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freedomben
ninkendo
> It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time.
I use !g once a week or so in Kagi, and 100% of the time, google’s results are worse. It’s usually something bogus I’m searching for, and there really isn’t anything to be said about it, but when I search google for it, I get a ton more junk that is totally unrelated to my query.
Kagi’s results are better than google’s 100% of the time that I compare the two. It’s no exaggeration.
null0ranje
This is my experience as well. Whenever I !g as search, it is usually in desperation. I can’t remember the last time I found something on Google I couldn’t on Kagi.
flkiwi
As noted above, Kagi is the quietest but most useful subscription I have. The Kagi Assistant AI tool, with its access to pretty much any major model, is an enormous bonus.
trenchpilgrim
I really like the new Assistant update which guides you on the strengths and weaknesses of the selectable models and recommends a shortlist.
yunwal
> downranking/upranking/blacklisting
Kagi is awesome, and their default search is just way, way better than google.
That being said, their upranking, downranking, and finetuning just straight up does not work. I spent like an hour pinning sites that I wanted to show up in my search results, tested extensively, and it turns out search just doesn't seem to pay attention to your pinned sites at all. It's one of the features that I was most excited about, and I'm super bummed it doesn't work. I've had an open issue since March about it on their feedback forum, and it seems like they have no plans to fix it.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/6670-pinned-domains-dont-appear-a...
bot403
Years ago Google used to have a feature of blacklisting sites from your results. Go figure, they removed it.
I made the switch to kagi because there was so much ai slop and stack overflow copy sites in my Google results. Sometimes I would hit three or four cheap clone sites of the same stack overflow answer trying to get my answer. Now I'm super happy with Kagi.
fossislife
There are browser extensions, like uBlacklist, that can permanently remove sites from results.
I think you can import filter lists similar to how it works with uBlock Origin and import some AI websites list.
eboynyc32
Kagi is Super impressive.
mft_
I recently dumped Google on my phone because of the awful dark pattern they'd put in with a popup trying to generate an installation of the Google search app.
While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page, go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again. (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.)
Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi a go...
qwerpy
Many dark patterns at work there. The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store. The popup helpfully colors “continue” a nice shade of blue and the “stay on webpage” button is a less visible outline instead of a colored button. When I’m in an hurry, even though I’ve dodged the App Store redirect hundreds of times in the past, it somehow still manages to trick me. And then the whole redirect loop which is rage inducing.
Hopefully ublock origin lite can keep the popups away for a while.
nerdsniper
Redirecting safari sites to apps (including app store) should be a per-domain permission that I can revoke.
eviks
You're in luck, Orion browser from the same company has this config and asks at the first redirection!
bondarchuk
> The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store.
Ah yes, they do exactly the same thing with Maps.
mapipolo
This was precisely the last straw for me as well. The dark pattern is so outrageous and abhorrent that it felt right to dump Google on principle even if Kagi were not better. That it is better is a welcome bonus.
gonesurfing
Just as an FYI for anyone on iOS that is still tolerating this egregious dark pattern example, I successfully used Distraction Control in Safari to block this popup. Details here https://support.apple.com/en-gb/120682
busymom0
Is there a way to use it to hide the "microphone" button on Google? That's what keeps redirecting me to App Store if I accidentally click it once.
I tried selecting it in the distraction picker but it seems to hide the entire page.
gonesurfing
Not that I can see. I just tried it and get the same issue you describe.
x187463
This one, specifically, drives me crazy. The boldly colored 'Continue' does NOT, in fact, continue the results. Instead, it continues to the app store. Just awful.
xdavidliu
I changed my default search engine on iOS from Google to DuckDuckGo for this exact reason.
FredPret
It's because the "install app" option is styled to look like the "go away" option. I fell for the same trick many times; now I use Perplexity.
damascus_kei
Kagi has given me the most value per dollar out of any subscription I have ever had. I find the things I want much faster. I use the AI summarize; for example, to summarize YouTube video when looking for specific info or to summarize reddit web results. I also use Kagi Assistant everyday; usually several different models. Most importantly, my wife likes it. I find google almost unusable now. I can't go back. I will never go back.
QuantumGood
Seeing how Perplexity (my preference) or Kagi is much better than Google for 98% of queries, Google has indeed killed itself, at least for the time being. Xfinity has a one year free on Perplexity Pro, which is how I tested the switchover.
Early attempts at search-emabled AIs (e.g. ChatGPT) were nowhere near as good at first, so I stopped testing them against Perplexity/Kagi
codethief
I'm really quite… perplexed by how so many people seem to be happy with Perplexity. I have tried it a number of times and it always hallucinated a ton (especially the stuff where it provided "sources").
