Kagi Assistants

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-assistants

by ingve • 8 months ago

180 116 8 months ago

blog.kagi.com

jryio• 8 months ago

I think there's a very important nugget here unrelated to agents: Kagi as a search engine is a higher signal source of information than Google page rank and ad sense funded model. Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.

We found many, many examples of benchmark tasks where the same model using Kagi Search as a backend outperformed other search engines, simply because Kagi Search either returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher, or because the other results were not polluting the model’s context window with more irrelevant data.
This benchmark unwittingly showed us that Kagi Search is a better backend for LLM-based search than Google/Bing because we filter out the noise that confuses other models.

bitpush• 8 months ago

Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.

I'm not convinced about this. If the strategy is "lets return wikipedia.org as the most relevant result", that's not sophisticated at all. Infact, it only worked for a very narrow subset of queries. If I search for 'top luggages for solo travel', I dont want to see wikipedia and I dont know how kagi will be any better.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

(Kagi staff here)

Generally we do particularly better on product research queries [1] than other categories, because most poor review sites are full of trackers and other stuff we downrank.

However there aren't public benchmarks for us to brag about on product search, and frankly the simpleQA digression in this post made it long enough it was almost cut.

1. (Except hyper local search like local restaurants)

viraptor2• 8 months ago

The wrote "returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher" and not "wikipedia.org as the most relevant result" - that's an important distinction. There are many irrelevant Wikipedia pages.

clearleaf2• 8 months ago

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

Hey Google, Pinterest results are probably messing with AI crawlers pretty badly. I bet it would really help the AI if that site was deranked :)

Also if this really is the case, I wonder what an AI using Marginalia for reference would be like.

viraptor2• 8 months ago

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

It's likely they can filter the results for their own agents, but will leave other results as they are. Half the issue with normal results are their ads - that's not going away.

sroussey• 8 months ago

There are several startups providing web search solely for ai agents. Not sure any agent uses Google for this.

MangoToupe• 8 months ago

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

They spent the last decade and a half encouraging the proliferation of garbage via "SEO". I don't see this reversing.

idiotsecant• 8 months ago

Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.

Unlikely. There are very few people willing to pay for Kagi. The HN audience is not at all representative of the overall population.

Google can have really miserable search results and people will still use it. It's not enough to be as good as google, you have to be 30% better than google and still free in order to convert users.

I use Kagi and it's one of the few services I am OK with a reoccurring charge from because I trust the brand for whatever reason. Until they find a way to make it free, though, it can't replace google.

pixelready• 8 months ago

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger

Kagi works better and will continue to do so as long as Kagi’s interests are aligned with users’ needs and Google’s aren’t.

xigoi2• 8 months ago

Google wants there to be garbage in search results, because most of the garbage sites are full of Google ads.

solarkraft• 8 months ago

Makes me wish the Kagi API was available and not prohibitively priced: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html

daft_pink• 8 months ago

Not for nothing, but I wish there was an anonymized ai built into a kagi that was able to have normal conversation discussion about sexual topics or search for pornographic topics like a safe search off function.

I understand the safety needs around things LLM should not build nuclear weapons, but it would be nice to have a frontier model that could write or find porn.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

You'll want de-censored models like cydonia for that -- can be found on openrouter, or through something like msty

HotGarbage• 8 months ago

I really wish Kagi would focus on search and not waste time and money on slop.

0x1ch• 8 months ago

This is building on top of the existing core product, so the output is directly tied to the quality of their core search results being fed into the assistants. I overall really enjoy all of their A.I products, using their prompt assistant frequently for quick research tasks.

It does miss occasionally, or I feel like "that was a waste of tokens" due to a bad response or something, but overall I like supporting Kagi's current mission in the market of AI tools.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

It's not -- this was posted literally yesterday as a position statement on the matter (see early paragraphs in OP):

https://blog.kagi.com/llms

Kagi is treating LLMs as potentially useful tools to be used with their deficiencies in mind, and with respect of user choices.

Also, we're explicitly fighting against slop:

https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop

saghm3• 8 months ago

Is there anyone selling LLM tools that would claim they aren't keeping their deficiencies in mind or admit that they're ignoring user choices? I'm not saying you are or aren't wasting money on slop, because I have no way of knowing, but it's hard to imagine someone who is concerned about a company acting in bad finding this compelling.

drewda• 8 months ago

What they saying in this post is that they are designing these LLM-based features to support search.

