9 ms·

I dumped Google for Kagi

362 points by thimabi 1y ago

thimabi 1y ago
There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs… Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.
- ufmace 1y ago
  One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.
  - thimabi 1y ago
    Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations… probably won’t have access to a better search experience.
    - jjtheblunt 1y ago
      I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber since right after the started) wondering if the partial defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly) improve search experiences even for non paying searchers, as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of online experiences.
  - youniverse 1y ago
    I believe they are developing their own browser and email to have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      The browser actally came before the search engine.
- jasonvorhe 1y ago
  Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime Google around ~2008. I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you get very good parental control options, for college and gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated feature of "lensing" the AI assistant. The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
- eugenekolo 1y ago
  I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines. There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
  - apparent 1y ago
    It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it. The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if your use case is just replacing Google.
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough, because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  >Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. OTOH, the existence of Kagi Assistant made Kagi Teams a very easy sell to my employer.
- nottorp 1y ago
  It's not paying for search, it's pricing for techbros. I happen to be an Ars subscriber and that's about as much as I'd be willing to pay for Kagi too.
- jmull 1y ago
  I'd rather just pay for good search than spend time to de-enshittify Google. I'm hoping enough people agree with me for Kagi to be viable.
api 1y ago
Did that over a year ago.
predkambrij 1y ago
you can set search?q=%s&udm=14& for google and default to "web" tab, where you actually get search results. Works fine for me.
- lee_ars 1y ago
  For now.
- eviks 1y ago
  But then you lose non-ai summaries that are often useful and various calculator results etc
netsharc 1y ago
Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards. TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
franze 1y ago
soooo... he still uses search engines?
- lee_ars 1y ago
  I'm not quite finding that AI search works reliably for my use cases yet.
- pyrale 1y ago
  Some people are still looking for source material rather than, say, an imaginary friend summarizing info that may or may not have been made up.
- lief79 1y ago
  How do you look something up?
  - x187463 1y ago
    Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  There's no viable alternative, so yes of course people use search engines.
- saltysalt 1y ago
  Not everyone trusts AI to filter their internet queries.
andrewla 1y ago
tl;dr: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine. This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity. The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
mxmlnkn 1y ago
AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I don't mind it necessarily, as I use it all the time in place of Googling, so you would think that folding it into search would work well. But it doesn't, at least not for me. But I think that's tied to poor implementation, design, and being a solution looking for a problem rather than a philosophical issue with using AI to improve search experience.
- mjlee 1y ago
  When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as the difference between searching for something, or just asking the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to move the conversation to a new LLM session.
  - VHRanger 1y ago
    you can also just go straight to the assistant from the query with !ai -- it'll power the answer directly with your default assistant model
flenserboy 1y ago
the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked. from that point on search results on Google have been what they want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact searches — & giving useful results could not be tolerated, whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)
- glenstein 1y ago
  >it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found Wholeheartedly agree. Millionshort was based on this idea, of effectively skipping the "first 10k" sites that most commonly come up in results, skipping to the good stuff. But they've implemented forced logins and made other design choices I haven't loved.
galleywest200 1y ago
I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently. If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.
- Livanskoy 1y ago
  [flagged]
- xyse53 1y ago
  I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  I would also really like it if Kagi didn't fund state-sponsored terrorism. On the other hand, the search is better, so...
  - sitzkrieg 1y ago
    wait till you see what USA funds
    - idiotsecant 1y ago
      Ok... Are we just naming random countries that also do terrorism now? Inserting butwhaddaboudda YEWW ESS into literally every conversation is tiring. Yes, the US does bad stuff. It doesn't make funding terrorism by Kagi less bad.
      - xigoi 1y ago
        Pointing out hypocrisy is not whataboutism.
mft_ 1y ago
I recently dumped Google on my phone because of the awful dark pattern they'd put in with a popup trying to generate an installation of the Google search app. While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page, go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again. (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.) Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi a go...
- xdavidliu 1y ago
  I changed my default search engine on iOS from Google to DuckDuckGo for this exact reason.
- qwerpy 1y ago
  Many dark patterns at work there. The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store. The popup helpfully colors “continue” a nice shade of blue and the “stay on webpage” button is a less visible outline instead of a colored button. When I’m in an hurry, even though I’ve dodged the App Store redirect hundreds of times in the past, it somehow still manages to trick me. And then the whole redirect loop which is rage inducing. Hopefully ublock origin lite can keep the popups away for a while.
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    > The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store. Ah yes, they do exactly the same thing with Maps.
  - nerdsniper 1y ago
    Redirecting safari sites to apps (including app store) should be a per-domain permission that I can revoke.
edgineer 1y ago
This has bothered me about kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665 The founder started that he was not interested in serving users who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and don't require an account.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  That position seems to have changed, I think? They are supposedly allowing people to buy Privacy Pass tokens without a Kagi account in-the-future™: "Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it." https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on Tor Browser for it to work)
- bsimpson 1y ago
  People always joked that Incognito Mode is for porn, but I use it for search. I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and trying to groom that list. In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from Gemini either. I really don't like that. I should be allowed to be curious about something without having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.
idiotsecant 1y ago
Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map. I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.
- everfrustrated 1y ago
  As a paying user it's frustrating how bad Kagi maps are given they're (presumably) paying Mapbox $ for it. Most of the time the search function doesn't work and I've been disappointed enough that I default to Google Maps for anything maps related.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    In my experience it's the POI data that's really tough. (As opposed to roads/addresses.) Locally, Google Maps has enough market share that every business ensures that their info on Google Maps is correct. Even Apple Maps hasn't been able to scale to compete.
- damian_at_kagi 1y ago
  Maps dev here. Would appreciate a bit more feedback at https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    The problems that need solving are not problems you can develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc wants to populate their information into google maps and keep it current. Kagi doesn't have that. They need to somehow get all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi maps. It's impossible.
CalChris 1y ago
Search (Google) is dead. Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were. The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now. So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction. The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.
- mingus88 1y ago
