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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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").
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
Perplexity Pro allows you to use GPT-4 Omni, Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Sonar, DeepSeek R1, and others. Can you clarify what you mean by based on the ancient llama 3.3 70B? And they pull results from multiple search engines, and their own index, not just Google.
Preference doesn't have to be based on anything, but providing misinformation that is easily verified is not that common on HN. And Perplexity Pro is different than vanilla Perplexity.
I was talking about their sonar API and what you get when you go to perplexity.ai and search by default -- it's llama 3.3 70B hosted with cerebras. Which is fast, but way way behind the times -- it's more likely to hallucinate than models from basically anyone from the competition, including quick answer.
You're right though it seems that they don't just use bing + their own crawler, but who else they use seems to be community speculation.
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.
So in your opinion, incidentally in this thread about Kagi, you think Google is better? You imply Perplexity only uses their own index, but they pull results from multiple external search engines and their own index. As I mentioned in another thread, that kind of easy-to-verify-as-misinformation is not that common on HN. And Perplexity Pro is different than vanilla Perplexity.
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.
AI comments in general mean something different once versions are clarified. I've never seen so many comment threads where people don't specify clearly which version(s) they are discussing, which seems relevant 95+% of the time.
pplx.ai did RAG (with attachments) and web search (immediately after they pivoted from Twitter search aka "Bird SQL") way before other chat interfaces caught on. Their features were free & the product was sticky.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.
When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as the difference between searching for something, or just asking the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to move the conversation to a new LLM session.
I don't mind it necessarily, as I use it all the time in place of Googling, so you would think that folding it into search would work well.
But it doesn't, at least not for me. But I think that's tied to poor implementation, design, and being a solution looking for a problem rather than a philosophical issue with using AI to improve search experience.
I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar. I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when integrating it into a backend project that needed that functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult. Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
No proxy yet, but I am considering one as many sites are re-directing my crawler based on its IP, which is causing indexing issues.
The hardest part BY FAR is the crawler: initially I was using Apache Nutch but it got slower and slower as the index grew, so I replaced it with my own crawler that I wrote in PHP (comfortable for me) and made that multi-threaded using Supervisor.
The second hardest part was the amount of security I had to build in to prevent bots running spam searches and hogging my infra.
Do you have multiple IPs? I am trying to build something which needs just the published at and updated at date fields for thousands of links and I am afraid my IP will get blocked quickly.
Just one IP for now. You are right to worry about being blocked from crawling however, it has happened to me already on a few sites. The key things to help mitigate against this are:
1. Always identify your crawler via a consistent user-agent string, that explains its a web search crawler and not a generic web browser.
2. Always obey the directives in robots.txt.
3. Make sure your crawler is not too aggressive (low frequency of requests).
I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently.
If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.
This has always struck me as pretty weak. Yes, paying Yandex indirectly results in paying taxes to the Russian government. But people are rarely so dogmatic about these matters. There are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the world, under which companies must operate because people live there who must try to make a living. Punishing the people at those companies because they're obligated ot pay taxes to their rulers strikes me as rather ridiculous.
Kagi is awesome. I appreciate the Yandex results. I'm not a big fan of Russia.
> There are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the world, under which companies must operate because people live there who must try to make a living.
Right, but there's lots of companies in the world. Lots more than there are tyrannical regimes. Lots more than there are total regimes! We're not individually obligated to support each of them, when they financially support things we find abhorrent.
Yes, people buy oil from middle eastern tyrannies, everything from China, things made from dubiously sourced raw materials etc. - but they somehow draw the line at one particular conflict or nation (not always Russia).
Well, you have to start drawing lines somewhere, and focus on an issue or two that are important to you. You will only end up spreading yourself thin (and not making an impact at all with anything) if you try to draw every line "correctly".
Holding and adhering to personal principles is the opposite of weak. You might disagree with that person's decision, but that does not make them (or their decision) weak.
Yandex isn't just an honest business trying to survive in Putin's Russia, it actively manipulates results to push Kremlin propaganda. It only returned negative coverage about Navalny and called it an "experiment" when it was caught. It actively blocks images of Putin when you search for "bunker grandpa", a common nickname for him. It replaces links to the anti-Putin Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps with links to FSB-controlled honeypots. Its largest shareholders are Russian oligarchs, state-owned banks and oil companies.
Maybe they have to do it to survive, who knows, but you don't have to use their services or products that resell their services.
> The job of a search engine is to produce the most relevant search results, period. Kagi excels at this precisely because we remain unimpressed by world politics. The moment 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I stop working on a search engine.
I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
If you want to support the people of Ukraine, the best thing you can do right now is give them money to buy more drones. This will have much more of an effect than Kagi's Yandex integration.
I recommend https://dzygaspaw.com personally, but there are many good crowdfunding organizers.
Does there exist another source for a good, broad web index that can provide results like mid-'00s Google?
I use DDG mostly but if I need to actually search the web I go to Yandex (I don't have Kagi... at least not yet). I don't know of another place that can do that.
Would you consider boycotting Google or Amazon because of their relationship with the Israeli military? I avoid Amazon, but it's pretty tough to avoid Google.