The post describes how their use-case is finding high quality sources relevant to a query and providing summaries with references/links to the user (not generating long-form "research reports")

FWIW, this aligns with what I've found ChatGPT useful for: a better Google, rather than a robotic writer.

theoldgreybeard2• 8 months ago

I'm sure Google also says they built "AI mode" to "support search".

Their search is still trash.

barrell2• 8 months ago

If you look at my post history, I’m the last person to defend LLMs. That being said, I think LLMs are the next evolution in search. Not what OpenAI and Anthropic and xAI are working on - I think all the major models are moving further and further away from that with the “AI” stuff. But the core technology is an amazing way to search.

So I actually find it the perfect thing for Kagi to work with. If they can leverage LLMs to improve search, without getting distracted by the “AI” stuff, there’s tons of potential value,

Not saying that’s what this is… but if there’s any company I’d want playing with LLMs it’s probably Kagi

skydhash2• 8 months ago

A better search would be rich metadata and powerful filter tools, not result summarizer. When I search, I want to find stuff, I don’t want an interpretation of what was found.

bigstrat2003• 8 months ago

Same, though in fairness as long as they don't force it on me (the way Google does) and as long as the real search results don't suffer because of a lack of love (which so far they haven't), then it's no skin off my back. I think LLMs are an abysmal tool for finding information, but as long as the actual search feature is working well then I don't care if an LLM option exists.

itomato2• 8 months ago

I'm seeing a lot of investment in these things that have a short shelf life.

Agents/assistants but nothing more.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

We're building tools that we find useful, and we hope others find it too. See notes on our view of LLMs and their flaws:

https://blog.kagi.com/llms

ugurs• 8 months ago

Why do you think the shelf life is short?

itomato2• 8 months ago

The implementation technologies are shifting. Model access, training, fine-tuning, MCP, they change week-by-week along with the root need.

natemcintosh• 8 months ago

As a Kagi subscriber, I find this to be mostly useful. I'd say I do about 50% standard Kagi searches, 50% Kagi assistant searches/conversations. This new ability to change the level of "research" performed can be genuinely useful in certain contexts. That said, I probably expect to use this new "research assistant" once or twice a month.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

I'd say the most useful part for me is appending ? / !quick / !research directly from the browser search bar to a query

jen729w• 8 months ago

I love your `?` mechanic. Brilliantly simple. Thank you from a very happy customer.

tshaddox• 8 months ago

I have yet to understand when to use `?` versus `!quick`. The former is much less disruptive since it's very fast and displays an answer above the normal search results. And I haven't played with them enough to know what kinds of things `!quick` is meaningfully better at than `?`.

Do you have any pointers?

adriantoine2• 8 months ago

Same, I'm quite happy with it. I first subscribed because I was fed up with the promoted results in Google but now I find their assistant searches actually useful too.

milch3• 8 months ago

I've already used the Research assistant half a dozen times today and am super happy with the outcomes. It does seem to be more trigger happy with doing multiple searches based on information it found in earlier results, and I've found the resulting output to be reasonably accurate. Some models in particular seem to never want to do more than one search, and you can tell the output in those cases is often not very useful if the sources partially contradict each other or don't provide enough detail. The best I've found to avoid this is o3 pro, but o3 pro is very slow and expensive. If the Research assistant gets 85% of the results in half the time as o3 pro...

ceroxylon• 8 months ago

Kagi reminds me of the original search engines of yore, when I could type what I want and it would appear, and I could go on with my work/life.

As for the people who claim this will create/introduce slop, Kagi is one of the few platforms where they are actively fighting against low quality AI generated content with their community fueled "SlopStop" campaign.[0]

Not sponsored, just a fan. Looking forward to trying this out.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

iLoveOncall4• 8 months ago

The fact that people applaud Kagi taking the money they gave for search to invest it in bullshit AI products and spit on Google's AI search at the same time tells you everything you need to know about HackerNews.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

We're explicitly conscious of the bullshit problem in AI and we try to focus on only building tools we find useful. See position statement on the matter yesterday:

https://blog.kagi.com/llms

iLoveOncall4• 8 months ago

Your words don't match your actions.

And to be clear you shouldn't build the tools that YOU find useful, you should build the tools that your users, which pay for a specific product, find useful.