  I pay for Kagi and Claude. I feel that the core of this decline in services is simply because nobody want to pay for what is of value. Search is still useful. Claude is not good at citing sources. Search is great for doing my own research. I’m hearing a lot of people just copy and paste LLM output as truth. From students to law clerks. LLMs are designed to output convincing text (not correct text) and for lazy people that’s good enough. There will always be a need for searching raw data and making conclusions without an LLM
  - CalChris 1y ago
    If current LLMs were perfect AGI then your lazy students and law clerks, they might even have a point. But you are setting the bar too high; LLMs are not perfect AGI. They hallucinate and you write bad prompts. Think of an LLM as more like a Dremel. Yeah, it isn't a Yamazaki Mazak. OTOH, search is like a screwdriver.
  - terribleperson 1y ago
    No one wants to pay for value because we were getting a bunch of value for free for twenty-ish years.
pclowes 1y ago
I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a potential long term cost. Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined. In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects. I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations. I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
- bsimpson 1y ago
  I've wondered about that too. Feels like there's a risk to be stuck in some flavor of 2025 indefinitely, if the incentive to produce new content is eroded by the rise of LLMs.
- x187463 1y ago
  The web is going to need a different business model. There's no way around it from this point. Traffic + Ads = Money is dead for anybody with content that can be summarized by an LLM. Even Traffic + Subscription = Money is also vulnerable if your offering is not easily discoverable outside of a search engine. I don't know the solution.
  - 10000truths 1y ago
    It's far more likely that LLM providers will create a marketplace for advertisers to inject their brand/product into responses to user queries.
    - bot403 1y ago
      Oh goodness no. Please delete your comment before a Google product manager reads it and puts it on their idea board.
josefritzishere 1y ago
Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there are other viable free options.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
I too have dumped Google for Kagi (within the same time frame, even). I encourage everyone to give it a shot and see if it clicks for you. For me, it was night and day. I used to be skeptical about the idea of paying for search, but I'm definitely sticking with Kagi after seeing how well it works.
obamagate 1y ago
Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
- x187463 1y ago
  Per the post, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index and lacks the customization offered by Kagi.
- dabbz 1y ago
  My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
  - tredre3 1y ago
    Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the results are straight from Bing. The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
    - dabbz 1y ago
      Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But sure, I guess their marketing worked. The index was why I looked elsewhere. The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)
NoSalt 1y ago
Who else remembers buying your shareware licenses from Kagi.com ?
anthonj 1y ago
Sounds interesting but I'm not ready to pay to use a search engine yet. Too many subscriptions for everything nowadays. Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now do their own indexing.
- dtkav 1y ago
  Of all of tech subscriptions that I pay for, kagi is a close second after claude in terms of the QoL improvement per dollar.
- int_19h 1y ago
  The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear business model.
ac130kz 1y ago
I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has made itself unbearable.
hcurtiss 1y ago
As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts for our daughters.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I've tried Kagi Assistant several times... I haven't really found my usage to be sticky though, I'm not entirely clear what I'd use it for on a regular basis where it would be an improvement over my current (LLM-free) workflow.
  - VHRanger 1y ago
    Try adding !ai to the end of queries once in a while and see if it saves you time. It does for a lot of them.
- VHRanger 1y ago
  I'd also encourage you to try the !ai bang in addition to the "?" for quick answers. !ai sends the query directly to kagi.com/assistant with you default model. If you pick a solid and fast default, like kimi-k2, it's a great experience
  - hcurtiss 1y ago
    This is a great tip!
manchmalscott 1y ago
I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying for various things that you don't use/consume.
  - manchmalscott 1y ago
    YouTube premium recently added a “lite” tier. I don’t use YouTube music and I don’t watch shorts or music videos on YouTube, so I’m able to have the channels I watch get compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary and non-core features of the platform. Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists it isn’t is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other perks of membership (background playback, etc.)
      - eviks 1y ago
        So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible? There are other factors that favor dumbed down user interfaces, but they are not unique to subscriptions
        Marsymars 1y ago
Citizen_Lame 1y ago
While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use it. Especially for non-ai tasks.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Because it's a paid service?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Marsymars 1y ago
  Well a) it was required because it's not free and it's difficult to collect payment from people without accounts and b) see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  Kagi is not a privacy orientated search engine.
damascus_kei 1y ago
Kagi has given me the most value per dollar out of any subscription I have ever had. I find the things I want much faster. I use the AI summarize; for example, to summarize YouTube video when looking for specific info or to summarize reddit web results. I also use Kagi Assistant everyday; usually several different models. Most importantly, my wife likes it. I find google almost unusable now. I can't go back. I will never go back.
- QuantumGood 1y ago
  Seeing how Perplexity (my preference) or Kagi is much better than Google for 98% of queries, Google has indeed killed itself, at least for the time being. Xfinity has a one year free on Perplexity Pro, which is how I tested the switchover. Early attempts at search-emabled AIs (e.g. ChatGPT) were nowhere near as good at first, so I stopped testing them against Perplexity/Kagi
  - ignoramous 1y ago
    For years I used pplx.ai extensively, but of late, chat.com (code, q&a) and gemini.google (youtube & web search) feel unmatched.
    - QuantumGood 1y ago
      Just a note: pplx.ai redirects to perplexity.com; chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com
    - drewbitt 1y ago
      You really were heavily using it in late 2022/early 2023? It seemed... rough.
      - ignoramous 1y ago
        pplx.ai did RAG (with attachments) and web search (immediately after they pivoted from Twitter search aka "Bird SQL") way before other chat interfaces caught on. Their features were free & the product was sticky.
outlore 1y ago
in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping, sports... it is better at finding documentation and technical articles and deprioritizing SEO spam
bananapub 1y ago
regular anecdata: it works great, at first I used to go back to Google a few times a month if Kagi didn't find something I was sure existed, but either Kagi got better or the web and/or Google got worse, because I don't go back to google anymore. easily worth 4 coffees a month just to not worry anymore about the direct consequences of my searches, and being able to shitcan garbage sites like pinboard.* while pranking wikipedia in my own search results is just gravy. they also have a search API now in beta which you can request access to; 2.5c/search.
discardedrefuse 1y ago
I'm afraid this is a case of "too little, too late". I've been a happy DDG user for many, many years. Sure, there's a learning curve when venturing out of google's cozy bubble. But once I figured it out, its been fantastic. Except the last few months. And, I can't stress this enough, its not DDG's fault. The results are relevant to my search, and at first glance seem to be what I'm looking for. But take more than 2 seconds to read, and you'll notice the websites themselves are trash heaps of AI slop, serving errors and mistakes. The human web is quickly shrinking out of existence. The last content silos of human expression have walled themselves in and are striking deals with the evil megacorps; pushing their shitty, error prone, planet killing, word prediction engines down everyone's throats. Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. Maybe they should pivot to web autopsy tools, not unlike Internet Archive. I wish the Kagi team well. I hope they succeed. And I really hope I'm wrong about the open web's grim future. But I'm probably not. And the AI arms race suggests the megacorps agree.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  > Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. 1. The Internet Archive 2. Anna's Archive 3. YouTube (if they're allowed to) That's more than enough knowledge and information.
