Try Switching to Kagi

https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/try_switching_to_kagi

by Ch00k • 1 year ago

715 465 1 year ago

daringfireball.net

decimalenough2• 1 year ago

no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark)

TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.

jessekv2• 1 year ago

!code will get you into the proper code assistant.

I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.

For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)

Edit: I got this working.

sitkack3• 1 year ago

What do you mean by custom assistants because you can make your !<word> assistants with your own prompt and the model of your choice.

Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?

al_borland• 1 year ago

Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.

https://kagi.com/assistant

Additional details on the blog post about it.

https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all

ac29• 1 year ago

https://kagi.com/assistant

Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does

louthy• 1 year ago

This is one of my favourite features. The UX is so god damn simple that it makes switching to an AI response so ridiculously trivial, I love it.

coreyh14444• 1 year ago

Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.

And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!

Ezhik4• 1 year ago

Kagi also lets you make custom bangs - I've got Google on !f and !h in addition to !g (sorry Flickr and Haskell users) to deal with typos.

submeta• 1 year ago

Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.

Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.

lcsh0s• 1 year ago

have you considered proton for emails?

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

What does Kagi assistant (every plan has sub SOTA a few days back) lack compared to Perplexity?

therein• 1 year ago

Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.

iLoveOncall3• 1 year ago

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".

But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.

I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.

orhmeh09• 1 year ago

Perhaps you are lucky to stick to happy paths or are not particularly discerning. It's real. https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-wors...

iLoveOncall3• 1 year ago

Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?

They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.

Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.

philwelch2• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/c1iDr

mrweasel• 1 year ago

When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.

My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.

Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.

In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.

Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.

esseph3• 1 year ago

I feel exactly the same way! It makes me wonder what the hell I look for on the internet vs the users complaining about the search results!

jacekm• 1 year ago

I suspect the secret sauce might be uBlock Origin. Even with basic, default filters it transforms Google into a vastly different experience.

rspoerri2• 1 year ago

I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.

internet_points• 1 year ago

The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).

The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")

That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.

sixtyj2• 1 year ago

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

rspoerri2• 1 year ago

With DDG I kept looking for better results, which I typically found, not so with Kagi.

foresterre• 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.

I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.

I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".

The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.

sixtyj2• 1 year ago

Thanks.

Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.

sph4• 1 year ago

I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.

ziddoap• 1 year ago

I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.

I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.

I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.

SG-2• 1 year ago

with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.

messe• 1 year ago

Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

All Google alternatives are very insufficient if you're searching in a different language than English. Except for Kagi.

JumpCrisscross6• 1 year ago

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."

This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.

It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)

snorremd• 1 year ago

I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.

Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.

JumpCrisscross6• 1 year ago

love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them

One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.

Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.

Semaphor• 1 year ago

I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

Use reader mode on your browser, and you can read most of the paywalled sites.

coldpie8• 1 year ago

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

_aavaa_2• 1 year ago

You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.

This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).

For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:

- w3school

- GeeksforGeeks

- real python

- programiz

- code academy

And only after do I get the official python docs.

On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.

dingnuts• 1 year ago

one I like to use to demonstrate is "how to fix a leaking faucet"

Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers

Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.

283042834092343• 1 year ago

To me, it is not the results that are the kicker. It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.

And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.

Zambyte3• 1 year ago

@dh nats !

This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.

@hn !

This brings me directly to the front page of HN.

@gh jj !

This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

!guixc how do I install nginx?

This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.

!p nginx

Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.

The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

Something tells me that Gruber has been betrayed by supposedly "premium" subscription services in the past.

dsego• 1 year ago

The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.

pookieinc• 1 year ago

For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?

evertedsphere• 1 year ago

how do you tolerate the sheer latency of running the "vast majority" of your web searches through an llm

esseph3• 1 year ago

How many searches previously to find the right question to ask x search time = total_search_time

# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops

ChocolateGod• 1 year ago

The LLM can read through the results quicker than you can and provide the information you were looking for.

senko5• 1 year ago

I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases.

I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)

ghc2• 1 year ago

What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.

bigstrat20032• 1 year ago

If you believe ChatGPT is good for such usage, no. But personally I think it sucks at that and have no idea how anyone can stand it.

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

Just try it, it's free to try.