You could have LLMs that are actually 100% accurate in their answers that it would not matter at all to what I am raising here. People are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools, they're paying for search. If you think otherwise, prove it, make subscriptions entirely separate for both products.

grayhatter2• 8 months ago

LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful
Note: This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML

I appreciate the disclaimer, but never underestimate someone's inability to understand something, when their job depends on them not understanding it.

Bullshit isn't useful to me, I don't appreciate being lied to. You might find use in declaring the two different, but sufficiently advanced ignorance (or incompetence) is indistinguishable from actual malice, and thus they should be treated the same.

Your essay, while well written, doesn't do much to convince me any modern LLM has a net positive effect. If I have to duplicate all of it's research to verify none of it is bullshit, which will only be harder after using it given the anchoring and confirmation bias it will introduce... why?

w10-1• 8 months ago

Do you have any evidence that the AI efforts are not being funded by the AI product, Kagi Assistant? I would expect the reverse: the high-margin AI products are likely cross-subsidizing the low-margin search products and their sliver of AI support.

stefan_• 8 months ago

High-margin AI products? Yes the world is just filled with those!

data-ottawa• 8 months ago

Search is AI now, so I don’t get what your argument is.

Since 2019 Google and Bing both use BERT style encoder-only search architecture.

I’ve been using Kagi ki (now research assistant) for months and it is a fantastic product that genuinely improves the search experience.

So overall I’m quite happy they made these investments. When you look at Google and Perplexity this is largely the direction the industry is going.

They’re building tools on other LLMs and basically running open router or something behind the scenes. They even show you your token use/cost against your allowance/budget in the billing page so you know what you’re paying for. They’re not training their own from-scratch LLMs, which I would consider a waste of money at their size/scale.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

We're not running on openrouter, that would break the privacy policy.

We get specific deals with providers and use different ones for production models.

We do train smaller scale stuff like query classification models (not trained on user queries, since I don't even have access to them!) but that's expected and trivially cheap.

bananapub• 8 months ago

regular reminder: kagi is - above all else - a really really good search engine, and if google/etc, or even just the increasingly horrific ads-ocracy make you sad, you should definitely give it a go - the trial is here: https://kagi.com/pricing

if you like it, it's only $10/month, which I regrettably spend on coffee some days.

skydhash2• 8 months ago

I now that the price haven’t changed for a while, but I would pay for unlimited search and no AI.

Dusseldorf2• 8 months ago

Well, good news. Unlimited search was $10 before. Then they added the AI access for free but, and this part is key, did not make any requirement that you have to use it.

iLoveOncall4• 8 months ago

above all else

What they've been building for the past couple of years makes it blindingly clear that they are definitely not a search engine *above all else*.

Don't believe me? Check their CEO's goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45998846

debo_• 8 months ago

I think you have a problem.

AuthAuth2• 8 months ago

Kagi is already expensive for a search engine. Now I know part of my subscription is going towards funding AI bullshit. And I know the cost of that AI bullshit will get jacked up in price and force Kagi sub price up as well. I'm so tired of AI being forced into everything.

progval• 8 months ago

These are only available on the Ultimate tier. If (like me) you don't care about the LLMs then there is no reason to be on the Ultimate tier so you don't pay for it.

johnnyanmac2• 8 months ago

expensive for a search engine.

As in, not "free"?

Either way, I guess we'll see how this affects the service.

AuthAuth2• 8 months ago

This is $10 USD a month to have a search engine. $5 is a more reasonable price but 300 searches is far to little to be useful. Converted to my currency this is over 2 hours of wages for a search engine.

ranyume2• 8 months ago

I used quick research and it was pretty cool. A couple of caveats to keep in mind:

1. It answers using only the crawled sites. You can't make it crawl a new page. 2. It doesn't use a page' search function automatically.

This is expected, but doesn't hurt to take that in mind. I think i'd be pretty useful. You ask for recent papers on a site and the engine could use hackernews' search function, then kagi would crawl the page.

Rehanzo4• 8 months ago

What exactly do you mean by "You can't make it crawl a new page"? It has the ability to read webpages, if that is what you're referring to

moebrowne2• 8 months ago

Yup, pasting in a URL will cause it to fetch the page.

ranyume2• 8 months ago

This query's results are wrong:

"""

site:https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... recent developments in ai?