  - ckdot 1y ago
    4. Wikipedia Am I too optimistic?
- saltysalt 1y ago
  Great comment and you are absolutely right: AI slop content will (ironically) kill AI search. In my opinion, we have gone full circle and arrived back to human curation to provide quality search results.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I don't think your post is without merit, but I often search for things where there's a single canonical source of truth, and no amount of AI slop or LLM results will be of interest. (e.g. this afternoon I've searched for a book title, for YouTube Premium pricing info, for git bisect documentation, for car collision stats, for speeding fine amounts, for some Linq documentation, and for some specific info on local parking).
temp0826 1y ago
I really like Kagi but am still holding out for a cheaper plan. If it were around the range of NextDNS (which I happily pay for) it would be a no-brainer. Wouldn't need or want any of the llm/other features.
dbalatero 1y ago
I got work to pay for Kagi out of my education budget, in case anyone else has that option available.
puff_pastry 1y ago
I tried Kagi and liked it for the most part. But I really wasn’t seeing the big benefit everyone’s claiming. Google is…fine? Maybe I just learned how to use it for what I do
sjs382 1y ago
One subtle (but important) way Kagi has improved my life is that I'm less "on guard" with search results. It's not perfect but I know that I'm more likely to find a result that serves me, rather than a result that's optimizing for an algorithm. And if I do come across something spammy, I know that telling Kagi to adjust a site lower (or remove a site from results) is just 2 clicks away. Even though it's a small thing, it's one I encountered with every Google search, manyamnymany times per day. Relieving that is worth more than $10/mo to me. I think that pricing is right, though—if it were more than $10/mo and I likely never would have tried it. The only thing I use Google Search for now is hyperlocal stuff, mostly I expect to interact with Maps result. Kagi Maps isn't even close.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Now that I think about it, this really summarises why I keep paying for Kagi. I can just search something, glance at the results and pick the one that seems the closest one to whatever I'm looking for. With Google, I have to first go "is this an ad pretending to be a search result?", then I need to spend more time looking that the domain and preview to see if it's some listicle crap or AI slop. Only then I can click the result.
  - ramenbytes 1y ago
    I had to use Google in a library while printing datasheets and clicked the first relevant looking result out of habit, only to be taken to the wrong part page. Closer inspection of the search results showed the small faint print of "Sponsored". I had forgotten about that since moving to Kagi.
ezst 1y ago
It's probably a good time to bump https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for those who haven't read it yet.
- captain_coffee 1y ago
  All the articles on that website are pure gold - I highly reccommend it! Recently launched a paid subscription with multiple extremely dense (1h+ reading time) posts per month.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  For a dash of irony, I asked Google Gemini to summarize: The article "The Men Who Killed Google" by Ed Zitron argues that Google's search engine has declined due to a shift from a user-centric approach to a revenue-focused one. The author pinpoints Prabhakar Raghavan, with the support of CEO Sundar Pichai, as the key individuals behind this change. The article details a "code yellow" in February 2019, declared by the ads team, due to underperforming search revenue. This led to a conflict between the ads and finance teams, who wanted to boost revenue at any cost, and the search team, which prioritized user experience. Following this, Google implemented several changes, including a March 2019 update that rolled back quality improvements and a May 2019 ad redesign that made ads look like organic search results. In May 2020, Raghavan replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search. The author notes Raghavan's history at Yahoo, where he was head of search from 2005 to 2012, a period during which Yahoo's search market share significantly dropped. Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality.
  - jesterson 1y ago
    > Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality. We can't complain as it is exactly whats asked from management of public companies innit? And that's why most products sucks nowadays
asdff 1y ago
At this point I feel like I know where all the content must lie that I am looking for domain wise. There is so much crap content out there on crap websites that discoverability is long dead anyhow. So, I basically just use google to search within domains I already know. Not sure how long this scales because like I said, my discovery rate has pretty much been zero for years now of new domains worth visiting. I'm sure they are out there but modern internet doesn't really let you find them short of finding a reference to them in some forum comment someplace, thanks to SEO arms race.
jiehong 1y ago
I like Kagi, but it feels a bit slow to display results. Like, the page loads very fast, but only with the search bar, and only then you get the results appearing after some loading. But it's acceptable. Image search is rather slow, though.
- nikanj 1y ago
  Google is much faster, because it's slower to show you results related to your search terms. It's much faster to just show you whatever slop their AI happened to cook up
- ckdot 1y ago
  I can confirm, and for me - even if I want like Kagi - I can’t tolerate it. I’ve read it depends on the Country you’re in. In Germany, where I’m from, loading time is up to 3 seconds - while on Google it’s almost instant.
freedomben 1y ago
Kagi sucks, this is a bad call. Just kidding, I love Kagi and I get a ton of value from it! I always like the saying that "the best ideas are obvious in hindsight", and that is absolutely how I feel about Kagi. Being able to uprank, downrank, and/or pinning, blacklisting domains is a killer feature, and something that would have been so easy for Google to have done at any time. Their approach to AI has also been perfect IMHO. From the beginning they didn't have the models provide answers, but (basically, as far as I can tell) RAGged the results and summarized (and included sources). I find myself using that feature all the time. Also the ! support and generally clean interface make for a great UX. I also very much appreciate their pro-rating and transparent billing, and the prices being pretty reasonable. The search results themselves are also better than Google (in no small part to my own fine-tuning of domains, i.e. downranking/upranking/blacklisting, but even just the vanilla results are better most of the time). It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time. I do routinely use !gm to open something in google maps though because Apple maps has not been a good experience for me, but I don't fault Kagi for that. If you haven't tried Kagi, you should. Also play around with the lenses feature while you're at it, cause you can find some cool stuff that way that otherwise doesn't surface in the results. Initial set up to make Kagi the default search engine is a little involved because you have to put your token in the query string, but the instructions are solid and once it's done, it's done. Very happy customer.
- flkiwi 1y ago
  As noted above, Kagi is the quietest but most useful subscription I have. The Kagi Assistant AI tool, with its access to pretty much any major model, is an enormous bonus.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    I really like the new Assistant update which guides you on the strengths and weaknesses of the selectable models and recommends a shortlist.
- ninkendo 1y ago
  > It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time. I use !g once a week or so in Kagi, and 100% of the time, google’s results are worse. It’s usually something bogus I’m searching for, and there really isn’t anything to be said about it, but when I search google for it, I get a ton more junk that is totally unrelated to my query. Kagi’s results are better than google’s 100% of the time that I compare the two. It’s no exaggeration.
mhb 1y ago
What ever happened to that HN darling, Duck Duck Go?
saltysalt 1y ago
I built my own, it's easier than you might think: https://greppr.org/ https://greppr.org/
- uticus 1y ago
  would be interested in directions on how to do this myself. like, take existing bookmarks, make a crawler. nice work, btw
  - saltysalt 1y ago
    Thanks! If I have time, I should write a how-to blog.
  - commandersaki 1y ago
    I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar. I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when integrating it into a backend project that needed that functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult. Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
- mbirth 1y ago
  There’s also Marginalia: https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/
  - saltysalt 1y ago
    Very nice!
- busymom0 1y ago
  What's the cost and architecture of running such a site and crawling all those pages?
phendrenad2 1y ago
