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Kagi Search API
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- techn00 2y ago> This is currently $19/mo plus search API cost (2.5c per search). Please reach out to support@kagi.com for invite. Isn't 2.5c per search kind of expensive? serp api is 1 cent for the $150/month = 15k searches plan
- llm_trw 2y agoYes, prohibitively.
- nielsole 2y agoSerp doesn't pay for any of the search infrastructure. So it's an unfair comparison
- ziddoap 2y agoFrom a customer perspective, it's completely fair to compare prices.
- bambax 2y agoIt's completely fair to compare prices when you're on the buying side. It's also strongly recommended when you're on the selling side, as you should be prepared to explain what added value justifies that your product is so much more expensive.
- echoangle 2y agoWhy would I care about that as a customer though? If I compare options, I look at price and performance. If one is making it harder for themselves without any added value for me, why would I pay more money for that?
- xnorswap 2y agoIt does seem expensive, but if it wasn't, then there'd be more temptation to simply white-label Kagi via it's own API while undercutting Kagi's own plans.
- dotancohen 2y agoThat's actually not so bad. That company reselling Kagi search is also replacing e.g. Kagi support, so there is less pressure on Kagi staff. And honestly, anything that gets more people into the idea of using not-Google for searching is good for Kagi - even if it is to an ostensibly competitor.
- cube2222 2y agoIsn't Serp using public Google search for free and effectively selling you "we will bypass the captchas that will inevitably come up"? Kind of doesn't make sense to compare to them.
- Kiro 2y agoHow is Serp not sued to oblivion?
- crowcroft 2y agoI suspect that Google finds value in the role they play in the market. There is demand for search APIs, and companies like Kagi can build a business around that, grow and then compete more generally with Google over time. Serp makes that difficult. For competitive reasons Google might not want to sell a search API directly (they might indirectly fuel a lot of competition against their main ad supported product). So letting Serp offer this service in a bit of a gray area makes it hard for competitors to form a beach head in search, while giving Google legal flexibility to shut down any service that tries to compete with them in any way through Serp's data.
- kingstoned 2y agoSued for what? For scraping a website? That is Google's main business.
- dooglius 2y agohttps://serpapi.com/blog/scraping-public-pages-legality/ https://serpapi.com/blog/scraping-public-pages-legality/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LorenDB 2y agoBrave is even cheaper, at 0.3 cents/request with a monthly limit of 20M searches (for the base plan).
- yawnxyz 2y agonever used Brave or Kagi, but comparing their search results, Kagi seems way more on-point in the first 10 results
- marginalia_nu 2y agoGiven the economics involved (likely a fixed cost per query), I think it makes business sense to try to get few customers to pay a lot to get a lot, much more so than having many customers that pay a little and get results on par Google's free offering. High end "boutique" search offering a refined search experience (at high computational cost) is a niche Google search can't compete with, since they're offering their search for free, and they'd take massive losses if they drastically increased the amount of compute per query.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago[flagged]
- michaelmcdonald 2y agoI can only assume that a number of factors play into the ranking. Probably aspects you can't see (how many people followed through to the link at Kagi.com? How many people loaded up the comments for the submission?). Upvotes and comments are almost certainly not the only factors in ranking on HN.
- ale42 2y ago> how many people followed through to the link at Kagi.com AFAIK HN does not track link clicks.
- devjab 2y agoIt’s a mix of time on HN and points. Which means articles which are of interest to the people here make it up rather fast. There isn’t really anything secret to HN. It’s not unbiased, but it’s easy to see which posts are “sponsored” as in the case of job postings. Obviously Kagi will rank well since it’s very popular with HN, but any “startup” tech company which has new features will typically rank high here.
- cyberlimerence 2y agoI'm pretty sure it is just ratio of points/time which matters. Number of comments has negative influence on rankings if number of comments >>> points. Sometimes truth is just boring.
- input_sh 2y agoKagi has under 35k paying members, about half of which are on HN. I wouldn't say it's either of the two, but more that the Venn diagram of people willing to pay for search and HN users looks like a Mastercard logo.
- cyberlurker 2y agoI pay for Kagi monthly and enjoy using it. But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries
- diggan 2y ago> But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries Depends for what use case. For traditional everyday queries, it does sound expensive indeed, if you're not recovering any of the spend from whatever you use the API for.