"""

Also when testing, if you know a piece of information exists in a website, but the information doesn't show up when you run the query, you don't have the tools to steer the engine to work more effectively. In a real scenario you don't know what the engine missed but it'd be cool to steer the engine in different ways to see how that changes the end result. For example, if you're planning a trip to japan, maybe you want the AI to only be shown a certain percentage of categories (nature, night life, or places too), alongside controlling how much you want to spend time crawling, maybe finding more niche information or more related information.

everlier2• 8 months ago

Their agents can natively read files and webpages from URLs. It's so convenient, I've implemented identical feature for our product at work.

smallerfish• 8 months ago

I tried a prompt that consistently gets Gemini to badly hallucinate, and it responded correctly.

Prompt: "At a recent SINAC conference (approx Sept 2025) the presenters spoke about SINAC being underresourced and in crisis, and suggested better leveraging of and coordination with NGOs. Find the minutes of the conference, and who was advocating for better NGO interaction."

The conference was actually in Oct 2024. The approx date in parens causes Gemini to create an entirely false narrative, which includes real people quoted out of context. This happens in both Gemini regular chat and Gemini Deep Research (in which the narrative gets badly out of control).

Kagi reasonably enough answers: "I cannot find the minutes of a SINAC conference from approximately September 2025, nor any specific information about presenters advocating for better NGO coordination at such an event."

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

Ah yes we have some benchmarks on this sort of misguided prompt trap, so it should perform well on this

adriantoine2• 8 months ago

I also tried two hallucinations that I've seen in the latest Gemini and Claude. The first one is the famous "how many r in strawberry" and another one is asking about king sacrifice in chess where most LLMs tell you it's a very powerful move and tell you how to do it (obviously a nonsense since the point of the game is to protect the king).

Kagi actually got those two correct, explaining how losing your king means losing your chess game, which is quite impressive.

sometimes_all2• 8 months ago

I tried both these prompts (along with the SINAC one as per GP) in Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3, and they both answered correctly for all three. Both also provided context on the chess question as well.