I've been using Kagi for a long time, ever since Google decided to censor the internet.
rubslopes 1y ago
Kagi's bang game is so good. A few of my custom bangs: - !w: results from last week only - !y: results from yesterday and today only - !io: Assistant, but offline - !ig: Assistant, but for grammar correction - !itr: Assistant, but for correcting and organizing transcript text - !sh: Google shopping tab
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- xigoi 1y ago
  > !w: results from last week only Did you just shadow the Wikipedia bang?
  - rubslopes 1y ago
    Sorry, I was actually translating to English. The bangs that I use are in my mother language.
renegat0x0 1y ago
I dumped corporate search for my own index https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database. Screw you guys! I'm creating my own search with open source. ... but seriously it just augments my search.
dsign 1y ago
I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean, I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to support the local merchants as much as possible. Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  > Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well. I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
  - busymom0 1y ago
    I face this issue too and can easily reproduce it. When typing in Google search, if I try to place the cursor, it will often register my click on the "microphone" icon due to a tiny delay of the search UI and that opens up the App Store page. When I switch back to Safari, it starts a never ending loop of sending me back to App Store page. I have to kill Safari to stop this.
srhtftw 1y ago
Kagi makes me want to learn Crystal¹ ¹ https://crystal-lang.org https://crystal-lang.org
kawfey 1y ago
for me kagi started out as a few searches and compared between it, DDG and google. and then i ran out of free searches, so I gave them $5. and then i ran out of $5 worth of searches so i kept renewing, $5 more. And again, and again. At this point I had all my defaults set to kagi because I loved it. Just the fact there are no ads or sponsored leads and I can more-or-less kill webpages completely generated and SEO'd with LLMs, I can actually do research again. and then I became a full subscriber, with orion, blacklists, I use the quick answer (LLM) and small web searching fruitfully, and joined their discord. It's been a long time since I fell head over heels for a technology product, and this being something so core to how I use the internet, it's a godsend. Enjoying it at least until they decide money is nice and growth is imperative, they go public, and enshittifies.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Capital causes big distortions: unreasonably cheap products from big companies and unreasonably cheap products from VC backed companies. Plus, habits and market power make it hard for people to switch en masse. Despite a tough market, Kagi succeeds the old way: with better products. Kagi proves plain old commerce - making a good thing and selling it - can win a fair fight against capital. Keep it up folks!
chipsrafferty 1y ago
I dumped Kagi for Google
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
i'll try it when i can pay $5 for unlimited search without AI results (not that it can't be useful; i'm just only interested in the search component).
eskatonic 1y ago
I've been using it for a little over a year now, and I just upgraded to the unlimited search subscription. Totally worth it.
cjk 1y ago
I made the same switch recently. Results from Kagi are night-and-day vs. Google. I do hope Kagi eventually has enough revenue to offer a more generous free tier, though (and without logging in). I fear it will remain a niche thing otherwise.
CuriousRose 1y ago
I love and pay for Kagi, but I am afraid paid search providers are in for a tough time. I am using search less and less, and directing more of my search (~90%) to Grok instead of Kagi now. The exception being price comparisons when online shopping. I want the exact information I'm after, in the way that I want it, immediately. Search cannot do this, unless they amalgamate into AI tools more and more, at which point they are in a different space altogether. Looks like an Uber eating Taxi's business situation again to me.
- VHRanger 1y ago
  You are aware that if you're paying for kagi you can just slap !ai at the end of any search query and it'll direct the query to kagi.com/assistant, right? And that you can set the model to answer those query as any of the grok models? Kagi isn't behind anyone else on this AI-powered search, in fact the assistant is nearly a strict superset of all the other ones. You can set the model to chatGPT, claude, gemini, grok, etc. And it'll use kagi search as a backend instead of, respectively, bing, brave, google, google+twitter.
  - CuriousRose 1y ago
    Didn't know this thanks! Looks like only Grok 3 mini is supported on my standard plan currently, and I'll have limited tokens to use on Grok 4 (that I'm already paying for) on the Premium plan. I'll stick to my current setup for now but appreciate the input.
    - VHRanger 1y ago
      Fair enough. I encourage you to cycle through the models in the assistant once in a while to see if there's new ones to like. Kimi-k2 for instance was a positive surprise recently and is being added to your standard plan tonight as well as the brand new GPT-OSS models.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  [flagged]
jaredcwhite 1y ago
I dumped DuckDuckGo for Kagi. heh heh Seriously, I haven't used Google in years. I stopped even relying on Google as a decent backup option because it's gotten so-o-o bad. DDG has gotten incrementally worse simply because they're unable to fend off the reams of AI slop taking over everything (and it's also based in large part on Bing's index). I recently tried Kagi now that they have free and lower-cost tiers, and oh wow I can feel the difference. This is like 2010s-era search, and I mean that as a distinct compliment. I signed up and won't look back. The "Quick Peek" feature is truly fantastic…it feels like it's some sort of AI but it's simply just a good set of queries with good excerpts of REAL text from REAL links. Bravo!
7bit 1y ago
I use ChatGPT to get first ideas about what I want to know and then even with Bing, I find the sources that confirm what the AI told me. Maybe I should have looked at Kagi 10 years ago, but today I don't see any value to the cost of subbing to Kagi.
zipping1549 1y ago
It's hard to appreciate something like Kagi when the point of the whole interaction is to minimize the time of interaction itself. But the experience is night and day. I don't see myself going back to any other search engines like DuckDuckGo or, God forbid, Google.
Waterluvian 1y ago
I’m looking at the pricing tiers and I think it’s fine. But what would probably make me adopt it instantly is if I could set a max tier and it would just ramp up the tier each month if I hit it. Ie. I set it to Professional and at 101 searches I’m upgraded to Starter and then at 301 upgraded to Professional. If I forget about it or stop using it or use it far less, I’m not just shoveling money into yet another subscription I have to manage. This is because I don’t have consistent usage habits, and the price isn’t stopping me, the psychology of a monthly subscription I don’t use is.
- handsclean 1y ago
  Kagi automatically credits you for any month you don’t use it [1] [2]. They also charge only the price difference on upgrade [3], though personally I care about this less now that unlimited is $10/mo. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing [2]: https://kagi.com/changelog#6155 https://kagi.com/changelog#6155 [3]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#if-i-upgrade-my-plan-before-my-renewal-date-will-i-have-to-pay-the-full-amount-of-the-new-plan https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#if-i-upgrade-my-plan...
  - Waterluvian 1y ago
    Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month. And it doesn't look like there's any sort of "you only used 20 searches so we'll Free Tier you rather than $10 tier you this month".
    - handsclean 1y ago
      > Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month. This is not true, you don’t pay if you don’t use it. I think you’re assuming “credit” means some sort of redeemable voucher, but it’s account balance that automatically covers your next bill. Then at the end of the second unused month you get a credit that covers the third month, and so on.
dave_walko 1y ago
I keep trying and then moving on. Is there a guide on how to actually use all the features or maybe a quick set up guide? I find myself using JUST search and no customization. I have 0 issue with paying if I use it but need a guide or examples. Please share
unstyledcontent 1y ago
Is it just me or do a lot of these comments seem a little too positive? I've never seen a product this hyped on HN. I'm suspicious...
tamimio 1y ago
My problem with kagi is I don’t want my search history to be tied to an account, no matter what privacy assurance there, I have zero trust in anything that I don’t fully control.
- nuker 1y ago
  This. The article plainly states that too: "The obvious flaw here is that Kagi still records source IP addresses along with Privacy Pass searches, potentially de-anonymizing them"
p3rls 1y ago
i didn't like kagi either at first, but google has deteriorated so much with the constant hindustantimes .com listicles in every fucking search query it's become unusable

