I've been using it during the beta and plan on paying for it once they start charging. Previously I had tried switching to DuckDuckGo, but found myself using !g half the time because I knew the DDG results would be garbage compared to the Google results.
I haven't found Kagi's results to be significantly better than Google's results, but unlike DDG they're not hugely worse than Google. It's all the extra stuff that makes me want to use Kagi instead of Google:
* Ability to banish sites from results forever. E.g. I never want to see the Concordia Lutheran High School's website when I search for things in the Common Lisp HyperSpec with clhs.
* Ability to weight sites higher. E.g. there are two mirrors of the Common Lisp HyperSpec that appear in results, one at http://clhs.lisp.se and one at http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/. The lisp.se mirror is hilariously slow for me (5-10 seconds to load) while the lispworks one is instant. Google always ranks lisp.se first which tricks me into clicking it and wasting my time. Kagi lets me weight that site lower so the lispworks site comes first. Banishing lisp.se would also work, but just upweighting it means I can still find it if the other mirror ever goes down or something.
* I reported a minor bug to Kagi and they fixed it within a few days. I doubt that would happen with Google.
* Supports DDG-style bang queries, which I use occasionally.
* No goddamn ads/tracking (I use uBlock Origin, but it's the principle of the thing). I've almost entirely de-Googled my life at this point (Youtube is the only holdout for me).
So it's not that it gives better results than Google, it's that the results aren't any worse and the extra quality-of-life features are really nice.
Basically everything you wrote above is what I'd say - except I haven't submitted a bug report or feedback to Kagi...
Basically, when I used DDG, I found myself frequently using !g to search Google instead. For Kagi, I haven't really found myself doing that anywhere near as often.
So yeah, you have to fill out a survey (took a couple of minutes and I got an invite the same/next day), so it's not the easiest to recommend right now. Two weeks and they go free+premium according to an email today.
I think it's just that I, like a lot of HN, have been getting super disillusioned with Google lately - and most importantly the preponderance of obviously machine-generated zero-value spam pages for everything I search for - so I was desperately trying to find something better. DDG constantly disappointed for my searching. Kagi doesn't do that. So I'm happy. $10/month happy? I'm not sure.
Generally, there's a growing group of people who are feeling about Google the way a lot of us felt about Facebook 10+ years ago - it's time to stop relying on it and maybe cut it out entirely (and yes, I know there are plenty of people who felt this way about Google for years already). So I pay for Fastmail now. I guess I'll likely be paying for Kagi now. Quality is getting expensive, but at least I'm paying with my money rather than my data.
Not only requires a login, but also Joe Regular cannot use it - beta means here closed invite-only, so it's just an internal tool for some group of people. So any news about it should be taken with a grain of salt.
There’s no way to test without giving your info away and taking a long survey from what I remember. It’s kind of like posting Facebook links I suppose.
Our goal at this stage (invite only beta) was not to get users who just want to try it out, but who actualy wanted to contribute by reporting bugs and suggestions as beta-testers. This is why we have a survey form, as completing it signals wilingness to invest time in the product. Soon (in two weeks) we will move to public beta.
Even then we won't have search without an account, among other things because bots would probably kill us.
