Why pay for a search engine

Why are there so many paying Kagi customers who feel the to write multiple paragraphs of testimonies? This is so unusual of HN.

Reeks of astroturfing.

You really can't distinguish enthusiasm for a product in a sea of crap from astroturfing?

Disclaimer: I’m a paying customer of Kagi.

It felt truly bizarre to subscribe to a search engine. To actually pay for access. There’s been a bit of drama with the CEO directly emailing people when they left poor reviews.

Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality.

I’m not surprised there’s a lot of people having thoughts and feelings about Kagi and expressing them. The fact that there’s a significant overlap between HN and Kagi’s user bases is hardly a surprise either.

Its hard to check is person geniune on internet. Also, too often we all see a lot of prise for not-so-good products.

Because a massive share of the kagi users are part of the hn-adjecent crowd. When you look at the most manually upranked domains, you'll probably get a clearer picture. https://imgur.com/a/1Ed23d6

The typical kagi user uses hn. In the past, hn was even further up, though I guess they're slowly getting "normal" people too.

> This is so unusual of HN

Is it? I see paragraphs of testimony from HN users who love anything whether that's a programming language, web framework, etc.

It's very well done-- really props to the Kagi marketing team, (you have a duckduckgo-style marketing book for sure to sell) but if you read a lot of hackernews you see the same stupid pattern over and over again in these Kagi threads with these testimonials like you said and becomes obvious.

Especially if you have used kagi

I can say that I’m a 10x dev since I use Kagi because it gives me good results most of the time at work. And when I accidentally switch back to other engines, I’m always disappointed.

But the truth is that subscribers are happy because it’s the only decent alternative out there. Google/DDG/Bing all suck. SearX may be good and free but I haven’t tried it yet.

There are only few products which I believe are genuinely good and I am happy to be a paying customer. Next to Intellij, Kagi is one of these products.

> Some people are not happy with Kagi investing in browser development instead of search results quality

As someone who uses Orion as their daily driver, I'll admit I'm somewhat confused by why Kagi isn't staying mission focussed. That said, it may be the case that they're a premium company for a small, well-defined niche. In that case, broadening the service offering makes sense--it's what Apple did.