Ezhik4• 1 year ago

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.

demaga• 1 year ago

I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches.

Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.

stevekemp2• 1 year ago

I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.

A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.

Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.

mubou• 1 year ago

how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country

It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.

Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?

nicbou• 1 year ago

I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!

Ezhik4• 1 year ago

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...

For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

areyourllySorry• 1 year ago

try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches

Thimothy• 1 year ago

In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

1oooqooq3• 1 year ago

duck duck go have a drop down where you select any county anywhere you are.

want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.

homebrewer• 1 year ago

Use https://google.com/ncr (which stands for "no country redirect" IIRC). Has been working for me in a non-English speaking country for a very long time.

sundarurfriend2• 1 year ago

Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.

drabbiticus• 1 year ago

Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?

rafram7• 1 year ago

On a search for "avi to mp4":

- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

Google clearly wins there.

prophesi• 1 year ago

Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.

283042834092343• 1 year ago

Happy paying customer of Kagi here. because to me intention counts.

Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.

Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.

Happy to pay kagi.

mvieira384• 1 year ago

Did the same here on my Android phone.

Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.

Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.

Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm

amelius3• 1 year ago

Avi to mp4 is best done with an ffmpeg command written by an llm. But OK, I get that that was not the point.

emacdona• 1 year ago

customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.

That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).

I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.

Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.

camillomiller• 1 year ago

Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).

So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.

Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.

Ezhik4• 1 year ago

There's also uBlacklist for blocking domains from search engines, a miracle extension.

senko5• 1 year ago

Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.

I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g

sph4• 1 year ago

I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site.

Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.

I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.

d12bb2• 1 year ago

German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.

piva00• 1 year ago

I use Kagi for all my Swedish searches, it works better than Google every time I compare.

glenjamin2• 1 year ago

I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!

sshine• 1 year ago

How so?

I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.

The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.

JumpCrisscross6• 1 year ago

Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS

Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.

sph4• 1 year ago

I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.

When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.

Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.

nkurz2• 1 year ago

I think there might be more to it. While it might just be me, I think Kagi could use some improvement here. I've been using Kagi with Safari on Mac for about a year, and never got the search extension to work consistently. It would sometimes give me Google, and sometimes Kagi. And sometimes it would give me one site then switch to the other after a several second delay.

Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.

(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)

glenjamin2• 1 year ago

No, it's "hard", because it requires an extension to monitor all requests to a different search enging and hijack those to perform a redirect.

This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.

kasey_junk• 1 year ago

If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.

troupo3• 1 year ago

In comments on Mastodon he also finds a way to twist this into an anti-EU rant: https://mastodon.social/@gruber/114418346006131728

badgersnake• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is tedious.

criddell2• 1 year ago

It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.

croisillon• 1 year ago

I find it a little surprising that the blog famously censored by HN is still able to land on the first page of HN

baggachipz• 1 year ago

The countdown has begun. Get your comments in now!

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 1 year ago

I see Gruber on here fairly frequently. Enough to say that articles from his blog are not a rarity

sylens• 1 year ago

Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.

Not one click but by no means a byzantine process

watusername• 1 year ago

This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].

If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:

For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).

[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

billbrown2• 1 year ago

Orion (made by Kagi) is a WebKit-based browser that eliminates the need for an extension.

roflmaostc• 1 year ago

I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan.

Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.

I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.

The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.

sitkack3• 1 year ago

That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.

Zealotux• 1 year ago

I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.

axegon_• 1 year ago

No, thanks, I'll stick to qwant: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...

flymaipie• 1 year ago

Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? It seems weird to me.

troupo3• 1 year ago

They pay for search results to search providers because Kagi doesn't have an index of their own.

In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.

kenanfyi• 1 year ago

They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.

JumpCrisscross6• 1 year ago

Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?

They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.

xigoi• 1 year ago

It’s not funding, it’s paying for a service.

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.

Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.

d12bb2• 1 year ago

When I tried Qwant a few weeks ago, its search results were even worse than Google. So, Kagi it still is.

jwe4• 1 year ago

Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".

If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.

cosmicgadget• 1 year ago

It's the same as when Russians are asked about the invasion, "I'm not political."

philwelch2• 1 year ago

Did you type this comment on a device made in China?

lelanthran• 1 year ago

I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.