362 points by thimabi 1y ago

There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs… Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.

ufmace 1y ago
One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.
- thimabi 1y ago
  Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations… probably won’t have access to a better search experience.
  - jjtheblunt 1y ago
    I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber since right after the started) wondering if the partial defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly) improve search experiences even for non paying searchers, as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of online experiences.
- youniverse 1y ago
  I believe they are developing their own browser and email to have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
  - xigoi 1y ago
    The browser actally came before the search engine.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime Google around ~2008. I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
mvieira38 1y ago
Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you get very good parental control options, for college and gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated feature of "lensing" the AI assistant. The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
eugenekolo 1y ago
I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines. There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
- apparent 1y ago
  It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it. The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if your use case is just replacing Google.
catlikesshrimp 1y ago
Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough, because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
bondarchuk 1y ago
>Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
Marsymars 1y ago
> Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. OTOH, the existence of Kagi Assistant made Kagi Teams a very easy sell to my employer.
nottorp 1y ago
It's not paying for search, it's pricing for techbros. I happen to be an Ars subscriber and that's about as much as I'd be willing to pay for Kagi too.
jmull 1y ago
I'd rather just pay for good search than spend time to de-enshittify Google. I'm hoping enough people agree with me for Kagi to be viable.

api 1y ago

Did that over a year ago.

predkambrij 1y ago

you can set search?q=%s&udm=14& for google and default to "web" tab, where you actually get search results. Works fine for me.

lee_ars 1y ago
For now.
eviks 1y ago
But then you lose non-ai summaries that are often useful and various calculator results etc

netsharc 1y ago

Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards. TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)

franze 1y ago

soooo... he still uses search engines?

lee_ars 1y ago
I'm not quite finding that AI search works reliably for my use cases yet.
pyrale 1y ago
Some people are still looking for source material rather than, say, an imaginary friend summarizing info that may or may not have been made up.
lief79 1y ago
How do you look something up?
- x187463 1y ago
  Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
There's no viable alternative, so yes of course people use search engines.
saltysalt 1y ago
Not everyone trusts AI to filter their internet queries.

andrewla 1y ago

tl;dr: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine. This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity. The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.

mxmlnkn 1y ago

AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.

