Back to Kagi

https://blog.melashri.net/micro/back-to-kagi/

by speckx • 10 hours ago

170 144 10 hours ago

blog.melashri.net

nemomarx• 10 hours ago

How'd you solve the Arabic issue?

(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)

Leptonmaniac• 9 hours ago

In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel

throw-qqqqq• 9 hours ago

but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel

Pardon?

elashri• 8 hours ago

Author here (I didn't submit the post though)

Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.

Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)

Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.

hyperionultra2• 9 hours ago

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

imzadi2• 9 hours ago

LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

fassssst• 9 hours ago

Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.

hs86• 8 hours ago

Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.

hyperionultra2• 8 hours ago

Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.

JohnFen3• 9 hours ago

With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.

liotier• 9 hours ago

They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.

I think the market segmentation is:

- Seeking documents: search engine

- Seeking answers: LLM

circularfoyers• 9 hours ago

Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.

mathw2• 9 hours ago

Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.

root_axis• 9 hours ago

LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.

kstrauser• 9 hours ago

Yes, for me.

Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”

Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.

Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”

Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.

And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.

cavoirom5• 8 hours ago

FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.

mark_something2• 8 hours ago

Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.

I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.

eipi10_hn2• 7 hours ago

You can do that with Kagi. Just put `?` at the end of the search and it will give you an answer.

bigstrat2003• 8 hours ago

Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).

mrsssnake• 2 hours ago

Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.

athenot• 9 hours ago

Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.

gaws• 6 hours ago

Why not use another browser?

poetril• 9 hours ago

I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.

giancarlostoro• 9 hours ago

I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.

recursive• 8 hours ago

I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.

northhex• 37 minutes ago

Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.

LoganDark• 9 hours ago

I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.

I might try it again sometime.

Shadowmist• 9 hours ago

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

dexterdog2• 9 hours ago

I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.

rpdillon2• 9 hours ago

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

CharlesW• 9 hours ago

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

thinkingtoilet• 9 hours ago

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

HelloUsername• 9 hours ago

html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript

starvar2• 9 hours ago

Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?

Schnouki• 9 hours ago

Using it in France: yes, it does.

optionalsquid3• 9 hours ago

It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs

brodo2• 9 hours ago

It works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.

menno-sh2• 9 hours ago

I find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's

fabioborellini• 8 hours ago

Finland: no

imzadi2• 9 hours ago

I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.

theusus• 9 hours ago

Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes

Varelion• 9 hours ago

I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.

Gualdrapo• 9 hours ago

Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.

The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.

levkk• 9 hours ago

Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.

For a price of two cups of coffee.

moebrowne3• 9 hours ago

AI slop is actively down-ranked based on community feedback: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

Diti• 6 hours ago

I extensively report obvious slop websites. Most of them get rejected/marked as “not AI”. That initiative is cute on paper, but they apparently do not trust the community.

o_m• 9 hours ago

I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.

optionalsquid3• 9 hours ago

Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use

dmrivers• 9 hours ago

I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere

vivzkestrel3• 9 hours ago

imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing

menno-sh2• 9 hours ago

I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.

Larrikin• 8 hours ago

What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?

Henchman213• 7 hours ago

All my hopes lay with Ladybird now

sanderjd6• 9 hours ago

But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.

calessian• 8 hours ago

Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.

Arkhaine_kupo2• 8 hours ago

The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures.

But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.

The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.

A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.

It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)

cyanydeez• 8 hours ago

kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.

of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content

ndiddy• 7 hours ago

The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.

amazingamazing• 9 hours ago

I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.

brodo2• 9 hours ago

It’s enough to add a `?` to any Kagi query to get an AI answer. I like that I can choose for which queries I use AI and for which traditional web search.

cavoirom5• 8 hours ago

Kagi has Assistant that is exactly AI search.

everfrustrated2• 9 hours ago

I feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search.

But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.

I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.

I wish them the best but timing is a b**.

cavoirom5• 9 hours ago

Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.

moebrowne3• 9 hours ago

Kagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust

mihaaly2• 9 hours ago

I think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)

rsolva• 8 hours ago

I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!

OleksandrC• 8 hours ago

This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).

johen8• 9 hours ago

What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those

Cider9986• 9 hours ago

Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.

samuell• 8 hours ago

I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.

prh8• 8 hours ago

Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html

MattTheRealOne• 5 hours ago

Same. I have been using Brave Search since its launch and it has been great in my experience. I also love that it has its own index. I have tried the free Kagi trial and it seems to work well, but I can't justify the cost for little to no benefit and it still depends on bigger search engines for indexing.

joshstrange2• 9 hours ago

I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".

I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.

dschroer• 9 hours ago

I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.

https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp

joshstrange2• 9 hours ago

Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).

The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.

mathw2• 9 hours ago

You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.

hbn• 8 hours ago

Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.

I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."

cavoirom5• 9 hours ago

On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.

eloisius2• 9 hours ago

I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.

selfawareMammal• 9 hours ago

How about Kagi using YANDEX?

SadTrombone• 9 hours ago

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

haburka• 9 hours ago

I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough

neysofu• 9 hours ago

Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:

Jul 2026 939

Jun 2026 1,317

May 2026 1,924

Apr 2026 2,537

Mar 2026 2,183

Feb 2026 2,038

Jan 2026 2,392

freehorse• 9 hours ago

It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.

Novosell• 9 hours ago

I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.

Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O

But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.

tombert• 9 hours ago

$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.

JohnFen3• 9 hours ago

I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.

mihaaly2• 9 hours ago

That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.

Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.

temp0826• 8 hours ago

If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.

2019842• 8 hours ago

Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.

Gud2• 6 hours ago

All of your examples are things many people are no longer doing because they can't afford them.

j1elo• 4 hours ago

So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?

In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:

* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.

* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)

* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)

* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.

ycombinator_acc• 2 hours ago

People not from North America and Western Europe exist.

armoredkitten• 6 hours ago

I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.

flakiness• 42 minutes ago

This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.

1970-01-01• 9 hours ago

I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.

drcongo• 9 hours ago

Kagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.

browningstreet• 9 hours ago

Kagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results

coldpie2• 9 hours ago

I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.

taude• 9 hours ago

Also, Google isn't scraping your data....

Forgeties792• 9 hours ago

Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?

Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.

You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.

coldpie2• 8 hours ago

I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.

moebrowne3• 9 hours ago

It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same

For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.

cavoirom5• 8 hours ago

I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:

- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...

Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.

the_lucifer2• 8 hours ago

It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling

I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.

I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.

URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.

Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.

This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.

mackeye• 7 hours ago

i love that geeksforgeeks is the website everyone mentions wanting to block :D

TiredOfLife• 7 hours ago

They are much better than DDG or Google in financing russian invasion into Ukraine

shibaprasadb• 9 hours ago

I was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!

mancerayder• 8 hours ago

I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.

Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?

That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.

maelito• 8 hours ago

I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.

The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.

This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.

I wonder if Kagi's using it.

Edit : thanks, corrected the URL

real_joschi• 8 hours ago

Correct URL is https://staan.ai/

alexruf• 4 hours ago

There's little to add to that. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi. I can understand if people simply don't want to or can't shell out $5 a month, but if someone is able to, those are probably the best $5 anyone who does a lot of internet research and uses AI can possibly invest.

Back to Kagi

Related Stories