It is kinda expensive, but the quality is very high and I search all day long. It's definitely worth it.
However, I do have to say that, when I was looking for a very specific post, I spent around twenty minutes on Google and DDG and they came back with trash, whereas Kagi found it right away. In that one instance it was, indeed, fantastic.
The quality of all free search is just bad. Kagi, even when it fails, is basically the difference between me looking for something or just giving up and deciding it's not worthwhile. Kagi's not magic-tier like early Google was - it's basically just the only modern web search engine.
It’s one of those tools where I have to say, “it doesn’t fit me but you’re doing something good in the world so keep going.”
I don’t do the kind of searches where Kagi is a lot better than Google (I bet folks here do).
On the searches I do want to do, i.e steaming movies, local business and map related, Kagi is not yet strong at. I kept having to !g.
So I’m back to Google which I find fits me better.
But I’m glad Kagi exists.
I use SearXNG by the way. Kagi is better but I like the way I can configure SearXNG.
I just tried it on Kagi and it suggested a Yelp link for restaurants in McKinney TX which is nowhere near where I am.
Google uses what it knows about you as context — which arguably many folks here are against— but it does get me the right results in one go.
Kagi does let you opt-in your location to improve searches. So there is a way and the user is in full control.
I love the service, but poor local results is definitely one of its weak points and basically the only reason I ever fall back to Google anymore.
https://kagi.com/images?q=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fp...
Lets use this as an example. I would personally like to have a list of exact results. Separately - a list of similar images would maybe be nice. But tbh, 99.99% of the time with reverse image search, I am trying to play detective, not find similar images. I am usually looking to see the first, original source of something. Or maybe other places I can find this image.
I will point out that detective stuff like this is crucial to try to prevent being catfished, or phished. I am not ignorant that it is also a concern for those who don't want to be found, for privacy or safety reasons; however some threat actor could just find a less public reverse image search I'm sure.
It's a separate login? That's really weird, isn't it?
That's it!
[0] https://kagifeedback.org/d/2565-image-search-doesnt-respect-...
I just tried generating an example. Take the query “screenshot nero burning rom windows xp” - of the first 10 images, only 6 are screenshots of the program on Kagi. On Google, it’s a solid 10/10.
Of course it’s hard to take just one example, but it reflects the general feeling I have when using the image search quite well. The results aren’t necessarily terrible, it’s just that they aren’t as relevant as Google’s.
To make it easier for you to report any discrepancies I created a bug report with screenshots of what I see.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5073-investigate-image-search-res...
It's Google Images that I find unusable.
Probably will be well-liked overall by Kagi customers, I'm sure. I'd be a bit concerned about false positives, but I suppose the stakes are pretty low compared to other similar situations (e.g. using AI to detect AI-generated essays in University), so there's not much of a concern.
Is there any mechanism to provide feedback for false positives?
I think this could possibly be nice reward program, provided guardrails are in place to prevent abuse.
Edit: When I explicitly choose to "Include" AI images from the toolbar option, they disappear. When I choose to "Exclude" them, they reappear. Still seems a bit buggy.
This is exactly the kind of thing I want to be paying for. It doesn't even matter if it's not 100% accurate (I don't think it ever could be without some serious processing), the commitment to down-ranking sites that have low quality content is the whole ball game for me.
(Please, don’t support (financially, by “donating” your attention) the surveillance, psychological addiction, and manipulation economy.)
And this is a great feature!
I do wonder how long the distinction between AI & non-AI, for any type of content, will be algorithmically or manually detectable.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=baby+peacock&fmt=images
https://www.google.com/search?q=baby+peacock&sclient=img&udm...
I guess to me anyway, images/news etc is a sideshow to the wider web, as in a crawler/indexer and not a pretendy meta search.
It depends on what I am searching for and why I want to use it.
I’m curious what other Kagi users are doing or finding that makes their experience so overwhelmingly positive. Is there some workflow I’m missing that’s required to get stupendous results? Are other search needs better met by Kagi that are missed by other search engines? Have others also felt a lack of “wow”?
I have used, and continue to try on occasion to keep my opinions updated, all the big search engines. DDG, Bing, and Google. The search experience is really not there for me in those 3. Bing consistently produces poor results, DDG is a bit better but I still have to manually sift through poor quality results to get what I want, and Google makes me scroll past a lot of bloat and ads first to get to quality results, with more ads interspersed throughout.
I like being able to search, get my quality results, and move on with my life. That's worth paying for to me.
(+) By frowning really hard at people who don't follow this rule?
Because, don't defecate where you eat.
how crazy are these images that you can't start with a prompt of your own?
Part of it, if I understand correctly, is that the data has no actual concept of grammar and meaning. So if you say "a table with 6 legs" it doesn't see that as a full concept, it sees words or segments of words, so "legs" can end up being legs of people (it might make a table with human or animal legs) and similarly it just might insert random legs in the scene because it has no understanding of the description.
So, people find ways to coerce / influence it to get to the right place.
It's also important to know what models/loras/etc were used as not all data sets generate good images for whatever your topic is.
Is this incentive for sites to avoid/discourage AI-generated images, to avoid that hurting search rankings?
The problem is that now that Pandora's box has been opened, all sorts of sites (incl. anywhere like social media that accepts user content) are going to have comingled AI-and-legitimate images that they host.
This is a hard problem to solve.
https://kagi.com/images?q=baby+peacock
...shows that infamous AI-generated peacock image multiple times on the first row of results.
Merely filtering out websites that tend to have lots of AI images does not prevent this failure case, since (for example):
https://birdfact.com/articles/baby-peacocks
has the fake image in there, as an example of "What does a baby peacock not look like?"
As Emily Bender has correctly pointed out, AI images are like an oil spill, and the cleanup (if such a thing is even feasible) will be challenging:
https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/cleaning-up-a-baby-peac...
(edited to add that I'm a paying Kagi customer, and this failure case isn't a ding against my overall impression of what Kagi is, and I'll continue using it)
For something that we just started working on a week ago and knowing this is just the first iteration of the feature - I think we are doing good overall. When there is will, there will be a way. And there is plenty of will on our end to stop this thing.
That said this feature might still be useful, especially if it's extended to normal search results for sites with AI-generated articles etc.
There are so many photobucket.com URLs buried in old forum posts that no longer work...
Okay, this would not work for Reddit, where many of the AI-generated images come from, or any other site that allows user-generated content (unless the site is strictly AI-related).
the anti ai-generated image crowd is a loud minority, they won't matter in the long term and spending dev time on this is questionable decision making at best.
now if you're a forensics company or that is the angle, then yeah it could be an interesting tool to have, might be even more profitable than this custom search as a service thing (obsoleted already by llm tech).
Similarly, there is a definite qualitative difference between some actual hand-drawn art and something entirely generated by a model. It's a pretty obvious distinction and it's more than reasonable for people to care about it.
Not to mention how much AI-generated imagery is absolutely tasteless slop. That certainly describes the obvious AI examples in the article! If all the filtering feature does is block those—and, unfortunately, it probably can't do more than that—it would still be really great. Even without AI we were already beset by visual garbage; AI has only made it easier to generate it; having some way to even partially filter it out is the least we should aim for.
I'm not anti AI but usually when I do an image search, I'm looking for photos of the real world, not artwork (from humans or AI)- and AI is getting so good I can't visually tell them apart.
It's not a dumb feature, this is what I wished for less than a week ago when using Google. I don't want my time wasted from judging AI images based on perception, I don't even want to perceive them.
Maybe when it comes to art, but not when it comes to anything else. If I want to know what something looks like in reality, AI results won't be of use.
