put down websites with ads is" there are exceptions (few probably)

One of them being vietnamcoracle.com, which is, without a doubt the best travel website for Vietnam (if you like to really go deeper.) None of the content is sponsored, just relevant ads (here you can rent a bike, book a tour etc) and they are discrete in general.

Between him researching new destinations and writing / updating/ replying to comments he just doesn't have a lot of time for the classic "money making job + sideproject".

I just imagine (hope) he's not the only website like that out there.

I don't currently use kagi but would prefer if there was an option to filter by ad type (everyone hates pop ups) and amount.

Anyway just my 2c.

With wolfram and the llm + more users I'm hopeful that in the longer term the price will go down and/or stay at 10$ over the longer term.

Kagi has a !reddit bang, but it sends you to the terrible reddit search. I added a custom bang !reddit with "search?q=%s site:reddit.com" as the URL, which just adds site:reddit.com to the search

you guys are living in a dreamworld. I'm totally fine with a site that has "tracking" like Google analytics to help content makers and businesses alike make decisions. And have visited many a site with valuable content that might have been tracking me at the same time. This eliminates tons of valuable content.

I have been using Kagi for quite a while. When I’m looking for code stuff at work, I will get results from Reddit that come to the top or close to the top. It doesn’t throw all of Reddit away, even when I’m not specially looking for Reddit.

I just tried your search, without even adding “Reddit” on the end. At the very top was a “Discussions” section, which had a tile for Reddit. The first result was also Reddit, with a few discussions nested under it. The the gearspace forum, followed by YouTube, then it bunches up a bunch of those 10 ten lists that pollute Google all into a section that is easy to use or skip, then sweetwater music, and then funny enough, your comment here on HN. It keeps going, but yeah… Reddit isn’t deranked to the point of not being used, Kagi sees the value in discussion forums when looking for the “best” something.

I think quite well. I've been using kagi for a couple months and I'm super happy with it, esp for programming-adjacent searches. You should give it a try! (not an investor, just a happy user).

There are built-in bangs for reddit, and users can prioritize reddit.com as a domain if they'd like.

Reddit has ads and tracking (so does facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc) not to mention your local paper.

Do they filter out reddit or just small ma and pa sites with adsense?

It has "lenses" that you can tailor yourself. Just pay and try it. Cancel if it's not your goto in a month.

Im sharing some saved Kagi searches:

best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers+...

best waterproof midi synthesizers https://kagi.com/search?q=best+waterproof+midi+synthesizers&...

Where do you use a MIDI synthesizer that it needs to be waterproof? In the rain, the ocean, the bathtub? Inquiring minds want to know!

It's OK. One thing it does is rope "reddit" into the "Forums" Lens, which on face seems good but I search mostly for car stuff and forums are a trove there.

Feature request: block a domain?

"saab 900 power steering rack -reddit"

still returns a ton of reddit results.

Wait, why do you need a waterproof midi synthesizer?

But how will you live with yourself when every search for library documentation or a programming language doesn't flood the first page with expertsexchange, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, favtutor, freecodecamp, and a pile of other tissue-thin content covered with popups?

Best $10 I spend every month.

Complete with how he played a major role in the early history of search engines.

A new kind of search engine

Please refrain from such inane, low-effort comments, regardless of how annoying Wolfram is. If you want to contribute to the discussion, say something about how this will impact Kagi.

Kagi-Wolfram derangement syndrome here we go!

"Kagi" goes first to get under his skin just a little bit.

Hahahahahahaha sooooo trrruuuueeeeeeee Let’s upload also a 2 GB paper with lots Of graphics and Mma code on ArXiv because everyone on ArXiv is looking forward to it

You can use the session link [0] in incognito so you don't have to login each time.

[0] https://kagi.com/settings?p=user_details

You can get something somewhat similar to Firefox Focus in regular Firefox for Android by enabling the option to open in Private tabs by default and turning on tab auto-closing. That's what I did for a while when there were indications that Firefox Focus was about to be abandoned (which never actually happened).

Even better though, now that Add Ons are opened up on Firefox for Android you can install Cookie AutoDelete. Then you just use regular tabs and can keep your Kagi cookies (and any other sites you regularly log into) but have it nuke every other site.

There is also a Kagi Add On. It didn't do pretty much anything when I first installed it last year but it might work these days.

