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points by furyofantares 2 days ago | 0 comments

I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.

I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.

First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.

I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.

The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.

I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.

[–] phyzome 2 days ago

My own workflow (for all search engines) is to add a keyword search in Firefox. This is way better than the built-in "search engine" feature because it supports pretty much any website.

I have a bookmark for `https://kagi.com/search?token=...&q=%s` (you can get the token from somewhere in the settings) and a keyword `k`. When I want to search, I type `k giant isopod` and hit enter -- that takes me to the search results. Note that that also works in private browsing windows, whether you want it to or not. :-P So you never have to worry about whether you're signed in.

Keyword searches are cool because you can use them for any site that exposes a query through any part of the URL.

[–] beans6543 2 days ago

It's possible in Firefox! Kagi just don't have helpful docs for how to set it up

[–] whilenot-dev 2 days ago

> it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on

May I recommend a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC[0], with a YubiKey[1] and some folder synchronization across machines?

[0]: https://keepassxc.org/

[1]: https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-yubikey-howto

[–] furyofantares 2 days ago

I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem and so I have my passwords almost everywhere that way. But like, I have a lot of devices and a whole family. Sometimes it turns out one is not set up properly and I logged in with a QR code.

[–] BoofMcQueen42 2 days ago

I had similar problems for a while. Especially Safari tabs that were dumped from memory on iOS. Logging in again was annoying. A quite over-engineered solution that slowly evolved in my Kagi usage uses Tailscale Golink [0].

Case 1: Kagi extension for Safari redirects from Ecosia to Kagi when on the good path. I rely on this mostly because it’s first-party so there’s a bit more trust with my queries.

Case 2: Safari Redirect Extension [1] redirects unauthenticated Kagi pages to Golink. Golink redirects back to the original page with a Kagi Token appended. Instantly authenticated.

Also, I highly recommend setting custom DNS records on Ecosia/DDG/whoever-you-redirect-from to prevent query leakage.

[0] https://github.com/tailscale/golink

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/i...

[–] BoofMcQueen42 1 day ago

Ah forgot to explicitly point out that this fixes the multiple-device log-in problem. All my devices end up redirected through that single point of Golink which appends the token.

[–] DavideNL 2 days ago

> "The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar."

That's definitely possible without installing an extension, you can add any search engine you want:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default/f...

[–] furyofantares 2 days ago

> I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.

(The instructions you linked are for Firefox)