VHRanger
It uses only google as a backend, and the answer engine is based on the ancient llama 3.3 70B.
It's well behind Kagi (which uses a bunch of sources for results and new models for quick answer or assistant). Perplexity is even well behind other competitors like chatgpt
bfeynman
same, so much so that I almost think they have a bot army for astroturfing, because I cannot believe anyone gets value from it over just one of the main providers and google. They dont index data nearly as much or as often as google, they basically are at a pareto frontier of just serving the most amount of people with lean indexing based on fact that people look up a lot of the same things. It reminds me of looking at google earth where you can see cities have 3d models but a random neighborhood where you grew up would be images years old. So yeah, its useful but definitely not a replacement for google, so idk why anyone would pay for it.
fud101
Perplexity is something I had skepticism for but it (Perplexity Pro) has all replaced my talking to a neural net needs. i still use Google but their default ai responses annoy me so i avoid it these days, why is that spam there for me to process when searching is already a chore. The only complaint i have is the perplexity webapp is very slow on my older devices. It should switch to a lighter version if possible.
eddythompson80
We only pump here sir.
ignoramous
For years I used pplx.ai extensively, but of late, chat.com (code, q&a) and gemini.google (youtube & web search) feel unmatched.
QuantumGood
Just a note: pplx.ai redirects to perplexity.com; chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com
drewbitt
You really were heavily using it in late 2022/early 2023? It seemed... rough.
mvieira38
Kagi Assistant's advantage of using their search engine, optionally fine-tuned to your preferences, instead of Google/Bing is so underrated, too. It's the killer feature for me
moebrowne
This. Being able to rank which sites bring extra context to your prompts is massive.
Luuucas
Google and Adblock
+ I love Youtube Summaries https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-summarize/c... (should be open source tough)
What's the difference compared to that setup?
plqbfbv
For me Kagi is the 2010-2015 Google Search experience. It just... works.
I basically pay only to have that. The rest are lots of niceties on top that I can pick if I want them or need them.
It respects your keywords, if it edits anything of the query it tells you why and how, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I had to scroll to hit the "More results" button since I started using it.
Before I tried Kagi (I tried it out when it was invite-only for testing and then converted to paying user) Google was basically frustrating me with every single query. I had to scroll past the ads, ignore the stuff that looked like websites, ignore the first 5 results because they were useless, ignore the "other results from X" because nothing of value was ever found, then go to the second page, and still find maybe 1 result that was applicable to my query.
Kagi felt like a breath of fresh air. I have a few Googler friends that tried it out on my recommendation and prefer it and pay for it over Google Search, I think that speaks for itself.
damascus_kei
TLDR: I find the information I want much faster and much more frequently.
Ad supported search is not incentivized to find you information as fast as possible; the goal is for you to click on ads.
I hate paying for anything. I am cheap as hell, but it saves me enough time that I can justify it. I felt google search was getting worse while I feel Kagi search gets better. Plus I can customize Kagi to ban entire websites or show websites, such as this one, more often.
I am not sure what the user experience of your setup is but with Kagi I can tell it to summarize like 8 sites and quickly read through all of them on the page.
Also, I didn't know how to use AI well with search prior to Kagi; the ease of use really helped me maximize its use.
My home is ad-blocked up the wazoo. I love signal and hate noise. Kagi gives me that.
CalChris
Search (Google) is dead.
Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were.
The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now.
So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction.
The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.
MSFT_Edging
How can search(the utility, not the business model) possibly be dead?
AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.
I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up confident answers.
AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very well documented and often discussed topics.
CalChris
The business model, not the utility.
… it would simply make up confident answers. Dunno if you've used Google recently, but it will very confidently provide simply useless search results, pages and pages and pages of useless search results.
I look at using LLMs as like using another programming language. My C++ skills are not going to be directly useful in Rust or OCaml. I need to learn a new paradigm.
I'd ask AI the same questions. This is the crux. You really have to learn how to write (engineer) good prompts and you have to check what the LLM wrote. You use 'confidently' as a disparaging word. I think LLMs clear writing is quite useful in the reduction phase.
LLMs are perfect? No, just way better than Google.
To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful has become To serve an ad and call it a day.
danudey
> it will very confidently provide simply useless search results, pages and pages and pages of useless search results.
I had assumed that this degredation of search with useless results was an attempt to drive more people towards its even more useless AI products/results.
QuantumGood
"AI with search" needs to be differentiated from "AI not using search". Perplexity is designed around search, which has pros (when searching) and cons (when there are a lot of followup prompts, Perplexity is more likely to lose context)
BlindEyeHalo
Search will fold into AI. ChatGPT already searches for answers on given prompts.
There will no longer be a reason to interact with a search engine directly for most people, AI will decide by itself if it retrieves from memory or performs a search.
MSFT_Edging
Okay great so ChatGPT will give me 5 confidently incorrect search results.
What a colossally stupid waste of energy. We could have had our answers, with a decent search engine.
I actually look down on LLM hopefuls. Just so irredeemably up their own ass. When the bubble collapses they should be sent off to their own island where they can sell the same coconut back and forth between themselves.
Seb-C
Saying that a natural language based interface will replace dedicated graphical UIs makes no sense to me.
It will never be as intuitive or efficient, not even mentioning the reliability.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and no LLM is going to change that.
mingus88
I pay for Kagi and Claude. I feel that the core of this decline in services is simply because nobody want to pay for what is of value.
Search is still useful. Claude is not good at citing sources. Search is great for doing my own research.
I’m hearing a lot of people just copy and paste LLM output as truth. From students to law clerks. LLMs are designed to output convincing text (not correct text) and for lazy people that’s good enough.
There will always be a need for searching raw data and making conclusions without an LLM
CalChris
If current LLMs were perfect AGI then your lazy students and law clerks, they might even have a point. But you are setting the bar too high; LLMs are not perfect AGI. They hallucinate and you write bad prompts. Think of an LLM as more like a Dremel. Yeah, it isn't a Yamazaki Mazak. OTOH, search is like a screwdriver.
terribleperson
No one wants to pay for value because we were getting a bunch of value for free for twenty-ish years.
carlosjobim
If you run any kind of business - online or offline - you will have ten times more customers coming from Google search than from social media. Especially if you make any effort on your website. And those are the organic results, not the ads.
dpassens
As opposed to LLMs, which aren't inaccurate or noisy?
sjs382
One subtle (but important) way Kagi has improved my life is that I'm less "on guard" with search results.
It's not perfect but I know that I'm more likely to find a result that serves me, rather than a result that's optimizing for an algorithm. And if I do come across something spammy, I know that telling Kagi to adjust a site lower (or remove a site from results) is just 2 clicks away.
Even though it's a small thing, it's one I encountered with every Google search, manyamnymany times per day. Relieving that is worth more than $10/mo to me. I think that pricing is right, though—if it were more than $10/mo and I likely never would have tried it.
The only thing I use Google Search for now is hyperlocal stuff, mostly I expect to interact with Maps result. Kagi Maps isn't even close.
theshrike79
Now that I think about it, this really summarises why I keep paying for Kagi.
I can just search something, glance at the results and pick the one that seems the closest one to whatever I'm looking for.
With Google, I have to first go "is this an ad pretending to be a search result?", then I need to spend more time looking that the domain and preview to see if it's some listicle crap or AI slop. Only then I can click the result.
ramenbytes
I had to use Google in a library while printing datasheets and clicked the first relevant looking result out of habit, only to be taken to the wrong part page. Closer inspection of the search results showed the small faint print of "Sponsored". I had forgotten about that since moving to Kagi.
pclowes
I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a potential long term cost.
Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined.
In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects.
I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations.
I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
x187463
The web is going to need a different business model. There's no way around it from this point. Traffic + Ads = Money is dead for anybody with content that can be summarized by an LLM. Even Traffic + Subscription = Money is also vulnerable if your offering is not easily discoverable outside of a search engine. I don't know the solution.
10000truths
It's far more likely that LLM providers will create a marketplace for advertisers to inject their brand/product into responses to user queries.
bot403
Oh goodness no.
Please delete your comment before a Google product manager reads it and puts it on their idea board.
bsimpson
I've wondered about that too. Feels like there's a risk to be stuck in some flavor of 2025 indefinitely, if the incentive to produce new content is eroded by the rise of LLMs.
saltysalt
I share the same concerns, hence built my own search engine that is human-curated. There is already a push back against "AI slop content" online, AI search will online make this worse as it ingests this slop.
thimabi
There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs…
Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.
ufmace
One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.
youniverse
I believe they are developing their own browser and email to have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
xigoi
The browser actally came before the search engine.
thimabi
Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations… probably won’t have access to a better search experience.
jjtheblunt
I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber since right after the started) wondering if the partial defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly) improve search experiences even for non paying searchers, as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of online experiences.
jasonvorhe
Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime Google around ~2008.
I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
eugenekolo
I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines.
There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
apparent
It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it.
The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if your use case is just replacing Google.
mvieira38
Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you get very good parental control options, for college and gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated feature of "lensing" the AI assistant.
The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
Marsymars
> Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
OTOH, the existence of Kagi Assistant made Kagi Teams a very easy sell to my employer.
bondarchuk
>Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
catlikesshrimp
Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough, because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
nottorp
It's not paying for search, it's pricing for techbros.
I happen to be an Ars subscriber and that's about as much as I'd be willing to pay for Kagi too.
hcurtiss
As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts for our daughters.
VHRanger
I'd also encourage you to try the !ai bang in addition to the "?" for quick answers.
!ai sends the query directly to kagi.com/assistant with you default model. If you pick a solid and fast default, like kimi-k2, it's a great experience
hcurtiss
This is a great tip!
Marsymars
I've tried Kagi Assistant several times... I haven't really found my usage to be sticky though, I'm not entirely clear what I'd use it for on a regular basis where it would be an improvement over my current (LLM-free) workflow.
flenserboy
the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked. from that point on search results on Google have been what they want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact searches — & giving useful results could not be tolerated, whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)
glenstein
>it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found
Wholeheartedly agree. Millionshort was based on this idea, of effectively skipping the "first 10k" sites that most commonly come up in results, skipping to the good stuff. But they've implemented forced logins and made other design choices I haven't loved.
bigstrat2003
I too have dumped Google for Kagi (within the same time frame, even). I encourage everyone to give it a shot and see if it clicks for you. For me, it was night and day. I used to be skeptical about the idea of paying for search, but I'm definitely sticking with Kagi after seeing how well it works.
ezst
It's probably a good time to bump https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for those who haven't read it yet.
phendrenad2
For a dash of irony, I asked Google Gemini to summarize:
The article "The Men Who Killed Google" by Ed Zitron argues that Google's search engine has declined due to a shift from a user-centric approach to a revenue-focused one. The author pinpoints Prabhakar Raghavan, with the support of CEO Sundar Pichai, as the key individuals behind this change.
The article details a "code yellow" in February 2019, declared by the ads team, due to underperforming search revenue. This led to a conflict between the ads and finance teams, who wanted to boost revenue at any cost, and the search team, which prioritized user experience.
Following this, Google implemented several changes, including a March 2019 update that rolled back quality improvements and a May 2019 ad redesign that made ads look like organic search results. In May 2020, Raghavan replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search. The author notes Raghavan's history at Yahoo, where he was head of search from 2005 to 2012, a period during which Yahoo's search market share significantly dropped.
Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality.
jesterson
> Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality.
We can't complain as it is exactly whats asked from management of public companies innit?
And that's why most products sucks nowadays
captain_coffee
All the articles on that website are pure gold - I highly reccommend it! Recently launched a paid subscription with multiple extremely dense (1h+ reading time) posts per month.
edgineer
This has bothered me about kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665
The founder started that he was not interested in serving users who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and don't require an account.
mvieira38
That position seems to have changed, I think? They are supposedly allowing people to buy Privacy Pass tokens without a Kagi account in-the-future™:
"Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it." https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on Tor Browser for it to work)
bsimpson
People always joked that Incognito Mode is for porn, but I use it for search.
I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and trying to groom that list.
In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from Gemini either. I really don't like that.
I should be allowed to be curious about something without having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.
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Kagi sucks, this is a bad call.
Just kidding, I love Kagi and I get a ton of value from it! I always like the saying that "the best ideas are obvious in hindsight", and that is absolutely how I feel about Kagi. Being able to uprank, downrank, and/or pinning, blacklisting domains is a killer feature, and something that would have been so easy for Google to have done at any time. Their approach to AI has also been perfect IMHO. From the beginning they didn't have the models provide answers, but (basically, as far as I can tell) RAGged the results and summarized (and included sources). I find myself using that feature all the time. Also the ! support and generally clean interface make for a great UX. I also very much appreciate their pro-rating and transparent billing, and the prices being pretty reasonable.
The search results themselves are also better than Google (in no small part to my own fine-tuning of domains, i.e. downranking/upranking/blacklisting, but even just the vanilla results are better most of the time). It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time. I do routinely use !gm to open something in google maps though because Apple maps has not been a good experience for me, but I don't fault Kagi for that.
If you haven't tried Kagi, you should. Also play around with the lenses feature while you're at it, cause you can find some cool stuff that way that otherwise doesn't surface in the results.
Initial set up to make Kagi the default search engine is a little involved because you have to put your token in the query string, but the instructions are solid and once it's done, it's done. Very happy customer.