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How I Use Kagi
- Chief_Searcha 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PokemonNoGo 1y agoDo they still use Yandex? >I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023 I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.
- ajdude 1y agoDo you have any links / sources for this?
- bangaladore 1y agoI think they are referring to this changelog item: > Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to. https://kagi.com/changelog#5340 https://kagi.com/changelog#5340
- jwr 1y agoThey were asked to stop and refused: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
- junon 1y agoThey have search results from Yandex among others, yes, and Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore.
- jwr 1y agoSee for example https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/the-sad-fate-of-yandex-from-independent-tech-startup-to-kremlin-propaganda-tool https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
- haiku2077 1y ago> Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
- threetonesun 1y agoYou're gonna have a hard time using anything right now if you want to avoid services run in a country not spending on a war somewhere.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoIt's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.
- skrtskrt 1y agoThis could easily refer to any of the despots the US backs
- cosmicgadget 1y agoIs that some sort of gotcha? By all means, boycott those countries as well. Support from the US certainly is not a free pass.
- skrtskrt 1y agoFollow the logic and boycott the US as well! Now you have zero viable search engines
- cosmicgadget 1y agoCan you give me a line-by-line breakdown please? For example, I believe term limits are still a thing.
- lostlogin 1y agoI have plenty of reservations about the US, but the invasion of the Ukraine is not in the same category as anything the US is up to.
- J_McQuade 1y agoAlso, the company is based in a country that has 'fueled' more wars in my lifetime than any other country has in the last 100 years. Definitely avoid.
- barbazoo 1y agoI doubted this but it's true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine) > Country of origin: USA
- Chief_Searcha 1y agoThere have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.
- mossTechnician 1y agoKagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1] [0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/20 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio... [1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49 https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49
- lostlogin 1y agoGood links. Him making out that hiding it is to help users is a bit gross.
- 7373737373 1y agoThey would rather live in a world where they can find everything, including 2℅ atrocities they indirectly fund, than not
- dcow 1y agoI prefer that world too. The only people morally responsible for committing atrocities are those who commit them. Shall we hold the farmers who grow food that Russian leaders consume morally culpable for those leaders’ actions? I’m dead serious. You cannot in good faith actually argue that everyone is indirectly morally culpable for any action that is “enabled” by something they do. Like freedom of expression, neutral objective search is too important to poison with identity politics and virtue signaling.
- joshuaturner 1y agoNot a great look. Even if you somehow believe partnering with Yandex is justifiable, you should stand by the decision. My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.
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- camel-cdr 1y agoI wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend. For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
- i_love_retros 1y ago[flagged]
- lostlogin 1y agoKagi was founded in the US, so by boycotting it they can satisfying this weird requirement that the US is sanctioned too.
- PokemonNoGo 1y agoHonestly American was bad before that.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoThat's one of the reasons I canceled my subscription as well.
- Heidaradar 1y agoDo you have the same opinion on companies that are based in israel/give money to israeli companies?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- J_McQuade 1y agoI always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer. When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
- xnx 1y ago> the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.
- rrr_oh_man 1y ago640 KB ought to be enough for anybody
- prophesi 1y agoThese days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches. edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
- thesuitonym 1y agoIMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good. The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.
- jwr 1y agoUnfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine. (I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
- laacz 1y agoThis thread's responses are a classic whataboutism. Instead of addressing this particular issue, people address others. I support motion for Kagi to drop Yandex integration, because of the reasons cited.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neurobashing 1y agocan you perhaps elaborate on which companies and in what capacity?
- jwr 1y agoYes, Yandex, they pay them for some of their search results. Here is their own statement, where they refuse to stop, even though people keep asking them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
- amendegree 1y agoThe blocklist thing is interesting, I finally took the plunge and installed the app and extension
- tiagod 1y agoI took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content. My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results. [0] https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list
- freedomben 1y agoIndeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.