The Government of Israel, as it currently stands, is absolutely a threat to Europe.
It has brought genocide, concentration camps and forced starvation back into the Overton window for state actors pursuing security objectives. This should terrify everyone, whether inside Europe or not.
In the UK, simply expressing support for a protest group is now imprisonable under anti-terror legislation. Germany is dishing out fines and deportations for as little as holding up signs.
Post-war Europe is ostensibly built on rules and norms around human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The behaviour of the state of Israel, and our governments' craven support for it, is causing rapid democratic backsliding and laying the groundwork for our next round of atrocities.
Whatever one's moral perspective, or position on the middle east, this concerns everyone.
Ok... Are we just naming random countries that also do terrorism now? Inserting butwhaddaboudda YEWW ESS into literally every conversation is tiring. Yes, the US does bad stuff. It doesn't make funding terrorism by Kagi less bad.
I made the same switch recently. Results from Kagi are night-and-day vs. Google.
I do hope Kagi eventually has enough revenue to offer a more generous free tier, though (and without logging in). I fear it will remain a niche thing otherwise.
Capital causes big distortions: unreasonably cheap products from big companies and unreasonably cheap products from VC backed companies. Plus, habits and market power make it hard for people to switch en masse.
Despite a tough market, Kagi succeeds the old way: with better products.
Kagi proves plain old commerce - making a good thing and selling it - can win a fair fight against capital. Keep it up folks!
regular anecdata: it works great, at first I used to go back to Google a few times a month if Kagi didn't find something I was sure existed, but either Kagi got better or the web and/or Google got worse, because I don't go back to google anymore.
easily worth 4 coffees a month just to not worry anymore about the direct consequences of my searches, and being able to shitcan garbage sites like pinboard.* while pranking wikipedia in my own search results is just gravy.
they also have a search API now in beta which you can request access to; 2.5c/search.
Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
When I used DDG, the results were worse than Google, and I kept going back to Google when I couldn't find something, always second-guessing the results. And it seems every time someone recommends DDG the first thing they point out is "you can just type !g to get google results!", so I assume this is still the case.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)
My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the results are straight from Bing.
The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But sure, I guess their marketing worked.
The index was why I looked elsewhere.
The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.
I’m looking at the pricing tiers and I think it’s fine. But what would probably make me adopt it instantly is if I could set a max tier and it would just ramp up the tier each month if I hit it. Ie. I set it to Professional and at 101 searches I’m upgraded to Starter and then at 301 upgraded to Professional. If I forget about it or stop using it or use it far less, I’m not just shoveling money into yet another subscription I have to manage.
This is because I don’t have consistent usage habits, and the price isn’t stopping me, the psychology of a monthly subscription I don’t use is.
Kagi automatically credits you for any month you don’t use it [1] [2]. They also charge only the price difference on upgrade [3], though personally I care about this less now that unlimited is $10/mo.
> Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month.
This is not true, you don’t pay if you don’t use it. I think you’re assuming “credit” means some sort of redeemable voucher, but it’s account balance that automatically covers your next bill. Then at the end of the second unused month you get a credit that covers the third month, and so on.
So if I don’t use it for six months I’ve still paid for six months. If I close my account and they send that money back to me, yeah that’s probably fine.
The thing I’m mainly on about is the UX of not having to babysit another subscription. I once had a newsgroups sub that was exactly like this and it was amazing. You’d say “I want to spend at most X” and it would just ramp up towards X tier as needed.
While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use it. Especially for non-ai tasks.
I love and pay for Kagi, but I am afraid paid search providers are in for a tough time. I am using search less and less, and directing more of my search (~90%) to Grok instead of Kagi now. The exception being price comparisons when online shopping. I want the exact information I'm after, in the way that I want it, immediately. Search cannot do this, unless they amalgamate into AI tools more and more, at which point they are in a different space altogether. Looks like an Uber eating Taxi's business situation again to me.
You are aware that if you're paying for kagi you can just slap !ai at the end of any search query and it'll direct the query to kagi.com/assistant, right?
And that you can set the model to answer those query as any of the grok models?
Kagi isn't behind anyone else on this AI-powered search, in fact the assistant is nearly a strict superset of all the other ones.
You can set the model to chatGPT, claude, gemini, grok, etc. And it'll use kagi search as a backend instead of, respectively, bing, brave, google, google+twitter.
Didn't know this thanks! Looks like only Grok 3 mini is supported on my standard plan currently, and I'll have limited tokens to use on Grok 4 (that I'm already paying for) on the Premium plan. I'll stick to my current setup for now but appreciate the input.
At this point I feel like I know where all the content must lie that I am looking for domain wise. There is so much crap content out there on crap websites that discoverability is long dead anyhow. So, I basically just use google to search within domains I already know.
Not sure how long this scales because like I said, my discovery rate has pretty much been zero for years now of new domains worth visiting. I'm sure they are out there but modern internet doesn't really let you find them short of finding a reference to them in some forum comment someplace, thanks to SEO arms race.
I'm afraid this is a case of "too little, too late". I've been a happy DDG user for many, many years. Sure, there's a learning curve when venturing out of google's cozy bubble. But once I figured it out, its been fantastic.