- singularity2001 2y agoridiculously expensive. yep. starter pack: 300 searches per month $5/mo
- permo-w 2y agoPerhaps this is just me, but in general I feel like Kagi is holding itself back with its pricing structure. 300 searches a month is not enough for me, and $10/month is too expensive for something I can get 75% of the value of for free elsewhere. I would have adopted it a long time ago if it were $5 a month, or you could pay per search.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI suppose they are choosing the customers they want and aren't growth focused. I wondered if they had any venture capital in them and was surprised to find they have a kind of community funding model where their investors are their users [0]. It's almost positioned as a luxury good, doesn't have to be better, it just captures the market that /wants/ to spend $10 a month on a search engine with the idea that they're funding a French atelier of bespoke software (and I say that as a subscriber :^) [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/ https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/
- permo-w 2y agoseems somewhat reasonable, if frustrating. I wish there was a mid-ground between this model and the ad-exploitation bonanza that every other search is based on
- cube2222 2y agoThis is nice! If I understand this part correctly > We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period. eventually this will be usable (for the 2.5c per search) for any member, without the added 19$ per month (just your standard sub cost). I expect this will come in handy as a tool for AI assistant apps. Anyway, happy Kagi user for around 2 years now, recommend it very much!
- diggan 2y ago> > We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period. Could someone with knowledge possibly give some hints of when the beta period is over?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SushiHippie 2y ago(Kagi User since two years) The assistant beta was ~1 year in beta. Assistant had many bugs in the early stages, but it's different kind of beast than Search API (more things that can go wrong). With Search API it's probably "only" billing/UI bugs which they want to catch in the beta and maybe some problems with the search results from the API endpoint Though in this case I'd say a few weeks, maybe 2 months. (They keep things in beta longer than it needs to be, to be completely sure nothing goes haywire especially if it's billing related like the pay per use API endpoint).
- diggan 2y ago> Though in this case I'd say a few weeks, maybe 2 months. Assuming this page was launched today, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. But this page has said that for as long as I've been a Kagi member (at least a year now I think), so that estimate seems pretty far of :) Was more looking for someone with inside knowledge who might be able to give some sort of indication for when this becomes available to us "normal" users :) Edit: Thanks to Internet Archive, here is that page in 2024-02-08: https://web.archive.org/web/20240208023510/https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240208023510/https://help.kagi... > We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period.
- Etheryte 2y agoWhile simple APIs can be nice, I can't help but feel that this is too simplistic. It's paid per request and there's no pagination, does that mean I'm incentivized to just use whatever the largest possible value is for the limit parameter? As is, this feels half baked.
- prophesi 2y agoIt also simply takes the settings from your account for its search results. I hope when it's out of closed beta that there will be a lot more flexibility to it. Though if it will truly be available to any member, creating an account specifically for your bot doesn't sound too terrible.
- djbusby 2y agoClosed Beta, of course it's simple and missing features users might expect.
- Havoc 2y agoThat pricing might work for direct human use but just too expensive for automation and agents.
- colesantiago 2y agoI know almost nobody in the real world that pays for Kagi, but the search API may have some business use case perhaps.
- BadHumans 2y agoI want to use Kagi but the internet has given me such trust issues that creating an account with a service that can log and tie all my search history back to a personal account or credit card is such a high wall for me to mentally overcome but I'm glad Kagi is expanding their offerings. I truly hope they succeed.
- contagiousflow 2y agoCan I ask what search engine you use then?
- BadHumans 2y agoMost of them. Duckduckgo, Startpage, Google, Mojeek, a few others. Depends on what I need at the time.
- axegon_ 2y ago[flagged]
- gurgunday 2y agoI wonder how it compares to Brave Search API: https://brave.com/search/api/ https://brave.com/search/api/ Brave has complete search independence and has been doing this for a while, but I hear Kagi has great results, but at the same time I'm perfectly happy with Brave Would be cool to hear from people who've tried both
- ricardo81 2y agoThey claim independence but they still don't have a user agent that has been seen in server logs. Last time I looked they use a browser user agent and follow Googlebot rules in robots.txt. Which is understandable because some webmasters use a whitelist approach to bots given how many there are, and you wouldn't want your search quality to hurt because e.g. Facebook blocks you. And a lot of their results correlate with Google's based on their historical Cliqz data. Not that I'm against Brave in any way, I think any alternative to Google's dominance is healthy. It just seems the touting of privacy, independence etc from alt search engines often has very loose meanings on those words, or sometimes comes across as god of the gaps platitudes.