I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.

[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.

shayway• 1 year ago

Brave user here too. I like it. One thing I really appreciate is the links to your query on Google/Bing partway down the page.

mbix77• 1 year ago

Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.

eloisius• 1 year ago

The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary

This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.

frank20022• 1 year ago

For those who tried both: Kagi or Perplexity?

I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...

bananapub2• 1 year ago

kagi has a free trial (100 searches) so you can just answer this very personal question for yourself.

dredmorbius• 1 year ago

Based on this alone, Kagi.

<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>

feydaykyn• 1 year ago

The first answer is to try each one full time for a week and see which one is better for your use case.

For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.

schrectacular4• 1 year ago

I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.

jetbalsa2• 1 year ago

I guess I'm a power user, I'm at > Total searches this period 1,216 > Assistant interactions this period 92

I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.

SietrixDev2• 1 year ago

I don’t think I’m a power user and I’m constantly over 1000 searches / month. Just a few days ago I upgraded my plan to the highest tier to play with the better models and in a few days it’s gonna renew for a year at this tier.

If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.

schrectacular4• 1 year ago

Strangely (or maybe not based on how pricing economics work) this is the most appealing tier.

Thanks for the reply, it is helpful .

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?

I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.

schrectacular4• 1 year ago

Fair point. The analogy is confusing but probably because it involves hydrocarbon subsidies... I mean how is the gas cheaper?! It makes no sense.

I'm sure my playful sarcasm above doesn't come through well, but thanks for the reply it is helpful.

daitangio• 1 year ago

I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing.

Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).

Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:

- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia

and news.ycombinator.com :) of course

bananapub2• 1 year ago

another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.

Some nice features that may not be obvious:

- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"

They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.

Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.

Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.

senko5• 1 year ago

Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead.

Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.

Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?

senko5• 1 year ago

Seems to be unburied!

greazy4• 1 year ago

I have at least one kagi 3 month trial link. If anyone wants it, reply below :)

grussladd• 1 year ago

I would love to try it out, if the link is still available :)

timothevs2• 1 year ago

That would be very kind, if you still have it available. I have been on the fence - skeptical as is my nature, but I wonder if I am in the wrong here :)

greazy4• 1 year ago

Here you go

https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493

Hope you see this!

ibrahimsow1• 1 year ago

Yes please

greazy4• 1 year ago

Here you go. Hope you see this before it gets snapped up

https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493

SG-2• 1 year ago

Curious, but how do you get 3 month trial invites?

greazy4• 1 year ago

Kagi sent an email a few months ago.

nexo-v1• 1 year ago

I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock).

Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.

Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.

wtmt• 1 year ago

I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.

But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.

I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.

[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.

devinprater• 1 year ago

Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.

dickiedyce• 1 year ago

I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow.

What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.

scroot• 1 year ago

I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable

coldpie8• 1 year ago

Could either of you provide some specific search terms (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search box) that provides better results on Kagi than on Google?

stranded22• 1 year ago

I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).

nsteel• 1 year ago

I'd not heard of controld before. I was going to ask what's the benefit over pihole but I think they've got it covered at https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/

Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.

whalesalad• 1 year ago

I have been using it for a few years now and can't live without it. They really nailed it.

mhb2• 1 year ago

I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?

noname120• 1 year ago

I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects

Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search

tempest_• 1 year ago

Very likely due to the cost of the maps api.

mhb2• 1 year ago

When I search for a city, along with the list of results, there is a map on the right. When I click on it, it doesn't go to Google Maps.

neogodless3• 1 year ago

About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.

This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.

What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

jrmg3• 1 year ago

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.

I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

neogodless3• 1 year ago

I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)

packetlost2• 1 year ago

That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.

Terretta3• 1 year ago

On the contrary, they are the rare SaaS that proactively avoids charging you any period you don't use it.

deng• 1 year ago

Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43308930

seth_at_kagi2• 1 year ago

Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.

This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.

With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.

HanClinto• 1 year ago

YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.

Liquix• 1 year ago

FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all

mac-attack2• 1 year ago

Why not just avoid their services instead of pirating their content and matching the ethics of their execs?

thmoonbus3• 1 year ago

As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.

I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

As long as your time is worth <$50/yr...