- TehShrike 1y agoI had the same reaction – his list includes washingtonpost.com, amazon.com, alternativeto.net, medium.com, twitter.com, msn.com, etc. He dumped his entire blocklist, which must include a bunch of sites that he finds personally annoying. Here is the list of domains owned by the 16 companies discussed in the post that he linked to: https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters/src/branch/main/16companies.txt https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters/src/branch/m...
- bbbhltz 1y agoThe "16 companies" blocklist is pretty extreme too. I sometimes want to exclude sites from it, but that would be against the spirit of the list.
- fLaMEd 1y agoYo, I'll spend a bit of time splitting the lists up. Obviously, there are a number of websites in there outside the 16 Companies from the linked article in my post, and the Kagi top blocked domains that I've added myself as I scroll through search results. I understand that my taste may not be for everybody so will make it clearer in the post and give a bit more options. Sound good?
- qwertox 1y agoI thought their maps integration was pretty bad compared to Google, as well as the information widgets. It stressed me, I was always thinking that somethin isn't right and that I'm to blame, because so many love it so much over Google.
- ekojs 1y agoMaybe not a popular sentiment here on HN but I cancelled my Kagi subscription (9+ months) just recently. Increasingly, most of my queries/search have been through LLMs and Google search is just fine (and even better for restaurants, places, and the like). I don't think the improved search experience is worth the subscription anymore.
- baggachipz 1y agoIn Kagi, you can just ad a "?" to your query and get an instant answer, a la LLMs.
- VHRanger 1y agoOr !ai to route it to kagi.com/assistant with your default model/agent to respond with kagi search results
- testfrequency 1y agoCan someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use? I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
- bbor 1y agoAs far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX. I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
- testfrequency 1y agoThanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search? Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get? Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources. That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
- lomlobon 1y agoProbably they are using 'Kagi Assistant', which is essentially kagi acting as an intermediary to the major LLMs. You get a catalog and a monthly quota. Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.
- testfrequency 1y ago
- joshuat 1y agoI really enjoy Kagi for search. It is a significantly better experience. I do still use Google Maps for looking up local things, and I kind of wish Kagi would redirect me there instead of their own maps implementation, which I just cannot imagine will ever be on par.
- dcchambers 1y agoHappy Kagi user for many many months now. The only thing I fall back to Google for are local results (specifically local business search - like restaurants). I still have an Android phone, use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc - but Kagi has almost entirely replaced my standard Google search results. And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying. I also find myself using the "quick answer" feature a lot too. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
- VHRanger 1y agoYou can trigger quick answer with a "?" But also feel free to try adding "!ai" to send the query to the assistant for a deeper dive
- dcchambers 1y agoI did know about the "?" feature and use it all the time but I didn't know about "!ai" - very cool I'll have to try it. Thanks!
- skrtskrt 1y agoKagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches. I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet. As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too
- weinzierl 1y agoFor over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well. I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of. This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.
- skrtskrt 1y agoInterestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.
- terribleperson 1y agoYep, I still use Google maps for food discovery. It's very good at that, still, and Kagi maps has a ways to go.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoIt's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.
- 1y ago
- seabass 1y agoI tried to give Kagi a fair shot by using it for a few months. I loved a lot of features, especially the boost/block lists. But I always felt the responses were way too slow for something I use that much. I benchmarked a handful of queries and confirmed they were consistently ~3x slower than Google for normal searches and 5-10x slower for image searches on my home network. I’m sure there are many factors that play into that, so maybe the reason I haven’t seen others complain about the speed has just been that the problem is unique to my network. But ultimately I opted to switch back to Google for my daily driver and just use Kagi for specific lenses.
- freediver 1y agoThat is unusual. Have you tried reaching out to support@kagi.com ?
- seabass 1y agoYep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.
- freediver 1y agoPlease reach out to me at vlad@kagi.com and we'll set you up on an account (on us) and I'll personally get involved to see what is happening. Most our searches complete in less than 1000ms. We do dig much deeper than Google though, and we more often than not place what you are looking for in the top 3 results - and that has to count for something too.
