YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Yes, sir(s)! Using a search engine without ads is such a life improvement that it’d be a steal at twice the price.

Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.

EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.

That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.

I love Kagi. I especially appreciate how it pushes back against AI slop and makes the web feel more human again. I haven't looked back at Google since switching. The search results are consistently better.

My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.

[0] https://kagi.com/smallweb/

Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.

That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?

I tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.

I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.

I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.

Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.

I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.