wasn’t Kagi the original Mac App Store? Nothing like Apple’s modern take, but I used it for a few “shareware” titles successfully

wondering if Apple is onto something in the internet search space...

I've been gradually working through its free trial, too. I say "gradually" because I've been so wary of "wasting" searches on stuff I can find easily through DuckDuckGo, that I've only actually been using it very sparingly. Its results have been good when I have used it. But there's something about putting a monetary value on each search that changes how I feel about using a search engine 😅

@manton Is this the same Kagi that had the shareware app store?

check out presearch.com

Having no ads is great! I also get better results for what I search, especially for technical questions for work stuff.

I had just tried this out a week ago. No native integration with Safari is what is keeping me at bay. They have their own browser, but 1Password does not work there. I am stuck!

@SciPhi Yep, I guess the new Kagi folks bought the domain name at some point.

@garthc Nope, unrelated to the old Kagi.

I’ve been a paid user of Kagi for a while and haven’t looked back. Google was too many ads and too much amp. I switched to DDG, but I felt like the quality of the results there was becoming more poor and found myself going back to google often.

Kagi has been the best of both worlds, great results, innovative features, and no ads or pushes into a proprietary ecosystem like Amp.

I don’t know if Kagi will survive as a paid search product, but I sure hope they do!

@dfj @manton might be a nice replacement for Neeva, thanks for the tip!

@theotherlinh In my case, DuckDuckGo is my first choice, and if I want to switch search engines for different results I use Startpage (!s in DDG), which uses the Google index, but without the creepiness.

@manton.org @manton.org the lack of ads is addicting. Well worth the subscription IMO

@rom @manton @davew Sure, who needs to make a living anyway?

What are you comparing it to? It's a big improvement in quality and speed over duckduckgo for me. (I still like do ddg a lot and try both it and Google when Kagi searches don't have my answer.)

problem is that we are not used to pay for a search engine.

@manton @daringfireball Interestingly looks like Kagi is primarily a client on top of Google, Bing etc rather than a new search index: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

It’s own search indexes mentioned there are http://teclis.com/ and https://tinygem.org/ it seems.

I have been looking at @Mojeek as another alternative. As far as I know it doesn’t rely on anyone else’s index but their own.

(Related, https://commoncrawl.org/ is a great data source for those looking to build new indexes)

@numericcitizen @manton They do have their own web crawler that powers eg Siri: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683

@manton @daringfireball And unlike @Mojeek (https://www.mojeek.com/bot.html), CommonCrawl (https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questions/), Marginalia (https://www.marginalia.nu/marginalia-search/for-webmasters/), Apple (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683) and somewhat DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot) there seems to be no bot/crawling info at all for Kagi / Teclis, only that it uses a Python and puppeteer hybrid (http://teclis.com/), but no info on how to identify it’s crawler or how to target it with robots.txt 😕

@manton thanks for mentioning this. I have gotten so tired of the noise that is mixed into Google search results.