- seabass 1y agoVery kind of you! Just reached out. And I agree, the lack of sponsored results among the top 3 and overall quality of the results are valuable.
- blitzpoet 1y agoDDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.
- bbor 1y agoHow much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know. How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say. Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
- xk_id 1y agoThat doesn’t mean DDG is anything special, only that Google has become incredibly bad.
- bbor 1y agoAwesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!
- xigoi 1y agoAll of these sites pretend to have useful content, but require an account to view it, which makes them SEO spam in my view.
- karaterobot 1y agoSearch engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me. Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful. On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me. Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
- hootz 1y agoKagi has an optional integrated search AI which you can activate by adding a question mark at the end of your query.
- VHRanger 1y agoYou can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query. It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.
- patrickscoleman 1y agoAds are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case. There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things. [1] https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-ads-on-chatgpt-one-day https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...
- 1y ago
- SLWW 1y agoBeen an Early Adopter, joined January of 2023 and I have never looked back or paused my monthly. I'm currently running with the Ultimate package which is good value for the $25/month price tag. Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience. I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.
- giantfrog 1y agoIf you'd told me several years ago I'd be paying $10/month for a search engine, I'd say that's crazy talk. But it genuinely is worth it.
- Aldipower 1y agoIf Kagi would offer an easy to use pre-paid option, I would use it again.
- privacyking 1y agoSame. It would be great if they had something like the mullvads cards you can buy off Amazon in most countries to credit your account
- commiefornia 1y ago[dead]
- sergiotapia 1y agoKagi seems like an old tool for a bygone age. A faster horse carriage, instead of a car, you know?
- rtrgrd 1y agoI've never used Kagi before and wanted to try: how does Kagi stack up against Brave search?
- VHRanger 1y agoKagi results consume brave search among others before returning the result so should be a superset in quality
- jszymborski 1y agoSo is it truly the case that I can now pay for Kagi without my searches being associated to my account? And I dont mean by scouts pledge, but I recall reading something about anonymous crypto tokens? I'd consider getting an account if so.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoPrivacy pass exists, but is limited to 1,500 tokens per month (3, batches of 500). Furthermore, they do not allow disabling safe search or customizing the results in any way (including your block lists) when using it. Also, since they are the token signer, make sure you use a different IP to get tokens signed / when logged in, otherwise the traffic for the "private" searches is trivially reversible. So... Kinda useless right now?
- moebrowne 1y ago> Furthermore, they do not allow disabling safe search or customizing the results in any way (including your block lists) when using it. You make out like this is a bad thing, implementing these features would undermine your anonymity. It's explained in detail in their announcement blog: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=If%20Kagi,personalization https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=If%20Kagi,pe...
- Tadpole9181 1y agoNo, that's an excuse and not a justification. You have to log in to the extension to use Privacy Pass. They are fully capable of pulling your block list and removing those entries at the frontend. And safe search toggling via a query string parameter when using a token does not, in any way, expose any reversible information about a user.
- lvl155 1y agoI go to Kagi to try it out. Asks me to sign in to do search. That’s just a bad onboarding experience.
- xigoi 1y agoKagi is a paid service. Allowing random people to search for free would defeat the point and make them go bankrupt.
- apexskier 1y agoAs a refinement on this, if you're not comfortable blocking these results entirely, Kagi allows you to lower their relevance in your results rather than simply blocking outright.
- danzero 1y ago[dead]
- progx 1y agoSwitched to ChatGPT, what is this google thing?
- xigoi 1y agoSo you switched from one evil megacorporation to another evil megacorporation? Good job.
- adham-omran 1y agoKagi has been a great asset for the past year, their support team is phenomenal and responsive. The result quality is great and have seen co-workers eyeing the service because of what they've seen.
- xk_id 1y agoIt’s so strange to me that I’m now using Google maybe a couple times a month (and then only through a proxy like Mullvad’s leta). This would have been inconceivable 15, even 10 years ago. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but wow, how times change.