Derbasti• 1 year ago

I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.

Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.

idiotsecant5• 1 year ago

10 dollars is like, a sandwich. Access to your search engine for a month is less useful than a sandwich?

xeonmc• 1 year ago

Pro tip : there is a DuckDuckGo lite version

dhc024• 1 year ago

As my income drops in slow periods, I pause subscriptions to many things. The very last two I would be willing to give up are (n-1): YouTube Premium and (n): Kagi.

zaneyard• 1 year ago

Firefox (and probably others) allows you to set up custom search engines (like Wikipedia). So when I know I am trying to get to Wikipedia or npm or whatever I just do an @wikipedia and type my search.

schrectacular4• 1 year ago

Feel the same. I liked it during the trial, but not THAT much.

BeetleB• 1 year ago

Just FYI, if you run out of your 300, you can simply renew on that date. So if 300 searches lasts you 21 days, you're effectively paying between $5 and $10 per month. If you run out halfway, though, it's cheaper to pay for unlimited.

mossTechnician• 1 year ago

That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.

It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.

Zambyte3• 1 year ago

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not.

The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.

tombert2• 1 year ago

A friend of mine and I split the cost of a family plan ($20/month) and that way we have four extra accounts to use for our family and the like. The amortized cost is pretty reasonable then.

I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.

And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.

SllX• 1 year ago

I justify it by having less Disney/Hulu/Max and I’ve just cut down on entertainment related subscriptions in general, although you can pry YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands.

guywithahat• 1 year ago

I think part of what's tough is I use two search engines + 2 LLM's, depending on what I'm trying to do. It's easy when most of them are free, but if I'm going to pay money it needs to be much better than the rest, and I don't think Kagi is.

II2II• 1 year ago

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?"

I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.

I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.

DougN7• 1 year ago

Kagi is one of the few subscriptions I think is 100% worth the price. In fact, I’d pay double. Very happy user for almost two years.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice.

I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.

eviks• 1 year ago

A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result.

Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)

Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result

Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.

I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)

esafak2• 1 year ago

Imagine a product so bad they have to dole out gift cards to make people use it. Are you saying you can use google through bing and get paid??

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY

harshitaneja3• 1 year ago

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.

I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.

jetbalsa2• 1 year ago

Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.

Zambyte3• 1 year ago

The assistant recently was made available to all tiers, with only the more expensive models being limited to the higher tier.

harshitaneja3• 1 year ago

Assistant was surprisingly useful. In a couple of occasions I had it find me research papers I didn't know existed for a problem I had been working on for long. However the realization for me was that I shouldn't neglect search abilities of the LLMs I was already paying for. I tried to replace my Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions with Assistant but the usage limits were too low for me. And for the cases where I wanted to use long context of Gemini models, the assistant had an arbitrary limit of only 32k I think.

However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.

abtinf• 1 year ago

What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?

p_j_w• 1 year ago

GP literally said in their first sentence that results quality wasn't improved with Kagi.

chipsrafferty• 1 year ago

I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.

zelphirkalt• 1 year ago

User scripts and browser extensions to the rescue, at no cost but time invested in setting them up.

vinnymac• 1 year ago

I have had a similar experience. After using Kagi, I don't really get why someone would pay for what they are offering today.

coldpie8• 1 year ago

This has also been my experience. The search quality is no better. When I ask people directly what they like about Kagi, it's all about the customization stuff (custom search operators; denylisting domains; etc). I do see the appeal of that, but I don't personally care enough about those features to pay for it.

qudat• 1 year ago

You also get Kagi assistant which is nice

bl4kers• 1 year ago

Same

int_19h• 1 year ago

Part of the problem is that Google has been actively sabotaging google-fu for quite some time now. E.g. ignoring quoting in queries.

cromka• 1 year ago

This is so infuriating that it single-handedly made me start looking for alternatives.

There is a noticeable friction now in using Google for searching. A pretty good example of how a decent product gets ruined by accountants and shareholder demand.

harshitaneja3• 1 year ago

Agreed. It is a major annoyance and the primary reason I was exploring other options. However, even though it is infuriating when google refuses to not respect my query, the number of such queries for me are limited and thus I can use Kagi(and lately exploring search in ChatGPT). The amount of such searches I have needed haven't exceeded 100 on Kagi so I haven't had the need to resubscribe yet but if they do I guess I will maintain the subscription. However with the response time issue I doubt I would ever want it to be my primary search provider.