Except the last few months. And, I can't stress this enough, its not DDG's fault. The results are relevant to my search, and at first glance seem to be what I'm looking for. But take more than 2 seconds to read, and you'll notice the websites themselves are trash heaps of AI slop, serving errors and mistakes.
The human web is quickly shrinking out of existence. The last content silos of human expression have walled themselves in and are striking deals with the evil megacorps; pushing their shitty, error prone, planet killing, word prediction engines down everyone's throats.
Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. Maybe they should pivot to web autopsy tools, not unlike Internet Archive. I wish the Kagi team well. I hope they succeed. And I really hope I'm wrong about the open web's grim future. But I'm probably not. And the AI arms race suggests the megacorps agree.
I don't think your post is without merit, but I often search for things where there's a single canonical source of truth, and no amount of AI slop or LLM results will be of interest. (e.g. this afternoon I've searched for a book title, for YouTube Premium pricing info, for git bisect documentation, for car collision stats, for speeding fine amounts, for some Linq documentation, and for some specific info on local parking).
I keep trying and then moving on. Is there a guide on how to actually use all the features or maybe a quick set up guide? I find myself using JUST search and no customization. I have 0 issue with paying if I use it but need a guide or examples. Please share
It's hard to appreciate something like Kagi when the point of the whole interaction is to minimize the time of interaction itself. But the experience is night and day. I don't see myself going back to any other search engines like DuckDuckGo or, God forbid, Google.
I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean, I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to support the local merchants as much as possible.
Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
> Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
I face this issue too and can easily reproduce it. When typing in Google search, if I try to place the cursor, it will often register my click on the "microphone" icon due to a tiny delay of the search UI and that opens up the App Store page. When I switch back to Safari, it starts a never ending loop of sending me back to App Store page. I have to kill Safari to stop this.
in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping, sports...
it is better at finding documentation and technical articles and deprioritizing SEO spam
I can confirm, and for me - even if I want like Kagi - I can’t tolerate it. I’ve read it depends on the Country you’re in. In Germany, where I’m from, loading time is up to 3 seconds - while on Google it’s almost instant.
Google is much faster, because it's slower to show you results related to your search terms. It's much faster to just show you whatever slop their AI happened to cook up
The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear business model.
Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there are other viable free options.
My problem with kagi is I don’t want my search history to be tied to an account, no matter what privacy assurance there, I have zero trust in anything that I don’t fully control.
I use ChatGPT to get first ideas about what I want to know and then even with Bing, I find the sources that confirm what the AI told me. Maybe I should have looked at Kagi 10 years ago, but today I don't see any value to the cost of subbing to Kagi.
If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine.
This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity.
The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has made itself unbearable.
I really like Kagi but am still holding out for a cheaper plan. If it were around the range of NextDNS (which I happily pay for) it would be a no-brainer. Wouldn't need or want any of the llm/other features.
I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.
That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying for various things that you don't use/consume.
YouTube premium recently added a “lite” tier. I don’t use YouTube music and I don’t watch shorts or music videos on YouTube, so I’m able to have the channels I watch get compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary and non-core features of the platform.
Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists it isn’t is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.
Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other perks of membership (background playback, etc.)
So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible? There are other factors that favor dumbed down user interfaces, but they are not unique to subscriptions
> So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible?
Just the nature of it? A subscription is always going to be a regular fee that pays for an aggregate of multiple things, some of which aren’t used by every subscriber. (And which some subscribers are going to object to paying for.) The only way to ensure that you only pay for what you use is a pay-per-use model.
And conceptually I really like pay-per-use models, but the public tends not to love them - in particular for things with low marginal costs of production/serving, like software services. (As opposed to medium marginal-cost goods, like say, home gas utility, where non-usage-based pricing is available, but tends to be poor value.)
I'm building my own search engine that is human-curated, as I am also uncomfortable relying on AI to filter my search results. It's free, feedback welcomed: https://greppr.org/
Thats realy cool, and i would be interested in building something like this for myself (for German sources) do you have any directions to point me into for making something like this myself?
Seriously, I haven't used Google in years. I stopped even relying on Google as a decent backup option because it's gotten so-o-o bad. DDG has gotten incrementally worse simply because they're unable to fend off the reams of AI slop taking over everything (and it's also based in large part on Bing's index).
I recently tried Kagi now that they have free and lower-cost tiers, and oh wow I can feel the difference. This is like 2010s-era search, and I mean that as a distinct compliment. I signed up and won't look back. The "Quick Peek" feature is truly fantastic…it feels like it's some sort of AI but it's simply just a good set of queries with good excerpts of REAL text from REAL links. Bravo!
for me kagi started out as a few searches and compared between it, DDG and google.
and then i ran out of free searches, so I gave them $5.
and then i ran out of $5 worth of searches so i kept renewing, $5 more. And again, and again.
At this point I had all my defaults set to kagi because I loved it. Just the fact there are no ads or sponsored leads and I can more-or-less kill webpages completely generated and SEO'd with LLMs, I can actually do research again.
and then I became a full subscriber, with orion, blacklists, I use the quick answer (LLM) and small web searching fruitfully, and joined their discord.