- thesuitonym 2y agoBrave browser is adware, and I have no reason to believe their search is different. Kagi at least purports to not be.
- rsanek 2y agointeresting to see the Kagi logo on the linked Brave page
- thesuitonym 2y agoNot really, Kagi talks about how they use Brave here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html#kagi-vs-brave-search https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...
- dns_snek 2y agoAbout a year ago when I last tried Brave Search the quality of their results was often poor compared to Google, Bing, and Kagi, however their effort is appreciated and I hope that they continue improving.
- lr0 2y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833833 I've been considering Kagi a lot, but I find it sorta expensive (especially if compared to 'free') at least in my region. I learnt that they were discussing regional pricing[1], like the one in Netflix and other services. [1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing
- cube2222 2y agoFrankly, reading through that discussion, it doesn't seem like it's actually being seriously considered by them. It's just being advocated for by some users with them explaining why it's not really realistic to introduce.
- iambateman 2y agoFor reference, the biggest competitor is Brave, which costs 5 times less ($5/1000 compared to $25/1000). Can anyone from Kagi help us understand the reason for the difference? All things equal, I’d love to use Kagi but I can’t tell my client that their search costs went up by 500% for no reason.
- dotinvoke 2y agoBrave does not permit you to store search results unless you opt for the $26/mo plan. I emailed them about it and that policy applies to storing any data derived from search results as well.
- sam0x17 2y agoKagi pays market price to the upstream search providers (unless something has changed since I wrote much of their initial backend circa ~2019). Bigger players like Brave are likely able to broker a pricing deal with search providers that is better than the market API price. I was very adamant early on that they should be investing in developing their own indexing infrastructure so they can have true independence, but this has never been part of the vision as far as I can tell.
- bilekas 2y agoSomeone here convinced me to try Kagi. It's top, 10/10. Good to have good results again.
- kstrauser 2y agoLikewise. It’s a wonderful QoL improvement for a few bucks a month. I’ve been using it for about a year and Google makes me wince now, in much the same way as using a browser without an ad blocker. Plenty of people do that every day just fine, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
- bookofjoe 2y agoHow is it that Kagi and Brave seem to have working micropayment systems but such are not implemented everywhere on the web so everyone who provides value can receive compensation?
- evanjrowley 2y agoSince I last checked, the API is still in beta. One major difference is that it's open to business clients, where before, it was invite only. I wonder what it would take to use Kagi together with something like SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
- manbitesdog 2y agoHas anyone tried its suggestion API? I've been looking for a web search suggestion API that is free on a low quota for a long time
- alexvitkov 2y agoThe price here is absurd - scraping unnamed big tech search engines costs $0.00, with the caveat of a slightly higher barrier of entry.
- ColinHayhurst 2y agoWho said they are scraping? I can confirm they are certainly paying for the Mojeek API https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
- alexvitkov 2y agoI didn't say they are scraping. What I meant is that YOU should, if you're considering this at any serious scale.
- ColinHayhurst 2y agoIndeed you didn't; apologies.
- bambax 2y agoNobody said Kagi is scraping. The OP said scraping was free, and therefore, paying 2.5c per search is absurd.
- ukuina 2y agoInteresting, why should people pay for the Kagi API ($0.025/search) instead of using Mojeek's API ($0.001/search) directly?
- simonw 2y agoAny information about the licensing terms of data that comes back from the search API? A lot of APIs like this have serious restrictions on what you can do with the returned data, such as not being able to store it. This can greatly limit potential applications for anything beyond just "show some search results to a user".
- ColinHayhurst 2y agoStorage is an option here: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
- tempworkac 2y agolaughably overpriced. if it were any other company this wouldn't be #1 at time of writing. brave, bing and google are an order of magnitude cheaper. and honestly the quality between all of these search engines are basically the same.
- dotinvoke 2y agoWhat is your preferred alternative?