Lariscus2• 1 year ago

I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.

esafak2• 1 year ago

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

Lariscus2• 1 year ago

I like it, but that still leaves metadata like the fact that I have an account at all. With the low user numbers of Kagi any privacy guarantee by them is an illusion. Since Kagi is operating out of a country without any privacy laws that could protect me, I will not use their services.

prinny_• 1 year ago

I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same.

There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.

lucasyvas• 1 year ago

If anything your description could be justification for some people to pay for it.

tigroferoce• 1 year ago

I personally would pay even if the results were _slightly_ worse. But for me they are as good or better than Google.

I also use a lot the assistant, so I'm happy customer so far.

mvieira384• 1 year ago

If you only use it occasionally, you can pay for the 300 searches a month plan and they won't bill you until you exceed that amount

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.

righthand• 1 year ago

It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.

mkbelieve• 1 year ago

Kagi rules for search, and they also have the best AI front end in my opinion.

theusus• 1 year ago

I tried Kagi and Brave. I get similar results on both but Brave is cheaper and AI answers.

bearjaws• 1 year ago

Recently converted 2 coworkers to Kagi, their minds we're blown when I was sharing screen and had no ads and relevant search results.

waiwai933• 1 year ago

I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either.

That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)

rkangel• 1 year ago

I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.

I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.

dvngnt_• 1 year ago

Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results.

Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

I wish there was a discounted plan that didn't include "AI" - if the search is good, that's all I'm looking for in a search engine.

billbrown2• 1 year ago

For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.

https://kagi.com/changelog

kristofferR4• 1 year ago

Not only that, but they also have an issue tracker/FR page [1] and a Discord server [2]. It feels way more human and less corporate than Google.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/ [2] https://kagi.com/discord

MostlyStable• 1 year ago

While this is true, it's one part of Kagi that I wouldn't expect to remain true if they every actually got mainstream success. That human/less corporate feel is less an effect of their mission goals than it is their very small size.

They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.

1oooqooq3• 1 year ago

did this guy sell his apple stock and joined early on kagi private equity?

jhickok• 1 year ago

I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.

jordemort• 1 year ago

senorqa• 1 year ago

99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm. It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.

prirai3• 1 year ago

What tools do you use for command line searching?

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

Currently, the script looks like this

      #!/bin/sh
      0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073

"0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1

yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.

0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.

yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.

This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.

Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.

1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.

2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.

mcpar-land• 1 year ago

I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page.

But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.

0_gravitas• 1 year ago

25$ a month user here and quite happy with just how quiet results are, equally so with the Assistant output when I've used it.

mapumbaa• 1 year ago

Just go for metaGer instead. Non-profit and based in Germany.

mac-attack2• 1 year ago

searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.

nedt2• 1 year ago

I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly. My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.

kristofferR4• 1 year ago

Nope, they've solved that:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

handsclean• 1 year ago

Session links are what you’re looking for. Privacy Pass doesn’t work if you clear cookies, and in fact will lock you out of Privacy Pass for a month if you clear cookies maybe four times. Ask me how I found out.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....

nedt2• 1 year ago

Always needs an extension. That's not the same as just using Duckduckgo.

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

Me too, actually. I'm starting to think this "buy Kagi!" movement is being pushed by people who didn't even know they could change their default search provider.

ctvo• 1 year ago

As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.

Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.

KoolKat233• 1 year ago

Absolutely agree.

Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.

If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.

Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.

SietrixDev2• 1 year ago

This. I didn’t know it was EU only thing, but sometimes you have a map displayed in Google search results and there’s no way to actually go to Google Maps beside clicking “directions” button (and I think even this button isn’t always there).

Just recently I’ve created a bang in Kagi which redirects me to Google Maps roughly around my home with a query that I typed.

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

Would an OpenStreetMap integration be sufficient to replace this functionality?