It's been a long time since I fell head over heels for a technology product, and this being something so core to how I use the internet, it's a godsend.
Enjoying it at least until they decide money is nice and growth is imperative, they go public, and enshittifies.
Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map.
I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.
We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
The problems that need solving are not problems you can develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc wants to populate their information into google maps and keep it current. Kagi doesn't have that. They need to somehow get all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi maps. It's impossible.
As a paying user it's frustrating how bad Kagi maps are given they're (presumably) paying Mapbox $ for it. Most of the time the search function doesn't work and I've been disappointed enough that I default to Google Maps for anything maps related.
In my experience it's the POI data that's really tough. (As opposed to roads/addresses.) Locally, Google Maps has enough market share that every business ensures that their info on Google Maps is correct. Even Apple Maps hasn't been able to scale to compete.
Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards.
TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
i didn't like kagi either at first, but google has deteriorated so much with the constant hindustantimes .com listicles in every fucking search query it's become unusable
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I really like the new Assistant update which guides you on the strengths and weaknesses of the selectable models and recommends a shortlist.
> 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...
Kagi is Super impressive.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Redirecting safari sites to apps (including app store) should be a per-domain permission that I can revoke.
You're in luck, Orion browser from the same company has this config and asks at the first redirection!
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Not that I can see. I just tried it and get the same issue you describe.
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.
I changed my default search engine on iOS from Google to DuckDuckGo for this exact reason.
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.
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.
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
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").
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
Ok ok, I'm signing up for Kagi now
Perplexity Pro allows you to use GPT-4 Omni, Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Sonar, DeepSeek R1, and others. Can you clarify what you mean by based on the ancient llama 3.3 70B? And they pull results from multiple search engines, and their own index, not just Google.
Preference doesn't have to be based on anything, but providing misinformation that is easily verified is not that common on HN. And Perplexity Pro is different than vanilla Perplexity.
I was talking about their sonar API and what you get when you go to perplexity.ai and search by default -- it's llama 3.3 70B hosted with cerebras. Which is fast, but way way behind the times -- it's more likely to hallucinate than models from basically anyone from the competition, including quick answer.
You're right though it seems that they don't just use bing + their own crawler, but who else they use seems to be community speculation.
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.
Society is screwed once AI companies reach the 'using our product as our personal bot army' phase.
So in your opinion, incidentally in this thread about Kagi, you think Google is better? You imply Perplexity only uses their own index, but they pull results from multiple external search engines and their own index. As I mentioned in another thread, that kind of easy-to-verify-as-misinformation is not that common on HN. And Perplexity Pro is different than vanilla Perplexity.
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.
AI comments in general mean something different once versions are clarified. I've never seen so many comment threads where people don't specify clearly which version(s) they are discussing, which seems relevant 95+% of the time.
We only pump here sir.
For years I used pplx.ai extensively, but of late, chat.com (code, q&a) and gemini.google (youtube & web search) feel unmatched.
Just a note: pplx.ai redirects to perplexity.com; chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com
You really were heavily using it in late 2022/early 2023? It seemed... rough.
pplx.ai did RAG (with attachments) and web search (immediately after they pivoted from Twitter search aka "Bird SQL") way before other chat interfaces caught on. Their features were free & the product was sticky.
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
This. Being able to rank which sites bring extra context to your prompts is massive.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)
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
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.
No one wants to pay for value because we were getting a bunch of value for free for twenty-ish years.
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.
As opposed to LLMs, which aren't inaccurate or noisy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's far more likely that LLM providers will create a marketplace for advertisers to inject their brand/product into responses to user queries.
Oh goodness no.
Please delete your comment before a Google product manager reads it and puts it on their idea board.
I bet they already have and are preparing for the best marketshare to pull this off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe they are developing their own browser and email to have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
The browser actally came before the search engine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
I'd rather just pay for good search than spend time to de-enshittify Google.
I'm hoping enough people agree with me for Kagi to be viable.
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.
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
This is a great tip!
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.
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.)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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)
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.
AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.
When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as the difference between searching for something, or just asking the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to move the conversation to a new LLM session.
you can also just go straight to the assistant from the query with !ai -- it'll power the answer directly with your default assistant model
I don't mind it necessarily, as I use it all the time in place of Googling, so you would think that folding it into search would work well.
But it doesn't, at least not for me. But I think that's tied to poor implementation, design, and being a solution looking for a problem rather than a philosophical issue with using AI to improve search experience.
I built my own, it's easier than you might think: https://greppr.org/
There’s also Marginalia: https://marginalia-search.com/
Very nice!
would be interested in directions on how to do this myself.
like, take existing bookmarks, make a crawler.
nice work, btw
I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar. I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when integrating it into a backend project that needed that functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult. Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
Thanks! If I have time, I should write a how-to blog.
It seems to me that building a curated search engine is much easier than a general-purpose search engine.
You can achieve both in my opinion.
What's the cost and architecture of running such a site and crawling all those pages?
A single bare-metal server!
Oh wow. Do you need a proxy or something to be able to crawl so many pages? Can I email you with some technical questions? Thanks.
