Testing Uruky to replace Kagi
I thought that of all of the goals of my European migration journey, Kagi would be the easiest. I believed there to be no alternative, so I could just shrug and continue to be a happy customer.
For those who do not know, Kagi is (or at least started as) a paid search engine. No ads, no tracking, just a stellar search tool. Sure, nowadays they've expanded a lot (creating a new browser among other things), but search has been top-notch for the two and a half years I've been a user.
I thought that a subscription funded search engine was a niche that couldn't support more than one player, but then I came across Uruky - a Portuguese alternative. Since I'd begun the migration of all my other US subscriptions, I was interested to see if this could be done with search too.
For reference, here's what Uruky themself say about Uruky vs Kagi
Why even pay for search?
I despise the ad-funded business model. There are a few Europe-based search engines but most are ad-funded (MetaGer is another sub-based - I'll check it out later if things don't pan out with Uruky). Sure, I could run e.g. Ecosia with ads blocked (as they always are), but that feels like abusing the system and certainly won't plant any trees. I'd much rather have a fair scratching-of-backs: I pay you, you give me a good service.
The signup
I'm always happy to see a simple signup, and Uruky does not disappoint here. After clicking the sign-up link, your account - that is, the account number - is created. Then you have an option for a 2 hour freebie by doing a 'prove you're human' check, or to jump directly to the paying subscription. I dropped 5€ for a single month, stored the account number, copied the search url to my Firefox settings and set it as default.
Done.
The result quality
...was not good out of the box. A particularly jarring experience was when I wanted to open the ASP.NET documentation for policy based authorization. I had to put in basically the page title and domain exactly to have the relevant documentation show up in the first few results instead of a bunch of related blog posts.
Luckily in the settings page there was a 'apply recommended settings' button that made the results a lot better. I don't quite know the details as to why these settings are 'recommended', not 'default' - maybe it's due to some of the search indexes being UK based? Anyway, my results have been good since switching to those recommended settings.
Like Kagi, Uruky has user-controlled functionality for promoting/demoting certain sites in the results, which helps a lot with personalizing the results. Currently this can only be done from the settings page or from the desktop search results page. Or at least I can't see the button on the results page for it on Firefox Android.
No LLM assisted search
The one thing I foresee I will miss the most is the lack of LLM integration. Kagi thankfully doesn't do it by default, but by appending ? to any query you can get a short summary of the first results, after which it's easy to either check the results yourself or continue to a chat interface to make the bot dig deeper.
This has been accurate enough that I use it for most of my queries - a major crutch to be sure, but what's an addict to do... Kagi Assistant has also been nice for deeper dives and cursory research.
Uruky does not have any AI features currently and is seemingly hesitant to add any:
We find it hard to do in a sensible, responsible, and respectful way.
I think it's commendable that they're not blindly shoving LLMs everywhere, but this lack still stings. For now, I'll try to get used to the ancient ways, and review the search results myself 😬
The verdict
Uruky is still a very new product, seeing as the first public beta version was published in January. They also just celebrated getting to 150 paying subscribers, so not large by any measurement. There's quite a few rough edges - e.g. the keyboard navigation on the results page is serviceable but needs some loving - but development is active and new stuff is being pushed at a consistent pace.
Since it's not fully open source (source will become available to customers after 12 months), the best way to keep up with new developments is via the feed or website. Just this month they've added e.g. URL rewrites and result date filtering.
It may still be a bit raw, and the lack of bot-assisted summaries feels painful, but the result quality and speed seems good enough for me to keep using Uruky as my main search engine for now, especially since my Kagi Duo license is about to expire in just a few days.
The signup is so simple I recommend everyone to give it a go. Just remember to use the recommended settings if the results don't seem to match expectations.
Thoughts, comments? Send me an email!