Oh, and finally, there is the Kagi Session Link you can use that embeds a token in the URL so that you can more easily use it for something like a search provider in Incognito/Private tabs.

Imo ddg's mission is incompatible with today's web. The mission is simply to serve you regular Google/bing search, but without tracking and they do that well, but it is missing the absolute trash fire that those results are currently (yes, they have moved somewhat from that but clearly they are still heavily reliant on Google ranking). Kagi on the other hand, I spend 5$ a month on search that doesn't track me AND gives me great results. The open-source stuff (think of me when a bang now gives you https directly :D) is just the cherry on top.

> [1] To force me not to leave open tabs I don't really care about, my default browser is FireFox Focus, which is strictly "incognito" mode, which means I'd have to manually log in to Kagi every time I did a search.

I strongly recommend the Tab Wrangler extension. I set it to close any tabs that have not been visited in the last 6 hours. Of all the methods I've tried to deal with too many tabs, this has been the most effective.

The two are unrelated, but they do reference the shareware platform in their FAQ.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#are-you-affiliated-w...

Wow, that was a blast from the past, I had completely forgotten that's why the name seemed familiar.

This is fascinating. Even sillier example, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-31+to+2016-04-0... and https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2019-01-30+to+2016-04-0...

both show an identical duration of 2 years 9 months 26 days (edit: despite reporting 1032 and 1031 days respectively).

Do you still have any of the reports open? I might have some debug info. This appears to be an error with consecutive months with 31 days.

Jan 2024 - Nov 2023 example (both cases show "2 months 1 day"):

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-01-31+to+2023-11-2...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-01-30+to+2023-11-2...

Aug 2024 - Jun 2024 example (same bug):

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-08-31+to+2024-06-2...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-08-30+to+2024-06-2...

The same thing doesn't happen from Jul 2024 - May 2024 (results vary by 1 day):

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-07-31+to+2024-05-2...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2024-07-30+to+2024-05-2...

Is that a bug? I interpret it as from midnight 2016-04-04 to the first time which has the date 2019-01-31. That includes the full day of 2016-04-04 but nothing from 2019-01-31. This is contrasted with the opposite direction which is midnight 2019-01-31 going backwards, thus not including 2019-01-31 and all the way up till the first time which is 2016-04-04 non-inclusive.

Date time arithmetic is weird ;)

If you use "from" in the second example, the answer is the same as in the first ... anyway the system should figure it out.

Both show 1032 days. Do space missions depend on such fuzzy defined time stamps as (calendar?) months? I think time dilation would be a much more serious factor.

It feels like a glass of water on a hot day, when you didn't even realize you were thirsty. Suddenly you can find things again.

Recently I've been adding ? to a number of queries, to play with its knowledge graph and answering capabilities. It's been remarkably useful at surfacing information.

I think it was Scott Galloway who said that advertisement is a tax on the stupid and poor. It’s been true for news for a long time. It’s becoming, with Kagi, true for search.

Respectfully, I disagree. If I can get the answer without having to click through to another website, I'm a happy camper.

you have option to turn it off from settings

Mathematica is a commercial product: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/

> This is the size of Automattic

Automattic has almost 2000 employees.[0] I believe that number even automatically updates as folks come and go, but I could be wrong.

[0] https://automattic.com/about/

The headquarters are in Champaign, IL which is a small town with a much lower cost of living than Silicon Valley - so salaries are 20-40% lower than Automattic or other comparable mid-sized firm. The main revenue driver is Mathematica (now called the Wolfram Language) which has several lucrative and long-standing academic licensing deals in place. I don't think the other endeavors (Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram cloud, book publishing) have been nearly as profitable.

(I worked at Wolfram Research around a decade ago, when it was ~500 employees)

Wolfram research was lucky in getting A 6 m usd relief package donated by Us US law abiding tax paying citizens. Smart cookie how he got this donation.

Kagi's internal index seems to focus on sites that wouldn't necessarily block spiders.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

I've crawled small web sites (even hosted on major providers) to archive them and never hit a wall.

I’m fairly sure Kagi reuses Google and Bing search results, then de-craps and applies your customized preferences to them. I’m not sure it even runs its own spider.

I believe Kagi just pays to use Google's and Microsoft's indexes.

Neither, we are passing all the savings (we get better search API deals as we grow, AI is getting cheaper...) into making the product better, at no additional cost for the user, to ensure we are still around next year.