glenstein 1y ago
I don't mind it necessarily, as I use it all the time in place of Googling, so you would think that folding it into search would work well. But it doesn't, at least not for me. But I think that's tied to poor implementation, design, and being a solution looking for a problem rather than a philosophical issue with using AI to improve search experience.
mjlee 1y ago
When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as the difference between searching for something, or just asking the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to move the conversation to a new LLM session.
- VHRanger 1y ago
  you can also just go straight to the assistant from the query with !ai -- it'll power the answer directly with your default assistant model

flenserboy 1y ago

the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked. from that point on search results on Google have been what they want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact searches — & giving useful results could not be tolerated, whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)

glenstein 1y ago
>it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found Wholeheartedly agree. Millionshort was based on this idea, of effectively skipping the "first 10k" sites that most commonly come up in results, skipping to the good stuff. But they've implemented forced logins and made other design choices I haven't loved.

galleywest200 1y ago

I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently. If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.

Livanskoy 1y ago
[flagged]
xyse53 1y ago
I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
idiotsecant 1y ago
I would also really like it if Kagi didn't fund state-sponsored terrorism. On the other hand, the search is better, so...
- sitzkrieg 1y ago
  wait till you see what USA funds
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    Ok... Are we just naming random countries that also do terrorism now? Inserting butwhaddaboudda YEWW ESS into literally every conversation is tiring. Yes, the US does bad stuff. It doesn't make funding terrorism by Kagi less bad.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      Pointing out hypocrisy is not whataboutism.

mft_ 1y ago

I recently dumped Google on my phone because of the awful dark pattern they'd put in with a popup trying to generate an installation of the Google search app. While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page, go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again. (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.) Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi a go...

xdavidliu 1y ago
I changed my default search engine on iOS from Google to DuckDuckGo for this exact reason.
qwerpy 1y ago
Many dark patterns at work there. The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store. The popup helpfully colors “continue” a nice shade of blue and the “stay on webpage” button is a less visible outline instead of a colored button. When I’m in an hurry, even though I’ve dodged the App Store redirect hundreds of times in the past, it somehow still manages to trick me. And then the whole redirect loop which is rage inducing. Hopefully ublock origin lite can keep the popups away for a while.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  > The popup uses misleading words: “continue” which is what you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes you to App Store. Ah yes, they do exactly the same thing with Maps.
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  Redirecting safari sites to apps (including app store) should be a per-domain permission that I can revoke.

edgineer 1y ago

This has bothered me about kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665 The founder started that he was not interested in serving users who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and don't require an account.

mvieira38 1y ago
That position seems to have changed, I think? They are supposedly allowing people to buy Privacy Pass tokens without a Kagi account in-the-future™: "Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it." https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on Tor Browser for it to work)
bsimpson 1y ago
People always joked that Incognito Mode is for porn, but I use it for search. I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and trying to groom that list. In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from Gemini either. I really don't like that. I should be allowed to be curious about something without having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.

idiotsecant 1y ago

Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map. I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.

everfrustrated 1y ago
As a paying user it's frustrating how bad Kagi maps are given they're (presumably) paying Mapbox $ for it. Most of the time the search function doesn't work and I've been disappointed enough that I default to Google Maps for anything maps related.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  In my experience it's the POI data that's really tough. (As opposed to roads/addresses.) Locally, Google Maps has enough market share that every business ensures that their info on Google Maps is correct. Even Apple Maps hasn't been able to scale to compete.
damian_at_kagi 1y ago
Maps dev here. Would appreciate a bit more feedback at https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  The problems that need solving are not problems you can develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc wants to populate their information into google maps and keep it current. Kagi doesn't have that. They need to somehow get all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi maps. It's impossible.

CalChris 1y ago

Search (Google) is dead. Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were. The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now. So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction. The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.

mingus88 1y ago
I pay for Kagi and Claude. I feel that the core of this decline in services is simply because nobody want to pay for what is of value. Search is still useful. Claude is not good at citing sources. Search is great for doing my own research. I’m hearing a lot of people just copy and paste LLM output as truth. From students to law clerks. LLMs are designed to output convincing text (not correct text) and for lazy people that’s good enough. There will always be a need for searching raw data and making conclusions without an LLM
- CalChris 1y ago
  If current LLMs were perfect AGI then your lazy students and law clerks, they might even have a point. But you are setting the bar too high; LLMs are not perfect AGI. They hallucinate and you write bad prompts. Think of an LLM as more like a Dremel. Yeah, it isn't a Yamazaki Mazak. OTOH, search is like a screwdriver.
- terribleperson 1y ago
  No one wants to pay for value because we were getting a bunch of value for free for twenty-ish years.

pclowes 1y ago

I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a potential long term cost. Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined. In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects. I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations. I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.

bsimpson 1y ago
I've wondered about that too. Feels like there's a risk to be stuck in some flavor of 2025 indefinitely, if the incentive to produce new content is eroded by the rise of LLMs.
x187463 1y ago
The web is going to need a different business model. There's no way around it from this point. Traffic + Ads = Money is dead for anybody with content that can be summarized by an LLM. Even Traffic + Subscription = Money is also vulnerable if your offering is not easily discoverable outside of a search engine. I don't know the solution.
- 10000truths 1y ago
  It's far more likely that LLM providers will create a marketplace for advertisers to inject their brand/product into responses to user queries.
  - bot403 1y ago
    Oh goodness no. Please delete your comment before a Google product manager reads it and puts it on their idea board.

josefritzishere 1y ago

Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there are other viable free options.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

I too have dumped Google for Kagi (within the same time frame, even). I encourage everyone to give it a shot and see if it clicks for you. For me, it was night and day. I used to be skeptical about the idea of paying for search, but I'm definitely sticking with Kagi after seeing how well it works.

obamagate 1y ago

Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.

x187463 1y ago
Per the post, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index and lacks the customization offered by Kagi.
dabbz 1y ago
My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
- tredre3 1y ago
  Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the results are straight from Bing. The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
  - dabbz 1y ago
    Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But sure, I guess their marketing worked. The index was why I looked elsewhere. The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.
Marsymars 1y ago
I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)

NoSalt 1y ago

Who else remembers buying your shareware licenses from Kagi.com ?

anthonj 1y ago

Sounds interesting but I'm not ready to pay to use a search engine yet. Too many subscriptions for everything nowadays. Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now do their own indexing.

dtkav 1y ago
Of all of tech subscriptions that I pay for, kagi is a close second after claude in terms of the QoL improvement per dollar.
int_19h 1y ago
The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear business model.

ac130kz 1y ago

I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has made itself unbearable.

hcurtiss 1y ago

As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts for our daughters.