No proxy yet, but I am considering one as many sites are re-directing my crawler based on its IP, which is causing indexing issues.
The hardest part BY FAR is the crawler: initially I was using Apache Nutch but it got slower and slower as the index grew, so I replaced it with my own crawler that I wrote in PHP (comfortable for me) and made that multi-threaded using Supervisor.
The second hardest part was the amount of security I had to build in to prevent bots running spam searches and hogging my infra.
I'll try to write a blog soon and post it here.
Do you have multiple IPs? I am trying to build something which needs just the published at and updated at date fields for thousands of links and I am afraid my IP will get blocked quickly.
Just one IP for now. You are right to worry about being blocked from crawling however, it has happened to me already on a few sites. The key things to help mitigate against this are:
1. Always identify your crawler via a consistent user-agent string, that explains its a web search crawler and not a generic web browser.
2. Always obey the directives in robots.txt.
3. Make sure your crawler is not too aggressive (low frequency of requests).
(updated for formatting)
Nice, what are you using as storage?
Lucene on local disc.
I tried Kagi and liked it for the most part. But I really wasn’t seeing the big benefit everyone’s claiming.
Google is…fine? Maybe I just learned how to use it for what I do
I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently.
If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.
This has always struck me as pretty weak. Yes, paying Yandex indirectly results in paying taxes to the Russian government. But people are rarely so dogmatic about these matters. There are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the world, under which companies must operate because people live there who must try to make a living. Punishing the people at those companies because they're obligated ot pay taxes to their rulers strikes me as rather ridiculous.
Kagi is awesome. I appreciate the Yandex results. I'm not a big fan of Russia.
> There are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the world, under which companies must operate because people live there who must try to make a living.
Right, but there's lots of companies in the world. Lots more than there are tyrannical regimes. Lots more than there are total regimes! We're not individually obligated to support each of them, when they financially support things we find abhorrent.
Yes, people buy oil from middle eastern tyrannies, everything from China, things made from dubiously sourced raw materials etc. - but they somehow draw the line at one particular conflict or nation (not always Russia).
Well, you have to start drawing lines somewhere, and focus on an issue or two that are important to you. You will only end up spreading yourself thin (and not making an impact at all with anything) if you try to draw every line "correctly".
China isn't invading Ukraine, assassinating people in Europe, and things like that.
But no, I don't like the Chinese government either.
On the other hand there is the little matter of the Uygur genocide, and the suppression of other minority cultures.
With that logic you could do and buy everything. If you don't start somewhere you don't start at all.
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> This has always struck me as pretty weak
Holding and adhering to personal principles is the opposite of weak. You might disagree with that person's decision, but that does not make them (or their decision) weak.
I don't think it is weak. It is a principled stand. Maybe those principles are not shared by you, but that does not make them weak
Yandex isn't just an honest business trying to survive in Putin's Russia, it actively manipulates results to push Kremlin propaganda. It only returned negative coverage about Navalny and called it an "experiment" when it was caught. It actively blocks images of Putin when you search for "bunker grandpa", a common nickname for him. It replaces links to the anti-Putin Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps with links to FSB-controlled honeypots. Its largest shareholders are Russian oligarchs, state-owned banks and oil companies.
Maybe they have to do it to survive, who knows, but you don't have to use their services or products that resell their services.
No it’s not, since it’s been acquired by essentially government.
The founder has responded to similar comments - https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
God damn, that is some good reply!
> The job of a search engine is to produce the most relevant search results, period. Kagi excels at this precisely because we remain unimpressed by world politics. The moment 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I stop working on a search engine.
> We set out to fix search, not the world.
The consequences of this attitude of indifference (at best) will scale if Kagi becomes popular
The CEO has expressed his stance in a forum post: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
"Kagi has been using yandex search api since 2019, long before current geopolitical tensions"
The war in Ukraine has been ongoing since 2014.
"We understand these are deeply personal issues for many. As someone who was a refugee of two wars, I'm not indifferent to human suffering."
He is Serbian.
Regardless, the option to exclude Yandex (and other search engines) results has been suggested here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
If you want to support the people of Ukraine, the best thing you can do right now is give them money to buy more drones. This will have much more of an effect than Kagi's Yandex integration.
I recommend https://dzygaspaw.com personally, but there are many good crowdfunding organizers.
Does there exist another source for a good, broad web index that can provide results like mid-'00s Google?
I use DDG mostly but if I need to actually search the web I go to Yandex (I don't have Kagi... at least not yet). I don't know of another place that can do that.
Like, is there a viable alternative for Kagi?
Would you consider boycotting Google or Amazon because of their relationship with the Israeli military? I avoid Amazon, but it's pretty tough to avoid Google.
Israel is not a threat to Europe while it's hard to say the same for Putin. At least it matters if you live there.
The Government of Israel, as it currently stands, is absolutely a threat to Europe.
It has brought genocide, concentration camps and forced starvation back into the Overton window for state actors pursuing security objectives. This should terrify everyone, whether inside Europe or not.
In the UK, simply expressing support for a protest group is now imprisonable under anti-terror legislation. Germany is dishing out fines and deportations for as little as holding up signs.