KoolKat233• 1 year ago

In my opinion, no it's too shit compared to Google Maps, Apple Maps is also not great. Kagi have their own maps, which it seems is based on Apple Maps. Apple has no information outside the US (heard its better in the US but I just know it's not great in Europe or Africa). Things like operating hours.

mimischi• 1 year ago

Not OP, but I heavily rely on Google Maps reviews. Haven’t found another platform that replaces them.

poincaredisk2• 1 year ago

Just to add a different voice: I prefer OSM and for me it would be great.

carlosjobim8• 1 year ago

No, Google Maps is miles ahead of all competitors.

pjm331• 1 year ago

Yeah that’s the only type of search that I always append the !g to

frereubu• 1 year ago

You can shorten that to !gm if you want to go straight to Google Maps.

idiotsecant5• 1 year ago

Yes, kagi has a Google maps link built in but it doesn't integrate very smoothly. It ends up linking to strange results in Google maps. I would almost prefer that kagi just integrated Google maps until the kagi maps product is mature. It's my only stumbling block using kagi

poulpy123• 1 year ago

I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service

barbazoo• 1 year ago

Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.

Arathorn• 1 year ago

The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|

dkarl• 1 year ago

I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.

thi22• 1 year ago

My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill. So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it. It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.

schmorptron• 1 year ago

FYI, I think the $10 plan that's now "basic AI" used to just be the unlimited search plan and they just recently added a limited capacity of the AI stuff to it.

catapart• 1 year ago

Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least:

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

yesfitz• 1 year ago

I read through the whole opinion piece.

Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.

mvieira384• 1 year ago

I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time

omgitspavel2• 1 year ago

I also want to add that Kagi recently partnered with a Russian state-owned search engine Yandex: https://kagi.com/changelog#5340. This means they are paying money to the Russian state through taxes and sharing my search queries with it. This was a critical issue for me, and it led me to stop using it and request a refund earlier this year.

369548684892826• 1 year ago

Exactly, glad I'm not the only one!

parasti• 1 year ago

This is a critical issue to pretty much every EU citizen.

switch0073• 1 year ago

And according to the link below, the Kagi founder/CEO claims Yandex is a private company headquartered in Kazakhstan, unrelated to the Russian government.

https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311987220115248

poincaredisk2• 1 year ago

Sad to hear that. I seriously considered registering, but knowing this I can't in good faith pay money to Kagi. I know it sounds petty, but to people in my country this issue is very important.

And for many businesses in the EU it's illegal to transfer money directly or indirectly to Russia. I don't know how this applies exactly, but I know my company cannot legally pay for this

mm263• 1 year ago

This makes Vlad look much better than the poster thinks. It's ridiculous that the poster is dishing out, but when Vlad offers discussion (not even criticism!) they are like "oh no, I'm just a little nobody getting HARASSED by a powerful and might CEO". They can't take even the mildest disagreement, let alone criticism.

People need to stop posting this blog post as if it's something incriminating, or even negative. I'm sure if GDPR is violated, Kagi will sort it out with their lawyers, but as of now I don't see what exactly are we worrying about. For me it's neither GDPR nor Vlad's "appalling" behaviour and if it's neither, this whole blog is utterly useless

wfn2• 1 year ago

Well, re: GDPR, for one Vlad is abjectly clearly wrong on email addresses not being PII. They are.

The mere fact of him relying on his rationalisation (of burner email addresses) over established GDPR definitions of PII is troubling. To me it rings immature and unprofessional. As a software engineer I shall treat PII with care and account for it. If a CEO is this defensive about their clearly wrong opinion, it's a red flag to me.

eGP9jDq_nw• 1 year ago

does kagi censor offensive results?

gmiller123456• 1 year ago

Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.

It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.

I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.

icar• 1 year ago

Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad. Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.

thi22• 1 year ago

For german it works fine, how is duckduckgo doing with catalan?

niuzeta• 1 year ago

I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.

I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.

I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.

zenGull• 1 year ago

Fwiw, give a searxng instance a try.

temp0826• 1 year ago

Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)

dddw• 1 year ago

Nextdns price is really good. 20 bucks per year. One can only get so many 5 buck per month subscriptions, because eventually they compound and it becomes just too much. It is the reason I haven't done Kagi, but search is getting worse and worse nowadays, so I might just do it soon. I'm typing this because I like to see more 1 to 3 bucks a month typs of services.

praisewhitey• 1 year ago

I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th

It's the first result on Duckduckgo.

coldpie8• 1 year ago

It's the first result on Google for me, too.

Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.

dmje• 1 year ago

Of all the arguments, the “but it’s expensive” one is the one I really fail to parse. Search is probably the tool we all use day in and day out - it’s critical to everything we do both at work and at home. Paying for it is only a mind stretch because we’re so used to “free” but really, it’s nothing. Two coffees for a search that isn’t full of shit is an absolute no-brainer in my opinion.

speckx• 1 year ago

After using Kagi for two years now, I can't go back to Google or Bing. On principle, I pay for the Ultimate package because I desperately want there to be something besides Google and Bing.

dhc024• 1 year ago

That also is a factor in why I pay for more than I need. I want them to succeed.

superkuh• 1 year ago

I paid for 3 months. Kagi was okay, but it's not really a search engine like I use search engines. They only ever returned <200 results per search query. So you had to depend on their system to magically know what results you wanted out of everything in existence. There was no way to look through the actual search results returned deeply.

This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.

gpvos• 1 year ago

The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; [...]

If you want an official website, always follow the link to the Wikipedia article, and there click on the link to the official website.

Also, I find Duckduckgo a lot better than Google in general.

switch0073• 1 year ago

No thanks. I'm not sending money and traffic to Yandex. I'm going to give Qwant a go (French company, headquartered in Paris)

layoric• 1 year ago

Been using Kagi for about 18 months, and IMO well worth it. It does what is says on the tin, it's a search. You use it, it provides good results, and you're done. No fighting with ads, no making you automatically skipping the first few results because you know from experience they are promoted. You control what experience you want with specific domains. Privacy pass means you don't even have to be logged in.

One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.

api• 1 year ago

I've used Kagi for over a year. It's been months since I've used Google. Now I also use LLMs (both local and hosted) along with Kagi, and Google is obsolete for search.

Google's results are really awful, and it constantly nags me to install Chrome.

agentk9• 1 year ago

Being "apolitical" is no excuse for funding a russian company (yandex). If they did not do this I would probably be a paying customer. There is nothing else in this space that has the trust or features that kagi has.

The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).

Spivak2• 1 year ago

I would consider reading Vlad's response to this which is extremely measured and not at all "throwing his hands up" at the issue.

jwe4• 1 year ago

As somebody who is also not a Kagi customer because of this the statement of Vlad is exactly "throwing his hands up".

Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world."

All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.

switch0073• 1 year ago

Neither of you wish to link to what you're referencing?

LoganDark• 1 year ago

I love Kagi, but they seem extremely hobbled by Bing's terrible index. I occasionally have to switch to Google to find stuff and that makes me sad.

istillwritecode• 1 year ago

Nah. I don't do subscriptions for much of anything. I just do fewer searches now that I know google is so heavily slanted toward commercially relevant queries.

Kagi seems like an obvious acquisition target. They will never raise enough paying subscribers.

pensatoio• 1 year ago

I tried it a few months back, and it blew me away how much search could be improved. I am now a paying customer and extremely satisfied with the product.

shadowvoxing• 1 year ago

I use DDG daily and I'm happy with the results. In fact, I've become quite a fan of it lately. And with my ChatGPT sub, Kagi seems unnecessary.

pwn0• 1 year ago

Why would you use Kagi over something like SearxNG?

pzo• 1 year ago

With current geopolitical environment I would be more inclined to switch to Kagi if they move HQ to EU or Swiss.

roydivision• 1 year ago

I switched about two months ago, paid for a year. It's such a relief, it's like having search of ten years ago back again. It just works, and no useless crap. Options that make sense to ME, not to the profit line.

I'm now paying for:

- Search

- Email

- News

- Backups

Of course I'd rather not spend the money, but ALL these services are leagues ahead of the ad-supported alternatives. This is how the Internet should work.

(Edit - formatting)

martin82• 1 year ago

been using Kagi for a few years now. I'm happy. Whenever I have to use Google on a rare occasion I am shocked by just how filthy and useless it is.

Starter1437• 1 year ago

I've built something similar. I also added a way to use CLI-like features straight from the browser address bar.

Check it out: https://github.com/wajeht/bang

Try Switching to Kagi

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