Marsymars 1y ago
I've tried Kagi Assistant several times... I haven't really found my usage to be sticky though, I'm not entirely clear what I'd use it for on a regular basis where it would be an improvement over my current (LLM-free) workflow.
- VHRanger 1y ago
  Try adding !ai to the end of queries once in a while and see if it saves you time. It does for a lot of them.
VHRanger 1y ago
I'd also encourage you to try the !ai bang in addition to the "?" for quick answers. !ai sends the query directly to kagi.com/assistant with you default model. If you pick a solid and fast default, like kimi-k2, it's a great experience
- hcurtiss 1y ago
  This is a great tip!

manchmalscott 1y ago

I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.

Marsymars 1y ago
That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying for various things that you don't use/consume.
- manchmalscott 1y ago
  YouTube premium recently added a “lite” tier. I don’t use YouTube music and I don’t watch shorts or music videos on YouTube, so I’m able to have the channels I watch get compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary and non-core features of the platform. Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists it isn’t is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other perks of membership (background playback, etc.)
    - eviks 1y ago
      So what is it about subscription that makes this impossible? There are other factors that favor dumbed down user interfaces, but they are not unique to subscriptions
      - Marsymars 1y ago

Citizen_Lame 1y ago

While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use it. Especially for non-ai tasks.

int_19h 1y ago
Because it's a paid service?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Marsymars 1y ago
Well a) it was required because it's not free and it's difficult to collect payment from people without accounts and b) see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Kagi is not a privacy orientated search engine.

damascus_kei 1y ago

Kagi has given me the most value per dollar out of any subscription I have ever had. I find the things I want much faster. I use the AI summarize; for example, to summarize YouTube video when looking for specific info or to summarize reddit web results. I also use Kagi Assistant everyday; usually several different models. Most importantly, my wife likes it. I find google almost unusable now. I can't go back. I will never go back.

QuantumGood 1y ago
Seeing how Perplexity (my preference) or Kagi is much better than Google for 98% of queries, Google has indeed killed itself, at least for the time being. Xfinity has a one year free on Perplexity Pro, which is how I tested the switchover. Early attempts at search-emabled AIs (e.g. ChatGPT) were nowhere near as good at first, so I stopped testing them against Perplexity/Kagi
- ignoramous 1y ago
  For years I used pplx.ai extensively, but of late, chat.com (code, q&a) and gemini.google (youtube & web search) feel unmatched.
  - QuantumGood 1y ago
    Just a note: pplx.ai redirects to perplexity.com; chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com
  - drewbitt 1y ago
    You really were heavily using it in late 2022/early 2023? It seemed... rough.
    - ignoramous 1y ago
      pplx.ai did RAG (with attachments) and web search (immediately after they pivoted from Twitter search aka "Bird SQL") way before other chat interfaces caught on. Their features were free & the product was sticky.

outlore 1y ago

in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping, sports... it is better at finding documentation and technical articles and deprioritizing SEO spam

bananapub 1y ago

regular anecdata: it works great, at first I used to go back to Google a few times a month if Kagi didn't find something I was sure existed, but either Kagi got better or the web and/or Google got worse, because I don't go back to google anymore. easily worth 4 coffees a month just to not worry anymore about the direct consequences of my searches, and being able to shitcan garbage sites like pinboard.* while pranking wikipedia in my own search results is just gravy. they also have a search API now in beta which you can request access to; 2.5c/search.

discardedrefuse 1y ago

I'm afraid this is a case of "too little, too late". I've been a happy DDG user for many, many years. Sure, there's a learning curve when venturing out of google's cozy bubble. But once I figured it out, its been fantastic. Except the last few months. And, I can't stress this enough, its not DDG's fault. The results are relevant to my search, and at first glance seem to be what I'm looking for. But take more than 2 seconds to read, and you'll notice the websites themselves are trash heaps of AI slop, serving errors and mistakes. The human web is quickly shrinking out of existence. The last content silos of human expression have walled themselves in and are striking deals with the evil megacorps; pushing their shitty, error prone, planet killing, word prediction engines down everyone's throats. Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. Maybe they should pivot to web autopsy tools, not unlike Internet Archive. I wish the Kagi team well. I hope they succeed. And I really hope I'm wrong about the open web's grim future. But I'm probably not. And the AI arms race suggests the megacorps agree.

carlosjobim 1y ago
> Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index. 1. The Internet Archive 2. Anna's Archive 3. YouTube (if they're allowed to) That's more than enough knowledge and information.
- ckdot 1y ago
  4. Wikipedia Am I too optimistic?
saltysalt 1y ago
Great comment and you are absolutely right: AI slop content will (ironically) kill AI search. In my opinion, we have gone full circle and arrived back to human curation to provide quality search results.
Marsymars 1y ago
I don't think your post is without merit, but I often search for things where there's a single canonical source of truth, and no amount of AI slop or LLM results will be of interest. (e.g. this afternoon I've searched for a book title, for YouTube Premium pricing info, for git bisect documentation, for car collision stats, for speeding fine amounts, for some Linq documentation, and for some specific info on local parking).

temp0826 1y ago

I really like Kagi but am still holding out for a cheaper plan. If it were around the range of NextDNS (which I happily pay for) it would be a no-brainer. Wouldn't need or want any of the llm/other features.

dbalatero 1y ago

I got work to pay for Kagi out of my education budget, in case anyone else has that option available.