Post-war Europe is ostensibly built on rules and norms around human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The behaviour of the state of Israel, and our governments' craven support for it, is causing rapid democratic backsliding and laying the groundwork for our next round of atrocities.
Whatever one's moral perspective, or position on the middle east, this concerns everyone.
Do you feel that Kagi going down completely could have any meaningful impact on the war? What leads you to believe that?
I would also really like it if Kagi didn't fund state-sponsored terrorism. On the other hand, the search is better, so...
wait till you see what USA funds
Ok... Are we just naming random countries that also do terrorism now? Inserting butwhaddaboudda YEWW ESS into literally every conversation is tiring. Yes, the US does bad stuff. It doesn't make funding terrorism by Kagi less bad.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not whataboutism.
Ok, I guess since the US is bad we should just never improve anything, ever.
What a waste of time this conversation is.
Enlighten us.
Israel.
Google has a 1.2Bn cloud contract with the Israeli gov/military.
There isn't really an escape from helping despotic, genocidal regimes.
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I made the same switch recently. Results from Kagi are night-and-day vs. Google.
I do hope Kagi eventually has enough revenue to offer a more generous free tier, though (and without logging in). I fear it will remain a niche thing otherwise.
Capital causes big distortions: unreasonably cheap products from big companies and unreasonably cheap products from VC backed companies. Plus, habits and market power make it hard for people to switch en masse.
Despite a tough market, Kagi succeeds the old way: with better products.
Kagi proves plain old commerce - making a good thing and selling it - can win a fair fight against capital. Keep it up folks!
Kagi's bang game is so good. A few of my custom bangs:
- !w: results from last week only
- !y: results from yesterday and today only
- !io: Assistant, but offline
- !ig: Assistant, but for grammar correction
- !itr: Assistant, but for correcting and organizing transcript text
- !sh: Google shopping tab
> !w: results from last week only
Did you just shadow the Wikipedia bang?
regular anecdata: it works great, at first I used to go back to Google a few times a month if Kagi didn't find something I was sure existed, but either Kagi got better or the web and/or Google got worse, because I don't go back to google anymore.
easily worth 4 coffees a month just to not worry anymore about the direct consequences of my searches, and being able to shitcan garbage sites like pinboard.* while pranking wikipedia in my own search results is just gravy.
they also have a search API now in beta which you can request access to; 2.5c/search.
Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
When I used DDG, the results were worse than Google, and I kept going back to Google when I couldn't find something, always second-guessing the results. And it seems every time someone recommends DDG the first thing they point out is "you can just type !g to get google results!", so I assume this is still the case.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)
Per the post, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index and lacks the customization offered by Kagi.
My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the results are straight from Bing.
The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But sure, I guess their marketing worked.
The index was why I looked elsewhere.
The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.
For non-English results, DDG and such alternatives are of very low quality, even compared to Google.
I’m looking at the pricing tiers and I think it’s fine. But what would probably make me adopt it instantly is if I could set a max tier and it would just ramp up the tier each month if I hit it. Ie. I set it to Professional and at 101 searches I’m upgraded to Starter and then at 301 upgraded to Professional. If I forget about it or stop using it or use it far less, I’m not just shoveling money into yet another subscription I have to manage.
This is because I don’t have consistent usage habits, and the price isn’t stopping me, the psychology of a monthly subscription I don’t use is.
Kagi automatically credits you for any month you don’t use it [1] [2]. They also charge only the price difference on upgrade [3], though personally I care about this less now that unlimited is $10/mo.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing
[2]: https://kagi.com/changelog#6155
[3]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#if-i-upgrade-my-plan...
Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month.
And it doesn't look like there's any sort of "you only used 20 searches so we'll Free Tier you rather than $10 tier you this month".
> Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month.
This is not true, you don’t pay if you don’t use it. I think you’re assuming “credit” means some sort of redeemable voucher, but it’s account balance that automatically covers your next bill. Then at the end of the second unused month you get a credit that covers the third month, and so on.
So if I don’t use it for six months I’ve still paid for six months. If I close my account and they send that money back to me, yeah that’s probably fine.
The thing I’m mainly on about is the UX of not having to babysit another subscription. I once had a newsgroups sub that was exactly like this and it was amazing. You’d say “I want to spend at most X” and it would just ramp up towards X tier as needed.
While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use it. Especially for non-ai tasks.
Well a) it was required because it's not free and it's difficult to collect payment from people without accounts and b) see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Kagi is not a privacy orientated search engine.
Because it's a paid service?
I love and pay for Kagi, but I am afraid paid search providers are in for a tough time. I am using search less and less, and directing more of my search (~90%) to Grok instead of Kagi now. The exception being price comparisons when online shopping. I want the exact information I'm after, in the way that I want it, immediately. Search cannot do this, unless they amalgamate into AI tools more and more, at which point they are in a different space altogether. Looks like an Uber eating Taxi's business situation again to me.
You are aware that if you're paying for kagi you can just slap !ai at the end of any search query and it'll direct the query to kagi.com/assistant, right?
And that you can set the model to answer those query as any of the grok models?