sometimes_all2• 8 months ago

You might be interested to know your comment caused Gemini 3 to go meta on this question. This is what I found in its thinking:

``` Evaluating Date Discrepancies

I've just uncovered a significant discrepancy: a "Hacker News" result flags a date error originating from the very format of parenthetical dates. The system appears to be misinterpreting these, leading to demonstrably false information. This warrants further investigation to understand the root cause and ensure data integrity.

Analyzing Date Ambiguity

I'm now grappling with the user's date. The Hacker News comment suggests the user's prompt might be flawed, as it contradicts the actual date of an event I've indexed. Specifically, the conference referenced occurred in October 2024, not September 2025 as the prompt implies. This leads me to question the user's understanding of the timeline or if the prompt refers to an unrelated event in September 2025. This inconsistency demands further clarification.

...

Investigating User Prompt Intent

I've just realized that the Hacker News snippet reveals this might be a specific problematic test prompt. My strategy is to focus on the October 2024 forum, a strong match, organized by Kattia Cambronero and CCT. I'll verify if there was a 2025 event, but the 2024 event fits the described "crisis" and "NGO coordination". If the user says "approx Sept 2025," they likely mean a recent event. ```

hatthew2• 8 months ago

I'm a little confused about what the point of these are compared to the existing features/models that kagi already has. Are they just supposed to be a one-stop shop where I don't have to choose which model to use? When should I use kagi quick/research assistant instead of, e.g. kimi?

I tried the quick assistant a bit (don't have ultimate so I can't try research), and while the writing style seems slightly different, I don't see much difference in information compared to using existing models through the general kagi assistant interface.

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

Quick assistant is a managed experience, so we can add features to it in a controlled way we can't for all the models we otherwise support at once.

For now Quick assistant has a "fast path" answer for simple queries. We can't support the upgrades we want to add in there on all the models because they differ in tool calling, citation reliability, context window, ability to not hallucinate, etc.

The responding model is currently qwen3-235B from cerebras but we want to decouple the user expectations from that so we can upgrade it down the road to something else. We like Kimi, but couldn't get a stable experience for Quick on it at launch with current providers (tool calling unreliability)

hatthew2• 8 months ago

That makes sense, thanks!

paradox460• 8 months ago

One thing I've wished for is the ability to use my kagi AI features in my editor (currently Zed)

Rehanzo4• 8 months ago

We've got an assistant API coming soon™

teecha4• 8 months ago

Could Kagi Ultimate be a good replacement for ChatGPT? A subscription there would save me some money if it was similar.

Just recently started paying for Kagi search and quite love it.

everlier2• 8 months ago

Mostly depends on which features are most important for you. I'm a SWE, so using their Assistant for Web RAG nearly exclusively for work-related stuff and for most of my personal queries. I'm rarely using multi-modal content, mostly sticking to text. They support many providers and new notable models are typically rolled out only a few days after release which is always great to test out. I have a standalone subscription for coding agent LLM. If above aligns - might be a good choice.

teecha4• 8 months ago

I do a lot of help with spreadsheets and some ongoing threads in ChatGPT.

I’m an Assistant Principal so use it to help me get better with spreadsheets, churn through complex formulas, and some other miscellaneous tasks for feedback and assistance. Definitely use a lot of screenshots of things to also help consume info in there.

I think I might be stuck with both for a while as I’m not sure Kagi can quite fill this gap yet.

coffeefirst• 8 months ago

That’s what I did and I’m pretty happy with it. I just fall back to something free on the rare occasion I want an image generated (tbh, mostly emojis of my dog).

Atotalnoob• 8 months ago

Mostly, yes.

You have a spend limit, but the assistant has dozens of of models

aitchnyu• 8 months ago

I use regular Kagi assistant for most of my questions. I use Openrouter chat to chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT 5 at the same time and continue only the productive conversation. My OR account is for my coding agent and its completely pay as you go, no fixed monthly costs.

teecha4• 8 months ago

I’ve stuck with chatgpt and do dump screenshots, spreadsheets, etc. in there with some regularity. Screenshots are mostly for convenience and spreadsheets when I’m still stuck on something. Didn’t even think about loading in different things. I can see potential for this in the future but I’ve been with ChatGPT for so long exactly because it does so well with accepting files to work with.

goobatrooba• 8 months ago

Do you use it regularly (20 min a day or so)? If so, how is your monthly consumption - does it beat the subscription costs for either service?

nsonha2• 8 months ago

I use perplexity a lot and pretty much exclusively with "deep research" on. Is this on the same level? Because Perplexity often take more than a minute, and this is only 20 secs.

milch3• 8 months ago

A query I ran earlier ran for about 70s, and did 12 web searches and 2 site fetches.

Havoc3• 8 months ago

An employee above said they’re using cerebas so time may not be a good measure of thinking effort here

Rehanzo4• 8 months ago

For most queries it is around the same level. Time spent isn't always the best tell of quality, particularly when the search engine used returns little noise

nsonha2• 8 months ago

I don't think the reasoning level is what makes it for me. I am treating this as a search engine. I want the thing to fetch/read from index as many pages as possible. Either that or as many agentic tool calls as needed. That takes time.

spott2• 8 months ago

I want a kagi mcp server I can use with ChatGPT or Claude.

I don’t want to use kagi ultimate (I use too many other features of ChatGPT and Claude), I just want to be able to improve the results of my AI models with kagi.

moebrowne2• 8 months ago

I believe this is what you're after: https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

VHRanger16• 8 months ago

What ChatGPT / Claude features do you use that we don't support?

We have an MCP server I can give you access to for search immediately. Down the line a search API and chat completions API to our assistant in the pipeline.

spott2• 8 months ago

Codex/claude code are the big ones.

Scheduled agents in ChatGPT.

I’ve been using the study mode recently, and that is nice to have.

Havoc3• 8 months ago

Easier access to search api in general would be awesome. If I’m paying someone for search it may as well be kagi

DontForgetMe• 8 months ago

Awesome, a search engine with an LLM / AI!

I hadn't been sure about Kagi before, but this has really swung it for me, I'm off to sign up post haste. It's a revolutionary move that really shows how fast ahead of the competition Kagi is, how dexterous their fingers at the pulse of humanity, how bold.

bryanhogan• 8 months ago

I really enjoy the tone/style of this announcement/blog post. It doesn't feel like it's overhyping something or using "salesy" language. I wish we would see this more often from companies.

Computer02• 8 months ago

I'm struggling to find a usecase for the quick assistant vs Kimi K2. Does anyone know any particular situations where the Assisstant is better than the model? I am not seeing how it is different than a model. Only speaking in regards to quick.

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