I think that in 5 years nobody will want to use a search engine which doesn’t have AI capabilities. The stuff which turns you off may be critical to Kagi’s survival.

I believe cutting out the whole GPT craze would be best. OpenAI bills are always anything but negligible and I think most users would agree lowering the subscription cost or using it for things like Wolfram integration may be best for the core product.

Don't forget that the standard plan of Kagi recently got infinitely cheaper, it used to be limited to 1000 searches a month and switched to pay-as-you-go afterwards, but now it has unlimited searches.

I‘d love to see an IMDB widget.

if that was the plan, they wouldn't have Stephen Wolfram on their board

It is expensive I'm sure - and they attested to that in their Discord - but it doesn't seem slow.

I can see them doing that for some things, but kind of doubt it for the more mathy things.

I don't think this would ultimately be healthy for Kagi. The continuing pressure to maintain the value of the subscription since people can cancel at anytime IMHO drives their success.

Once off lifetime memberships suck. They seem good but once they've got my money (and spent it in that year's budget or whatever), I'm basically just a free user with extra obligations from the company's perspective.

I strongly believe part of the reason Plex has gone down the shitter is because they sold too many lifetime memberships and expenditure has outstripped recurring revenue.

Morbidly, it's still true.

This does happen to me sometimes! Not 1/4 though, more like a few times a day. At first I thought it was my internet connection but it happens often enough and is usually reproducible for about 15 to 20 seconds, so does seem to have something to do with the query.

Try getting on contact with them. They've been helpful when I had a problem. I've born tried kagifeedback.com and their e-mail support (two separate questions), and in both cases I received help promptly.

That sounds like a good bug report for https://kagifeedback.org

Make sure to include example searches when this happens.

I get sent to the login screen maybe once per day. Very annoying if you searched from the address bar because your query isn't preserved anywhere. Not actually logged out, resending the query works.

@the__alchemist emailed you

Works perfectly for me on various browsers and operating systems, and for my friends as well.

Hopefully the kagi team will see this though and chime in, or you should report the bug

Good to know! This will help in figuring out when reading the news and they describe everything in tennis courts , school buses and football fields. How do you convert from tennis court to school bus?

It can't handle non-numeric quantities like "average distance to moon" but Google's calculator has handled calculations with units very well for 15 years at least. It definitely puts Apple's Spotlight calculations to shame.

I find that W|A works fine until it fails to parse my query and then I have no idea how to fix it, because the syntax is unclear.

I just tried some time math and it got it wrong

3:38 - 0:10 = 8 hours and 32 minutes

I'm guessing it was trying to convert it to times of day instead of 3 minutes 38 seconds.

Interestingly if I click the quick answer button it gives 3:48 as a result.

Google - doesn't even try.

WA directly also had to nudge it to use it as a unit instead of a time of day.

Still some work to do here it seems!

Just do it. Kagi has been my favorite $10/mo spent before this collab already.

I‘ve been using it for two years as my primary search engine, and they’ve been nailing it. Kagi‘s worth every cent. No ads, no need for DDG g-bang, because Kagi search results are above par, excellent support via email/feedback, „quick answer“ feature gives gpt reply, and now Wolfram.

The cheaper 300 searches/month subscription is a great way to try it out.

AFAIK that's the default monospace font for apple devices as well.

!gm is one of my most frequently used bangs on kagi

I run into this sometimes, but there's nothing stopping me from !gmaps until I'm happier with kagi map results.

If you're using Firefox and have Kagi as your default search engine, then just adding the Firefox search widget seems to do the trick.

Its easy to save a shortcut homescreen widget with Firefox Android. But, that's just a link to kagi.com, not a type to search widget.

Set kagi as the default search engine in edge on android (you need to install edge) and add the edge search widget to your home screen. I also switched to the MS launcher so I could get rid of the Google search bar.

Yeah I’m very seriously regretting passing on the private investment opportunity that early adopters were given.

I love the idea of Wolfram throwing his brainpower and associated ego behind this problem.

Yes, Kagi is using GCP (+ AWS + some baremetal)

> I get a feeling like I wasted a search when I search something stupid like x documentation.

I have unlimited searches with Kagi, but I have still gotten into a habit of obsessively taking notes. I personally use Org Roam, but I think anything with hyperlinking and allows you to take notes non-hierarchically is important. This kind of information is worth searching the web once, taking note of, and then using your notes later to access.