Kagi isn't behind anyone else on this AI-powered search, in fact the assistant is nearly a strict superset of all the other ones.
You can set the model to chatGPT, claude, gemini, grok, etc. And it'll use kagi search as a backend instead of, respectively, bing, brave, google, google+twitter.
Didn't know this thanks! Looks like only Grok 3 mini is supported on my standard plan currently, and I'll have limited tokens to use on Grok 4 (that I'm already paying for) on the Premium plan. I'll stick to my current setup for now but appreciate the input.
Fair enough. I encourage you to cycle through the models in the assistant once in a while to see if there's new ones to like.
Kimi-k2 for instance was a positive surprise recently and is being added to your standard plan tonight as well as the brand new GPT-OSS models.
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If you find it disgusting - that's your choice. You should also respect those who do not share it and yep - do pay money to Musk companies.
Would be great to keep this place off political manifestations of any kind.
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At this point I feel like I know where all the content must lie that I am looking for domain wise. There is so much crap content out there on crap websites that discoverability is long dead anyhow. So, I basically just use google to search within domains I already know.
Not sure how long this scales because like I said, my discovery rate has pretty much been zero for years now of new domains worth visiting. I'm sure they are out there but modern internet doesn't really let you find them short of finding a reference to them in some forum comment someplace, thanks to SEO arms race.
I'm afraid this is a case of "too little, too late". I've been a happy DDG user for many, many years. Sure, there's a learning curve when venturing out of google's cozy bubble. But once I figured it out, its been fantastic.
Except the last few months. And, I can't stress this enough, its not DDG's fault. The results are relevant to my search, and at first glance seem to be what I'm looking for. But take more than 2 seconds to read, and you'll notice the websites themselves are trash heaps of AI slop, serving errors and mistakes.
The human web is quickly shrinking out of existence. The last content silos of human expression have walled themselves in and are striking deals with the evil megacorps; pushing their shitty, error prone, planet killing, word prediction engines down everyone's throats.
Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. Maybe they should pivot to web autopsy tools, not unlike Internet Archive. I wish the Kagi team well. I hope they succeed. And I really hope I'm wrong about the open web's grim future. But I'm probably not. And the AI arms race suggests the megacorps agree.
> Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index.
We have something in the works to fight back on that front, do not be worried ;)
> Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index.
1. The Internet Archive
2. Anna's Archive
3. YouTube (if they're allowed to)
That's more than enough knowledge and information.
4. Wikipedia
Am I too optimistic?
Great comment and you are absolutely right: AI slop content will (ironically) kill AI search.
In my opinion, we have gone full circle and arrived back to human curation to provide quality search results.
I don't think your post is without merit, but I often search for things where there's a single canonical source of truth, and no amount of AI slop or LLM results will be of interest. (e.g. this afternoon I've searched for a book title, for YouTube Premium pricing info, for git bisect documentation, for car collision stats, for speeding fine amounts, for some Linq documentation, and for some specific info on local parking).
I keep trying and then moving on. Is there a guide on how to actually use all the features or maybe a quick set up guide? I find myself using JUST search and no customization. I have 0 issue with paying if I use it but need a guide or examples. Please share
It's hard to appreciate something like Kagi when the point of the whole interaction is to minimize the time of interaction itself. But the experience is night and day. I don't see myself going back to any other search engines like DuckDuckGo or, God forbid, Google.
I got work to pay for Kagi out of my education budget, in case anyone else has that option available.
I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean, I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to support the local merchants as much as possible.
Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
> Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
I face this issue too and can easily reproduce it. When typing in Google search, if I try to place the cursor, it will often register my click on the "microphone" icon due to a tiny delay of the search UI and that opens up the App Store page. When I switch back to Safari, it starts a never ending loop of sending me back to App Store page. I have to kill Safari to stop this.
in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping, sports... it is better at finding documentation and technical articles and deprioritizing SEO spam
I like Kagi, but it feels a bit slow to display results.
Like, the page loads very fast, but only with the search bar, and only then you get the results appearing after some loading. But it's acceptable.
Image search is rather slow, though.
I can confirm, and for me - even if I want like Kagi - I can’t tolerate it. I’ve read it depends on the Country you’re in. In Germany, where I’m from, loading time is up to 3 seconds - while on Google it’s almost instant.
Google is much faster, because it's slower to show you results related to your search terms. It's much faster to just show you whatever slop their AI happened to cook up
Sounds interesting but I'm not ready to pay to use a search engine yet. Too many subscriptions for everything nowadays.
Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now do their own indexing.
The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear business model.
Of all of tech subscriptions that I pay for, kagi is a close second after claude in terms of the QoL improvement per dollar.
Who else remembers buying your shareware licenses from Kagi.com ?
Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there are other viable free options.
I've been using it for a little over a year now, and I just upgraded to the unlimited search subscription. Totally worth it.
My problem with kagi is I don’t want my search history to be tied to an account, no matter what privacy assurance there, I have zero trust in anything that I don’t fully control.