- tempworkac 2y agobing, which is the cheapest AFAIK
- dotinvoke 2y agoI’ll admit that I struggle to read their Byzantine pricing tables but that is $15 per 1k searches, right?
- N-Krause 2y agoWrote a simple typescript client [1] for the whole api (not just search), a while back. Used it to write a simple plugin for Obsidian, to send a selection to the fastGPT of Kagi. [1] https://github.com/NilsKrause/kagi-api-client https://github.com/NilsKrause/kagi-api-client
- sricks3 2y agoThis is really cool. It's little things like this that keep me coming back to HN. I can't justify the cost of Kagi yet based on my current use, but I'm glad that people are out there building things like this. Thanks for your contribution and for making Obsidian and Kagi that much better!
- N-Krause 2y agoThanks, glad to hear. Hope it's also useful for someone else.
- voodooEntity 2y agoLooking at the pricing i dont see really why anyone would use this api. 2,5cent on first look dont seem to be "much" when thinking of the normal by hand usage of a search engine - but in terms of atomated usage (which is the idea for an API right? why else should i use an api...) this will ramp up very quickly to be very expensive. Apart from that, while i don't like google for all the reasons we all know - still their support of search operators and the results based on them is a magnitude better than all other search engines i tried so far. And yes my daily driver is duckduckgo atm, tho sometimes i still fall back to google if duckduckgo doesn't deliver and sadly have to admit that google often results in better results than the others... sad but true.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoKagi is streets ahead of DDG
- dingnuts 2y ago> sometimes i still fall back to google I gave a Kagi trial with limited searches to a friend and they reported using Kagi when Google failed. Yeah. It's that much better than Google. Which is better than DDG. Time is money, and I have $10/mo to save so much time. Really it's about incentives. The other engines want me to see what the advertisers want me to see. Kagi's customer is me; they'll show me what I want to see.
- voodooEntity 2y agoOk, so i just created a test account on Kagi to see if you are right. As i mentioned in my post, something i personally really value is search operators. So i did a direct comparsion on Kagi to google with a simple dork (its not like this would be my daily search but its a simple example for the usage of search operators and i just had no better idea *shrug) intitle:"Index of" intext:2024 intext:backup Old and simple directory indexing dork for backup files/directories. Kagi returns me 13 Results. Google Returns me 108 Results. The quality of the results is quite similar. So i can't tell on other searches using operators, and since my kagi kontigent for my free account is 100 searches i will think about some better search terms and try it again tomorrow. But on first sight, i can't approve the Kagi > Google statement.
- lopkeny12ko 2y ago> This is currently $19/mo plus search API cost (2.5c per search). This is ludicrously expensive. Who is their target customer base for this product?
- manishsharan 2y agoOn a related topic, I tried to use Selenium with Chrome with Google search. My idea was to find the result , read the search result web pages and feed it to an LLM and have it summarize the information. Somehow Google detected it was a bot and my script crashed. Has anyone done something similar?
- yawniek 2y agoi switched fulltime to kagi, it gives me mostly better results than google and bing. its possibly quite a clever strategy to have a high price, essentially the tesla playbook: get a good standing with HNW people and provide an awesome product, meanwhile the incumbents laugh at it because its not scalable and has no significant growth. But also they do not shoot it down. Once its big enough and economies of scale kick in, then the price is lowered or the market pays that price.
- daft_pink 2y agoi’m hoping the price comes down. i’m a premium kagi user, but I think it would be interesting to get my results via api
- freediver 2y agoKagi founder here. Kagi Search API is not officialy launched. We have a small, invite-only beta atm while we are working on it. We expect it to launch in about 2 months.
- dcchambers 2y agoI love that they're making an API available but I struggle to understand why there is an extra cost for it. Shouldn't that just be considered part of my regular search usage that I am already paying for? I understand paying extra for the LLM API but this confuses me.
- freediver 2y agoRegular search usage can not be automated to millions of requests, API can.
- dcchambers 2y agoWould be trivial to implement API limits to prevent that. As a personal Kagi user I would love to be able to experiment with the API but I'm not gonna pay for it. But I guess since this is only available at their business tier I'm not the target user anyway.
- freediver 2y agoOr you can just acknowledge that API is designed for a different use case and not have any limits in place.
- chrsgrrtt 2y ago2.5c per search seems prohibitively high