Flip side how much does Google pay you to defend their monopoly? Kagi is a solid product with a team that clearly cares about what they’re building. They’re transparent and post change logs when things update. I simply trust them infinitely more than Google.

Have you considered it's a good product that causes its users to become advocates?

Kagi customer here. Not getting paid to shill. I think it's worth occasionally mentioning alternatives that are good enough to pay for so that other people know there are other people using other options.

But full disclosure, sometimes I'm using DuckDuckGo and it's also good enough most of the time that I occasionally forget until I go down some rabbit hole and realize that I'm using the wrong search engine.

Whenever I fall back to Google and see how terrible it has become I feel sorry for everyone still using it as their main search engine so I tend to link people to kagi because it's just so much better. Especially the customization aspects. I also like the idea of mainstreaming to pay for critical services like search. No paid shilling whatsoever. Back in the early 2000s people used to drop links to Google whenever search engines where discussed because the alternatives were mostly bad.

Today we have Brave and the alternative Bing frontends but Kagi is still unrivaled because how easy it is to remove shitty results.

Disclaimer: Not a Kagi user. Unlikely to use it.

I just don’t understand people who get so upset that someone might like something enough to talk about liking it. So upset that they won’t ever try the thing. Like … ok I guess? You do you. It’s just a strange way to make decisions.

At least this is just a consumer product. Worse is when people here say they make technical decisions using the same process. They’d black list certain tech because they’ve heard people talking about how it solved their problems. Also ok, but now I know I should avoid them professionally.

I understand skepticism in the age of LLM-generated content and CAPTCHA-solving bots. What I don't understand is why people choose such weird hills to die on and think that posting about it will accomplish anything. Do you think people will read your comment and go "gee, I was going to use Kagi but now I won't because this random person has a bad feeling about a series of comments they remember seeing"?

I signed up for a specialist forum not too long ago and posted an honest review of a product because I hadn't been able to find one anywhere on the internet. Immediately a bunch of people accused me of being a "shill" for a direct-to-consumer business that's been powered by a Yahoo storefront for the last 20 years, as though a business that's run by a guy with an AOL e-mail address is sophisticated enough to figure out Fiverr and astroturf their reputation on a phpBB forum.

Think about it for just a moment - do you really think that the Hacker News audience is large enough or full of enough tastemakers to sway an alternative search engine's market share? It isn't. If Kagi wanted to do that they'd hire TikTok influencers.

Nope, it's just a nice thing I like. It is nearly the platonic ideal of a search engine for me. It causes me no problems and doesn't try to sell me garbage.

It's like discovering that there a better pair of shoes that're more comfortable. Everybody can use a slightly improved more comfortable pair of shoes, so it comes up frequently.