This. The article plainly states that too:
"The obvious flaw here is that Kagi still records source IP addresses along with Privacy Pass searches, potentially de-anonymizing them"
Kagi makes me want to learn Crystal¹
¹ https://crystal-lang.org
I use ChatGPT to get first ideas about what I want to know and then even with Bing, I find the sources that confirm what the AI told me. Maybe I should have looked at Kagi 10 years ago, but today I don't see any value to the cost of subbing to Kagi.
tl;dr: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine.
This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity.
The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has made itself unbearable.
I really like Kagi but am still holding out for a cheaper plan. If it were around the range of NextDNS (which I happily pay for) it would be a no-brainer. Wouldn't need or want any of the llm/other features.
I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.
That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying for various things that you don't use/consume.
YouTube premium recently added a “lite” tier. I don’t use YouTube music and I don’t watch shorts or music videos on YouTube, so I’m able to have the channels I watch get compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary and non-core features of the platform.
Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists it isn’t is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.
Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other perks of membership (background playback, etc.)
So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible? There are other factors that favor dumbed down user interfaces, but they are not unique to subscriptions
> So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible?
Just the nature of it? A subscription is always going to be a regular fee that pays for an aggregate of multiple things, some of which aren’t used by every subscriber. (And which some subscribers are going to object to paying for.) The only way to ensure that you only pay for what you use is a pay-per-use model.
And conceptually I really like pay-per-use models, but the public tends not to love them - in particular for things with low marginal costs of production/serving, like software services. (As opposed to medium marginal-cost goods, like say, home gas utility, where non-usage-based pricing is available, but tends to be poor value.)
You mean added it back, though not available in my country. Stopped paying for youtube when they removed it years ago.
I'm building my own search engine that is human-curated, as I am also uncomfortable relying on AI to filter my search results. It's free, feedback welcomed: https://greppr.org/
Thats realy cool, and i would be interested in building something like this for myself (for German sources) do you have any directions to point me into for making something like this myself?
I'll try to make time soon to write a blog, and post the link here.
I dumped DuckDuckGo for Kagi. heh heh
Seriously, I haven't used Google in years. I stopped even relying on Google as a decent backup option because it's gotten so-o-o bad. DDG has gotten incrementally worse simply because they're unable to fend off the reams of AI slop taking over everything (and it's also based in large part on Bing's index).
I recently tried Kagi now that they have free and lower-cost tiers, and oh wow I can feel the difference. This is like 2010s-era search, and I mean that as a distinct compliment. I signed up and won't look back. The "Quick Peek" feature is truly fantastic…it feels like it's some sort of AI but it's simply just a good set of queries with good excerpts of REAL text from REAL links. Bravo!
for me kagi started out as a few searches and compared between it, DDG and google.
and then i ran out of free searches, so I gave them $5.
and then i ran out of $5 worth of searches so i kept renewing, $5 more. And again, and again.
At this point I had all my defaults set to kagi because I loved it. Just the fact there are no ads or sponsored leads and I can more-or-less kill webpages completely generated and SEO'd with LLMs, I can actually do research again.
and then I became a full subscriber, with orion, blacklists, I use the quick answer (LLM) and small web searching fruitfully, and joined their discord.
It's been a long time since I fell head over heels for a technology product, and this being something so core to how I use the internet, it's a godsend.
Enjoying it at least until they decide money is nice and growth is imperative, they go public, and enshittifies.
you can set search?q=%s&udm=14& for google and default to "web" tab, where you actually get search results. Works fine for me.
For now.
But then you lose non-ai summaries that are often useful and various calculator results etc
I've been using Kagi for a long time, ever since Google decided to censor the internet.
i'll try it when i can pay $5 for unlimited search without AI results (not that it can't be useful; i'm just only interested in the search component).
What ever happened to that HN darling, Duck Duck Go?
I dumped corporate search for my own index https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database.
Screw you guys! I'm creating my own search with open source.
... but seriously it just augments my search.
Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map.
I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.
Maps dev here. Would appreciate a bit more feedback at https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps
We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
The problems that need solving are not problems you can develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc wants to populate their information into google maps and keep it current. Kagi doesn't have that. They need to somehow get all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi maps. It's impossible.
As a paying user it's frustrating how bad Kagi maps are given they're (presumably) paying Mapbox $ for it. Most of the time the search function doesn't work and I've been disappointed enough that I default to Google Maps for anything maps related.
In my experience it's the POI data that's really tough. (As opposed to roads/addresses.) Locally, Google Maps has enough market share that every business ensures that their info on Google Maps is correct. Even Apple Maps hasn't been able to scale to compete.
Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards.
TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
Did that over a year ago.
Is it just me or do a lot of these comments seem a little too positive? I've never seen a product this hyped on HN. I'm suspicious...
soooo... he still uses search engines?
Some people are still looking for source material rather than, say, an imaginary friend summarizing info that may or may not have been made up.
I'm not quite finding that AI search works reliably for my use cases yet.
There's no viable alternative, so yes of course people use search engines.
How do you look something up?
Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
Not everyone trusts AI to filter their internet queries.
i didn't like kagi either at first, but google has deteriorated so much with the constant hindustantimes .com listicles in every fucking search query it's become unusable
I dumped Kagi for Google