While yes, realistically this is just a lonesome longwinded approach to bookmarks, I have personally never found myself going back to browser bookmarks. I actually refer to my notes all the time though.

Wolfram isn't really in the ad business, as far as I know. They probably retain queries blindly for metric tracking, but my (informed) guess would be that it's very separate from and PII.

In WolframAlpha (no Kago subscription, but I assume it works just the same), to achieve your desired result, you merely have to use:

> 14:50 - 16:28

Or

> 14:50 to 16:28

It makes sense when you think of it.

I’ve been using this for years, and it works wonders for datetimes too.

This is the amount of time between 16:28 today and 14:50 tomorrow. You got a correct answer. Just not the answer you were thinking of.

To me it seems to compute number of hours in the interval between those times.

I don't use kagi. On WA, this search results in the answer with a prompt with the engine's assumptions, and includes a link to change the assumption to "math" from "word."

These prompts don't show on kagi? Seems like including them would be an avenue for improvement.

Yes, one vexing thing is the inability of search engines to convert time. 5209s to hours and minutes? Oh, I still need to tell you how to do in steps. Why is this so?

I'm getting the correct result: "= 1 hour and 38 minutes"

We have both available as a result of independent & simultaneous innovation/20%/side project things. I’m biased because I own the Kagi side, but have thought about this a bit.

SearX has some advantages. It’s free, except for the compute and labor costs. It runs on our infrastructure, so SSO is easy and we have complete visibility on what’s leaving our perimeter.

Ignoring nuanced search quality evaluation, SearX main disadvantages are (1) it’s only available on our network, so if you set it as the default search that feature breaks if you’re not at the office or on VPN and (2) it’s slow. Users get a blank page for a meaningful moment before results show up.

Kagi is snappy AF and adds solid AI features. Their Universal Summarizer (which isn’t actually LLM powered) works well and the fastGPT is the new standard for open ended information retrieval IMHO. (I have a Perplexity subscription I don’t bother to use)

What I want from Kagi is (1) a single payer team plan that gets all the features, (2) more information & contractual guarantees about privacy. I argue that Google is a terrible default, but the brand is trusted while Kagi is still mostly unknown.

Now, the real benefit of SearX would be integrated custom search providers for in-house data sources. We haven’t done that, and I’m not confident we have the resources to do it well. This is also something I’d love to get from Kagi, but it’s not well-aligned with their current roadmap. I’m content to use them to search external data and pursue other solutions for internal stuff.

I was relying on my own self hosted seaexNG before moving to kagi. I still have and use the instance from time to time. Using kagi is better and made my life easier. I stopped worrying about rate limited, bad UI and actually managing and following updates. It also did not solve the problem of ranking. Garbage results still showed. Kagi solved all of these problems and more and I didn't have to spend couple of hours per month to follow updates and manage my instance.

I kept getting rate limited or blocked with selfhosted Searx. Kagi is much better since it just works every time.

Just do it.

Someone did not like a dose of truth.

This is trite, but the simplest answer is that Kagi's product is search and its customers are users, and Google's product is ad impressions and its customers are advertisers.

Kagi founder here. Also a long time HN user and as such I too share your concern that we get too much exposure here. I do not know what to say but that I am eternally grateful to HN, as it is what enabled Kagi's existance. We have no marketing budget and majority of our users come from HN, so I can confirm that the comments you see here are authentic.

When I say this, I have some already voted down (you know who), and some voted up. If you notice, you will see Kagi keeps appearing on HN very often lately, and often there're people talk very good thing about Kagi. This clearly supports my suspicion here.

I find that people often don't fully know how to search and blame Google for not having the feature. Google even implements things in the browser that people can take advantage.

Kagi just happens to be pretty popular here, it's how I found out about it.

I think mostly a lot of cool stuff is being launched lately. But if I were a tech company, I'd definitely have a HN Plan ;)

Kagi does unit and currency conversion.

> I'm not sure "you and a swarm of a thousand digital clones" counts as fair use

It obviously does not. You’re a commercial client.

There was actually an outage due to this (their first major outage!) a few weeks ago. Someone was scraping via their API a little too hard, which had unexpected effects on upstream systems. So 100x human search volume is likely to be an issue unless you discuss it with the devs first.

>regularly accuses me of being a bot!

>swarm of autonomous agents.

So....Google is right?

They added the unlimited plan in September last year. Announcement: https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10

yes https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan