Back to Kagi(blog.melashri.net)
blog.melashri.net
Back to Kagi
https://blog.melashri.net/micro/back-to-kagi/
254 comments
> With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout
Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason.
Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have to click to load more. Annoying but still usable.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason.
Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have to click to load more. Annoying but still usable.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Author of said extension here. I've been getting some reports of this happening in a few countries, namely Australia and the US so far. See https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issu....
Well that's disappointing but not entirely surprising I guess. Probably won't be too long before they make that worldwide.
>Is this a thing now?
Here's a thread where it's being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747
Here's a thread where it's being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747
I've had a redirect to old.reddit.com configured within Kagi for a while, but recently they announced that they would begin forcing logins on old.reddit too, using the flimsy excuse of security. The rollout hit me this week, can't even view the site without an account anymore.
> no sudden UI changes
they did change https://kagi.com/summarizer recently and I was taken aback
they did change https://kagi.com/summarizer recently and I was taken aback
> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality.
You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearrange the UI right before you tap the screen (after about half a second of lag), so that you accidentally click an ad. It sounds stupid but I suspect a non-trivial ratio of their revenue comes from this phenomenon.
And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.
I suspect they're taking a similar approach with Google, with the difference that you cannot pay for Google and therefore are forced to have the crap experience all of the time.
You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearrange the UI right before you tap the screen (after about half a second of lag), so that you accidentally click an ad. It sounds stupid but I suspect a non-trivial ratio of their revenue comes from this phenomenon.
And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.
I suspect they're taking a similar approach with Google, with the difference that you cannot pay for Google and therefore are forced to have the crap experience all of the time.
I have YouTube premium and the UX issues have increased over time. Most recently the UI panel that expands into the comments section just stops responding and then you have to force close and restart the app. Another problem is that it randomly just drops your queued videos, entirely - always when you force close it, but also randomly. Sometimes random icons are invisible. After leaving a comment you sometimes can't see it.
> And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.
In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.
In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.
I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.
Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.
My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me.
I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either.
If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription.
The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it.
I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).
I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either.
If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription.
The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it.
I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).
This. We are all too worried about the future. Like today's "I won't use Codeberg because tomorrow they could ban all repositories that contain Chinese characters." Well if that happens then you move. We all die in the end anyway.
I think that ship has sailed [0].
If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.
[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)
If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.
[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)
I guess you can't make such ecosystem before growing sufficiently large. And for that you need to rely on something for some time first.
It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this was always the plan for Kagi. Google has been rather distracted and complacent in their, former, core business. If Kagi is bootstrapping their indexing to emerge on the other end of this as the next "good" search, then good on them.
I'll continue to support them because it's a great experience.
I'll continue to support them because it's a great experience.
Why reindex everything? You just need to show the relevant information
The search engine is a lot more than the index. And they have their own index
If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).
Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too.
For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too.
For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else.
I am trying this. I noticed I only browse a subset of sites a lot. Also HN works wonders for finding links. But how do you get around all those bot measures/cloudflare nowadays? It seems only google IPs get a special pass.
Yep, discovering that you only need a subset of sites is the key. In my case, I still had my entire Firefox browsing history in its SQLite cache, so I tried to index every page I'd ever visited, and had a list of the domains I actually visit. It's the same insight Brave Search had - they used to be a metasearch engine, but they built their own index until they could serve 99% of queries directly, even though their index was vastly smaller than Google or Bing.
I struggle with indexing too. I don't do any crawling, just indexing from sitemap.xml files or URLs I add to the queue manually. Also I'm indexing from my own residential PC, not a hosted VPS. Something that helped me was Cloudflare's new crawler API. For all the sites where Cloudflare blocks you, just use their API instead:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
Also for a quick index bootstrap, the Curlie database can be useful. It's the old DMOZ directory, the open Yahoo competitor, with 1.4 Million websites. A lot of the links are now very outdated, but it can be useful, and it's less than 500MB when converted to an SQLite database.
I struggle with indexing too. I don't do any crawling, just indexing from sitemap.xml files or URLs I add to the queue manually. Also I'm indexing from my own residential PC, not a hosted VPS. Something that helped me was Cloudflare's new crawler API. For all the sites where Cloudflare blocks you, just use their API instead:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
Also for a quick index bootstrap, the Curlie database can be useful. It's the old DMOZ directory, the open Yahoo competitor, with 1.4 Million websites. A lot of the links are now very outdated, but it can be useful, and it's less than 500MB when converted to an SQLite database.
Yes, Kagi is building its own index, and try to mix it more and more if it finds results from it.
More details are at: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Also, for every query, it shows a short infoline telling the index distribution.
More details are at: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Also, for every query, it shows a short infoline telling the index distribution.
Unfortunately, that's nearly identical to the text from September 2024, with the only change being an increase in the number of external search sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901052114/https://help.kagi...
I'm aware of their Teclis index, I used to be a paying API customer. Teclis is very small. It's primarily an index of indie blog websites (smallweb) mostly crawled via RSS feeds. That itself is a very cool idea, and a great supplemental index to have! But it isn't the kind of index that could ever replace their Brave / Yandex / SerpAPI dependencies. The Teclis API is even supplemented with results from Marginalia Search, a much larger index created by one person with less funding.
There's some technical info here on how Teclis is indexed, eg Readability.js for content extraction & Elasticsearch for the full-text indexing:
https://teclis.com/
Kagi's short infoline about index distribution sounds new to me though. I would love to see a blog post from Kagi about that & where they're at with query coverage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901052114/https://help.kagi...
I'm aware of their Teclis index, I used to be a paying API customer. Teclis is very small. It's primarily an index of indie blog websites (smallweb) mostly crawled via RSS feeds. That itself is a very cool idea, and a great supplemental index to have! But it isn't the kind of index that could ever replace their Brave / Yandex / SerpAPI dependencies. The Teclis API is even supplemented with results from Marginalia Search, a much larger index created by one person with less funding.
There's some technical info here on how Teclis is indexed, eg Readability.js for content extraction & Elasticsearch for the full-text indexing:
https://teclis.com/
Kagi's short infoline about index distribution sounds new to me though. I would love to see a blog post from Kagi about that & where they're at with query coverage.
I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.
I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
Over the last 2 months I’ve started to hit AI limits. I don’t feel like I’m using it more than before, but my usage went from $1-2/month to $9.50… where I’m actively avoiding usage to not hit my $10 limit halfway through the month.
Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.
Curious what your distribution is, as a ~400 person that thought they did more.
I do between 2,000 and 3,000 searches per month and have never hit a limit.
What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.
I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.
I might try it again sometime.
I might try it again sometime.
I’ve found the opposite. Most notably was when I joined an outage call at work. The call had been going for a few hours. They knew the issue, but didn’t have a fix. There were a dozen or two people on the call all searching for options (presumably all using Google). I went to Kagi and found an answer within a couple minutes that we ended up rolling out.
I’m just one person, and that’s just one incident, but it happened pretty early on after I switched to Kagi and had a pretty big impact on my perception of it.
I had been trying to get away from Google for many years, and with other options like DDG, I always felt I needed to go to Google for various searches, but so far I haven’t been back to Google at all in several years now.
I’m just one person, and that’s just one incident, but it happened pretty early on after I switched to Kagi and had a pretty big impact on my perception of it.
I had been trying to get away from Google for many years, and with other options like DDG, I always felt I needed to go to Google for various searches, but so far I haven’t been back to Google at all in several years now.
Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.
So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
This is such a wonderful website
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp
This is the broadband page.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp
This is the broadband page.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...
Thanks for sharing this one, that’s truly a gem that I had no idea existed
This one is also great
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
Made by Hans Rosling (among others)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
Made by Hans Rosling (among others)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
I think I’m on the upper end of what’s normal in U.S. but also not super abnormal either —
1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.
2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.
3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.
1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.
2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.
3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.
> A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX
For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.
https://mein.cineville.de/en/order
For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.
https://mein.cineville.de/en/order
Some of the US theatres (Regal, for instance) have something like that, too.
you guys are getting ripped the fuck off
It's rent. Rent varies based on location, and sets a price floor for all goods and services in that location.
That's such a shocking dispersion between telecom and dining out, I figured an LLM could help here. Gemini says "It's Spain"
Your mobile carrier and your fiber connection are great deals. That doesn't make $10 per month for Kagi an "absurdly high price". It's still a good deal. And they are completely different things.
I have very cheap electricity. If I compared other prices to my electrical bill, I couldn't purchase food, gas, Internet, or anything really. Because I'd say they are "absurdly high prices".
I have very cheap electricity. If I compared other prices to my electrical bill, I couldn't purchase food, gas, Internet, or anything really. Because I'd say they are "absurdly high prices".
which corner is that, where you live?
Well, the currency symbol might throw a hint. Because Americans of course use USD and rest of the world is pressured into using USD on online forums :)
Also the $22.83 for something that should be a round number.
Slapping sales tax on before the final price (but after the price in your head) is one of America's less charming quirks. No one else in the entire world does it.
Slapping sales tax on before the final price (but after the price in your head) is one of America's less charming quirks. No one else in the entire world does it.
(eyeroll)
"somewhere in the EU" is still fairly broad
It's nothing until you have to buy a $10/m subscription for every basic thing you do, then it adds up.
That's what gets me too. I've been tasked previously to help a young relative with budgeting, and there were so many "It's only $x a month!" items we found that it was ridiculous.
It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.
It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.
People not from North America and Western Europe exist.
Also, people in North America who don’t have tech jobs exist. I make pretty good money as a teacher, and it’s still significantly less than many of the parent posters salaries.
These people either don't understand what living in a "world" means or are just too stuck into "but rest of you don't pay" that it will be hard for them grasp anything beyond what's written in stone on those grey surfaces for them. What they also don't understand that a small fraction of paying customers in some of such countries might or will outspend entire country's regular spending in the "paying world". They also don't understand that to achieve that unlike physical goods these companies don't have to open agencies, distributors, warehouses, retail chains etc to "sell".
PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.
PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.
Yeah but you make up a small percentage of sales for US tech companies comparatively.
Have you met those people? A lot of them have ten dollars.
We’re talking median annual income of $10,000. I could forgive someone getting paid that not wanting to spend that $10 on an internet search engine instead of food.
$10 is nothing when it's $10, but everything is a $10 subscription these days - and you end up spending a lot of money.
All of your examples are things many people are no longer doing because they can't afford them.
People are no longer buying internet to use google, nor buying gas for cars? The others I understand, I'm cutting back on them too.
>nor buying gas for cars
In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
And some people [who own a car] actually stop using one when prices for gas go over the bar unless they absolutely have to.
In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
And some people [who own a car] actually stop using one when prices for gas go over the bar unless they absolutely have to.
> In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."
I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.
Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."
I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.
Well, sure, and so you rarely or never go there. Most people I know don't have a car. Doesn't mean there aren't cars in the country.
Yes, people are driving less when gas prices are high.
Even in the US, which is already very HCoL, I think you seriously underestimate the number of households who've either never had who have cut household Internet. Lots of households where everyone's Internet access is on smartphones via MNVO mobile carriers, typically on $10-$20/mo/line plans with 5-25GB/mo/line.
I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.
$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.
Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.
I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.
I do the same thing, I only use Kagi when the result I want isn’t obvious, so the cheap plan is plenty. It’s easy to do with the browser’s shortcuts.
AFAIK using the bangs (e.g. !g) do not consume your search quota, so you can do it via that as well.
Enable Safari suggestions, and it will suggest the website you're looking for most of the times while typing in the URL bar, and you don't need to bother with a search engine for those cases.
There is also uruky. They’re functionally unlimited on $5 but less developed feature wise
I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough
Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:
Jul 2026 939
Jun 2026 1,317
May 2026 1,924
Apr 2026 2,537
Mar 2026 2,183
Feb 2026 2,038
Jan 2026 2,392
Jul 2026 939
Jun 2026 1,317
May 2026 1,924
Apr 2026 2,537
Mar 2026 2,183
Feb 2026 2,038
Jan 2026 2,392
Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't.
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
Instead I just cancelled.
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
Instead I just cancelled.
I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.
Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O
But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O
But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.
This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.
That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.
Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.
Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.
If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.
I switched to Kagi 2 years ago and I've enjoyed it ever since. In May I decided that I wanted to give some other options a try, also given that I'm now relying on LLMs for some tasks I used Kagi for. I'm running qwen3.6 on my server and I thought it + a mediocre free search engine would be enough. Well, was I wrong. Almost three months have passed and I can't say anymore that it's just getting used to a different flow. Kagi offers something that I can't find anywhere else at the moment. I resubscribed last Monday :)
Kagi is great. The search gives you the actual thing you are looking for, but also their translate tool is very nifty, and their LLM assistants are actually better for my purposes than Anthropic or whatever. I have tried the same models via openrouter, but can’t get as good responses, so there’s something very clever they do with their harness. I use their Orion -browser and its summarise -function, which is very good. I am happy to pay for all this, it feels like they actually want to serve you good products, not just steal shit from you and scam you.
I have recently started using searXNG, which is ok, and somehow better than mpst for image searches, but not quite as good as Kagi.
I have recently started using searXNG, which is ok, and somehow better than mpst for image searches, but not quite as good as Kagi.
I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
i love that geeksforgeeks is the website everyone mentions wanting to block :D
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same
For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
“I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply.”
It’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.
You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.
I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.
It’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.
You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.
I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.
Also, Google isn't scraping your data....
I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:
- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...
Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.
- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...
Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.
What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen people claim about its actual usage, esp. the ones who are not from NA, that it is either below or just average wrt Google (because, well, there's no other mainstream search service to compare against). Few of them literally just say something very closely on the lines of ".. been using for X years... happy to pay". I suspect it might as well be literally just a satisfaction thing :D
Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?
Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.
You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.
You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
If ARPU for Google Search is estimated to be around $50-$80 per internet user and potentially way more in certain geographies, there could be significant financial savings to be had by switching to Kagi depending on where you sit.
I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.
I think it’s well worth it but we all make compromises. I have an iPhone after all lol.
They are much better than DDG or Google in financing russian invasion into Ukraine
I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
- start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies.
However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
I didn't know that page existed, thanks! I was amused to see that my blocklist already includes most of the sites that appear there.
Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it.
Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
> Kagi of course reviews it
They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
I had the same experience. I don't know why they haven't invested more in this feature. Heck, if they classified every site in their index as "AI/not AI" using machine learning, and had a large allowlist of "known-good" sites, that would take care of most of the problem (I am aware of the drawbacks of text-only AI classification, but they could use other indicators, like the site's publication date, domain name, domain registry date, etc.). I think for right now, the "state-of-the-art" for non-AI search is going to entail maintaining large whitelists/blacklists of websites that are crowd-sources by users (e.g. what you can find in some GitHub repositories). I was hoping that's what SlopStop was going to be, but it is not nearly as effective as it needs to be.
Discussed on HN back in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806
I was extremely pleased to login to my Kagi account and see that SlopStop was enabled by default. Thanks for the heads-up on this, and thanks to Kagi of course for enabling it.
They started marking a lot of my reports as not slop when it’s very obviously ai garbage. Stopslop is nice in theory if they actually handle reports correctly. It’s exhausting to spend time trying to help clean up their results only to be told no.
Do they review false positives? Do site owners have an avenue to challenge being falsely blocked?
But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.
> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures.
But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.
The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.
A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.
It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)
But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.
The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.
A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.
It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)
This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.
You remain skeptical of something proven through leaked emails?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...
The thing those emails demonstrate is not the thing I'm skeptical of!
¿Por qué no los dos?
To large extend, that content stopped dying after Google deprioritized it in search results. People stopped being able to find it, sites/communities stopped having views, authors gave up.
I stopped caring about my blog about that time - after I was unable to google my own postd. I remembered the name and some of the content, but it was just not coming up in the search. There was also noticeable drop in views. I kind of concluded it is pointless when it is not coming up in searches unless I SEO hard.
I stopped caring about my blog about that time - after I was unable to google my own postd. I remembered the name and some of the content, but it was just not coming up in the search. There was also noticeable drop in views. I kind of concluded it is pointless when it is not coming up in searches unless I SEO hard.
I could be convinced of this narrative. Like, if someone writes a book about this, with good evidence of what caused this to happen, I might find that persuasive.
But to me, what happened was social media and video becoming the locus of attention. I don't think people stopped putting content on independent websites because their traffic from search results went down, I think they just started putting content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok instead. To me, the whole way the web is used just changed over this period of time, in ways that mostly had very little to do with Google's search algorithm.
But to me, what happened was social media and video becoming the locus of attention. I don't think people stopped putting content on independent websites because their traffic from search results went down, I think they just started putting content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok instead. To me, the whole way the web is used just changed over this period of time, in ways that mostly had very little to do with Google's search algorithm.
I don't see why it can't be both. The web has less good content AND Google has altered their search results such that results are worse generally for us, but better for them and their bottom line.
I'm not saying it isn't both, what I'm saying is that the thesis of the newer Google competitors is that the problem is mostly that Google has chosen to suck, so they can do a lot better just by choosing to not suck. But I think that thesis is wrong, that it is mostly that the web sucks now, and that these search engines are ultimately likely to be unsatisfying because they can't actually solve that underlying problem.
But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.
But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.
I think the counterargument would be that the web sucks in large part because of the way it’s been shaped by Google. Most of the hyperwordy blogspam is driven by sites trying to optimize their SEO for Google. So websites like Kagi could potentially push the underlying web in a positive direction
I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO.
And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.
And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.
IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.
(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)
And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.
And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.
IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.
(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)
Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.
Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.
This is absolutely true and yet I know from experience the product forums for years were people screaming at Google for stripping away features
And I know they removed the boolean + operator because of Google+
And I know they removed the boolean + operator because of Google+
The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.
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kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.
of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
You're the product in Firefox, just a different kind than in chrome. Ad Nauseam is silly because ad companies know they are fake clicks and don't count them. Ads aren't the only thing you'd need to block from the internet.
There is zero evidence Ad Nauseum does not work, but there are plenty of signals it does. Google banned it from the Chrome store and setting any threshold below one hundred percent click rate just uses random.
Even if it is somehow detectable it's just Ublock origin and not every ad network is worth billions of dollars
Even if it is somehow detectable it's just Ublock origin and not every ad network is worth billions of dollars
Have you bought ads and then browsed that site with Ad Nauseum and then discovered that you paid for the ads?
i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere
I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
> although I heard there's a Linux version now?
Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894.
Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894.
Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
All my hopes lay with Ladybird now
I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).
The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.
The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.
You can pay per year ($54 for 3600 searches/year) and see how far you can go in a year.
You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
Even well-supported, well-documented projects. I'm in the middle of a Spring Boot upgrade, which includes a collection of Hibernate updates. These are well-supported projects with -- theoretically -- fantastic documentation. But when something goes wrong, trawling them for what's happened is tedious and doesn't teach me much; you end up chasing down uncommon threads. The death of StackOverflow doesn't help much either. Previously, web searches might have found a commiserator, but that's all gone now.
A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.
I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.
While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.
I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.
(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)
A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.
I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.
While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.
I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.
(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)
My challenge for anyone who still thinks like this is pay for Claude or Chatgpt and use the thinking version of the latest model for every web search you would do. See how long it takes for it to make a mistake. I can't remember the last time and I use chatgpt quite a bit every day.
The model reads the webpage before it gives it to you so the odds of a stale link are effectively nil these days. And the odds of it being exactly what you were looking for are quite high.
The models are so much better than they were even a year ago, and it seems many people have an outdated view of their capabilities.
Your idea about web devs picking a package before thinking about the problem is legitimate. What would be cool is if you could have something help you break down both the problem and the packages to choose from (or if it's worth rolling your own). AI is fantastic at this.
As said banging your head against arcane documentation or the infuriating Internet [1] isn't using your brain. And skipping the mundane parts let's you use your higher functioning brain so much it's exhausting. Thinking on the harder problems all day is exactly where I want to be.
[1]https://xkcd.com/979/
The model reads the webpage before it gives it to you so the odds of a stale link are effectively nil these days. And the odds of it being exactly what you were looking for are quite high.
The models are so much better than they were even a year ago, and it seems many people have an outdated view of their capabilities.
Your idea about web devs picking a package before thinking about the problem is legitimate. What would be cool is if you could have something help you break down both the problem and the packages to choose from (or if it's worth rolling your own). AI is fantastic at this.
As said banging your head against arcane documentation or the infuriating Internet [1] isn't using your brain. And skipping the mundane parts let's you use your higher functioning brain so much it's exhausting. Thinking on the harder problems all day is exactly where I want to be.
[1]https://xkcd.com/979/
I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
Correct URL is https://staan.ai/
I was a happy user of Kagi and I switched to Qwant a year ago because they are based in Europe (Ecosia seems to have US servers?).
But I have to say:
1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though.
2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why.
I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years.
Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.
But I have to say:
1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though.
2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why.
I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years.
Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.
Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.
I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.
Same. I have been using Brave Search since its launch and it has been great in my experience. I also love that it has its own index. I have tried the free Kagi trial and it seems to work well, but I can't justify the cost for little to no benefit and it still depends on bigger search engines for indexing.
Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html
I feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search.
But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.
I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.
I wish them the best but timing is a b**.
But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.
I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.
I wish them the best but timing is a b**.
Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.
I like the assistant, but now with new fair use billing I run out after 2 weeks with the 25$/month plan. I guess the problem is not that Kagi is expensive but that the big providers subsidize plans more than Kagi could afford, so it seems expensive. Because I have to switch after the 2 weeks anyway I kinda stopped using Kagi assistant and will probably downgrade the plan.
wow you're on the higher plan than me. I think Kimi K2.6 (reasoning) is enough for Assistant. The premium model will burn credit too fast.
Kagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust
I think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)
I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!
This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).
I would love a Kagi MCP to give my agents a better web search tool but they don't seem interested. I would pay for this.
I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.
The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.
Could we stop funding russia's invasion of Ukraine?
On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.
I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.
Kagi, like DDG and a few others around the same/similar ideas, doesn't work as "fully" for certain geographies (I assume many) as fully and wholesomely (as I gather from such posts and comments) it works for certain other geographies (again, I assume not many; for obvious reasons). I gave it a shot, trial and then the Starter pack. In some cases, it turned out to be almost completely futile. Anyway, just like Google Maps, nothing even comes close, for coverage and usability of Internet search, to Google Search for my geography (yes, I asked others as well who tried), sadly.
Since then I've learnt to live with `udm=14` and some occasional/rare uBlock Origin tweaks (earlier I used an about:config setting, which might still work, for anyone looking) - in Firefox.
On Safari (which is kind of my secondary phone browser), I still keep it as it is, and I use it to actually use the quick AI feature when I might want it, which isn't often.
Since then I've learnt to live with `udm=14` and some occasional/rare uBlock Origin tweaks (earlier I used an about:config setting, which might still work, for anyone looking) - in Firefox.
On Safari (which is kind of my secondary phone browser), I still keep it as it is, and I use it to actually use the quick AI feature when I might want it, which isn't often.
I stopped paying for Kagi after ~2 years. Search quality worsened over time; my brother and I would trade screenshots/complaints of irrelevant results for basic keywords. International searches were even more fruitless.
Also, I felt Kagi had too many projects going on. Their whimsical engineer-daycare-esque blogposts did not inspire confidence.
Also, I felt Kagi had too many projects going on. Their whimsical engineer-daycare-esque blogposts did not inspire confidence.
> Search quality worsened over time
They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.
They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.
They have their own indexes.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
There's little to add to that. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi. I can understand if people simply don't want to or can't shell out $5 a month, but if someone is able to, those are probably the best $5 anyone who does a lot of internet research and uses AI can possibly invest.
I was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!
I started with Kagi in 2024, and sometimes across different/new browser setups I accidentally land on Google and want to immediately throw up.
Havent looked backed a single day.
Havent looked backed a single day.
What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those
I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.
html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript
Kagi has been a great and worthwhile subscription to me. It feels like browsing the Google of the 10s in some ways. Way more private blogs and whatnot in the results.
Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.
One caveat is that many existing search engines are actively worse than what they had before.
Exact keyword matching had its use, but now they do some kind of vector search but without the text understanding of LLMs. Making anything more complex impossible to find without actually going to an LLM that understands what I'm actually going for and can help out.
Just recently I wanted to find out the mill build tool's special syntax to have the JVM version used for the build tool itself be the system version (on nixos, downloading a JVM won't work, but I can trivially pin a jdk version myself. Unfortunately mill will refuse to even start without this special line).
My Google/kagi fu absolutely failed, yet Claude managed to find me the exact syntax in a single prompt. (Do give it a try if you want to)
Exact keyword matching had its use, but now they do some kind of vector search but without the text understanding of LLMs. Making anything more complex impossible to find without actually going to an LLM that understands what I'm actually going for and can help out.
Just recently I wanted to find out the mill build tool's special syntax to have the JVM version used for the build tool itself be the system version (on nixos, downloading a JVM won't work, but I can trivially pin a jdk version myself. Unfortunately mill will refuse to even start without this special line).
My Google/kagi fu absolutely failed, yet Claude managed to find me the exact syntax in a single prompt. (Do give it a try if you want to)
Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.
Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.
Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.
So a slower search engine with fewer results?
Delivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.
Delivery food is worse everywhere I've ever had it.
They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.
I think the market segmentation is:
- Seeking documents: search engine
- Seeking answers: LLM
I think the market segmentation is:
- Seeking documents: search engine
- Seeking answers: LLM
Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.
I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.
I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.
You can do that with Kagi. Just put `?` at the end of the search and it will give you an answer.
Yes, for me.
Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”
Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.
Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”
Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.
And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.
Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”
Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.
Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”
Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.
And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.
Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.
Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.
LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.
With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.
FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.
Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.
Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).
I've been with Kagi for about a year now and I have had zero complaints. I love their search to death.
Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
It works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.
I find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's
It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs
For things to buy yes, though I’ll usually stick “Canada” into the search term.
Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.
Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.
Using it in France: yes, it does.
Finland: no
Any thoughts on Uruky? Just found it by searching for a Europe-based Kagi alternative. https://uruky.com
Uruky allows JSON formatted output and basically started to use them as API for my private SearXNG instance. Basically using them as paid search API that is much more reliable than scraping DuckDuckGO and Brave, with the benefit of blocking common AI slop sites and manual ranking of domains. Having EUSP first and Mojeek second somehow gives very satisfying results, both small nearby European businesses and big sites are searched up well, even without depending on American index.
How'd you solve the Arabic issue?
(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
Leptonmaniac(1)
Author here (I didn't submit the post though)
Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.
Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)
Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.
Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)
Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
Could you share the custom CSS you refer to?
Switched to Kagi a few years ago and don't even consider other options anymore. It's miles ahead of others.
Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.
For a price of two cups of coffee.
For a price of two cups of coffee.
AI slop is actively down-ranked based on community feedback: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
I extensively report obvious slop websites. Most of them get rejected/marked as “not AI”. That initiative is cute on paper, but they apparently do not trust the community.
I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
Kagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results
Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
What is the appeal that draws everyone to use Kagi?
how is Kagi for programming searches? I've exclusively used google for years for this.
Kagi is awesome. Highly recommend it. And Orion as well.
The combo of NextDNS + Kagi + occasional VPN (currently on Windscribe since they had a deal through Kagi and seem to have the most real vs fake VPN endpoints) is super seamless and easy
The combo of NextDNS + Kagi + occasional VPN (currently on Windscribe since they had a deal through Kagi and seem to have the most real vs fake VPN endpoints) is super seamless and easy
I have worked for Google on and off the last 6y. When I am not working there, I use kagi. When I am working there, I miss kagi a lot.
I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
I don't know, I tried kagi but it doesn't seem to have superior results to even ddg. It's even worse for non english content.
ChatGPT is better than their agent at everything, firefox extensions can filter domains and ads out of the search results while preventing tracking nand I don't even have to create an account for any of those.
Not to mention I actually mostly use search engines to for stuff that are not fuzzy anymore (since discovery with them are now terrible anyway), so I don't get that much value.
I really want to like kagi, it ticks all the boxes, but it misses a killer feature that would make me use it instead of alternatives that just do what I need.
ChatGPT is better than their agent at everything, firefox extensions can filter domains and ads out of the search results while preventing tracking nand I don't even have to create an account for any of those.
Not to mention I actually mostly use search engines to for stuff that are not fuzzy anymore (since discovery with them are now terrible anyway), so I don't get that much value.
I really want to like kagi, it ticks all the boxes, but it misses a killer feature that would make me use it instead of alternatives that just do what I need.
Kagi is great, but it's twice as expensive as I think it would have to be for me to feel like I'm actually getting good value for it, unfortunately.
Kagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.
why does the kagi website keep trying to reload itself? SUPER ANNOYING
How about Kagi using YANDEX?
I’m a paying Kagi subscriber but hardly use it because honestly much of the time I’m searching for an answer to a specific question not a website to visit and therefor want the AI response without clicking on another website. Unless it’s mission critical but that’s more rare.
I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout, it's been nice knowing that I can just stop having reddit show up in search results.