puff_pastry 1y ago

I tried Kagi and liked it for the most part. But I really wasn’t seeing the big benefit everyone’s claiming. Google is…fine? Maybe I just learned how to use it for what I do

sjs382 1y ago

One subtle (but important) way Kagi has improved my life is that I'm less "on guard" with search results. It's not perfect but I know that I'm more likely to find a result that serves me, rather than a result that's optimizing for an algorithm. And if I do come across something spammy, I know that telling Kagi to adjust a site lower (or remove a site from results) is just 2 clicks away. Even though it's a small thing, it's one I encountered with every Google search, manyamnymany times per day. Relieving that is worth more than $10/mo to me. I think that pricing is right, though—if it were more than $10/mo and I likely never would have tried it. The only thing I use Google Search for now is hyperlocal stuff, mostly I expect to interact with Maps result. Kagi Maps isn't even close.

theshrike79 1y ago
Now that I think about it, this really summarises why I keep paying for Kagi. I can just search something, glance at the results and pick the one that seems the closest one to whatever I'm looking for. With Google, I have to first go "is this an ad pretending to be a search result?", then I need to spend more time looking that the domain and preview to see if it's some listicle crap or AI slop. Only then I can click the result.
- ramenbytes 1y ago
  I had to use Google in a library while printing datasheets and clicked the first relevant looking result out of habit, only to be taken to the wrong part page. Closer inspection of the search results showed the small faint print of "Sponsored". I had forgotten about that since moving to Kagi.

ezst 1y ago

It's probably a good time to bump https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for those who haven't read it yet.

captain_coffee 1y ago
All the articles on that website are pure gold - I highly reccommend it! Recently launched a paid subscription with multiple extremely dense (1h+ reading time) posts per month.
phendrenad2 1y ago
For a dash of irony, I asked Google Gemini to summarize: The article "The Men Who Killed Google" by Ed Zitron argues that Google's search engine has declined due to a shift from a user-centric approach to a revenue-focused one. The author pinpoints Prabhakar Raghavan, with the support of CEO Sundar Pichai, as the key individuals behind this change. The article details a "code yellow" in February 2019, declared by the ads team, due to underperforming search revenue. This led to a conflict between the ads and finance teams, who wanted to boost revenue at any cost, and the search team, which prioritized user experience. Following this, Google implemented several changes, including a March 2019 update that rolled back quality improvements and a May 2019 ad redesign that made ads look like organic search results. In May 2020, Raghavan replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search. The author notes Raghavan's history at Yahoo, where he was head of search from 2005 to 2012, a period during which Yahoo's search market share significantly dropped. Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality.
- jesterson 1y ago
  > Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and growth over product quality. We can't complain as it is exactly whats asked from management of public companies innit? And that's why most products sucks nowadays

asdff 1y ago

At this point I feel like I know where all the content must lie that I am looking for domain wise. There is so much crap content out there on crap websites that discoverability is long dead anyhow. So, I basically just use google to search within domains I already know. Not sure how long this scales because like I said, my discovery rate has pretty much been zero for years now of new domains worth visiting. I'm sure they are out there but modern internet doesn't really let you find them short of finding a reference to them in some forum comment someplace, thanks to SEO arms race.

jiehong 1y ago

I like Kagi, but it feels a bit slow to display results. Like, the page loads very fast, but only with the search bar, and only then you get the results appearing after some loading. But it's acceptable. Image search is rather slow, though.

nikanj 1y ago
Google is much faster, because it's slower to show you results related to your search terms. It's much faster to just show you whatever slop their AI happened to cook up
ckdot 1y ago
I can confirm, and for me - even if I want like Kagi - I can’t tolerate it. I’ve read it depends on the Country you’re in. In Germany, where I’m from, loading time is up to 3 seconds - while on Google it’s almost instant.

freedomben 1y ago

Kagi sucks, this is a bad call. Just kidding, I love Kagi and I get a ton of value from it! I always like the saying that "the best ideas are obvious in hindsight", and that is absolutely how I feel about Kagi. Being able to uprank, downrank, and/or pinning, blacklisting domains is a killer feature, and something that would have been so easy for Google to have done at any time. Their approach to AI has also been perfect IMHO. From the beginning they didn't have the models provide answers, but (basically, as far as I can tell) RAGged the results and summarized (and included sources). I find myself using that feature all the time. Also the ! support and generally clean interface make for a great UX. I also very much appreciate their pro-rating and transparent billing, and the prices being pretty reasonable. The search results themselves are also better than Google (in no small part to my own fine-tuning of domains, i.e. downranking/upranking/blacklisting, but even just the vanilla results are better most of the time). It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time. I do routinely use !gm to open something in google maps though because Apple maps has not been a good experience for me, but I don't fault Kagi for that. If you haven't tried Kagi, you should. Also play around with the lenses feature while you're at it, cause you can find some cool stuff that way that otherwise doesn't surface in the results. Initial set up to make Kagi the default search engine is a little involved because you have to put your token in the query string, but the instructions are solid and once it's done, it's done. Very happy customer.

flkiwi 1y ago
As noted above, Kagi is the quietest but most useful subscription I have. The Kagi Assistant AI tool, with its access to pretty much any major model, is an enormous bonus.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  I really like the new Assistant update which guides you on the strengths and weaknesses of the selectable models and recommends a shortlist.
ninkendo 1y ago
> It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last time. I use !g once a week or so in Kagi, and 100% of the time, google’s results are worse. It’s usually something bogus I’m searching for, and there really isn’t anything to be said about it, but when I search google for it, I get a ton more junk that is totally unrelated to my query. Kagi’s results are better than google’s 100% of the time that I compare the two. It’s no exaggeration.

mhb 1y ago

What ever happened to that HN darling, Duck Duck Go?

saltysalt 1y ago

I built my own, it's easier than you might think: https://greppr.org/ https://greppr.org/

uticus 1y ago
would be interested in directions on how to do this myself. like, take existing bookmarks, make a crawler. nice work, btw
- saltysalt 1y ago
  Thanks! If I have time, I should write a how-to blog.
- commandersaki 1y ago
  I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar. I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when integrating it into a backend project that needed that functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult. Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
mbirth 1y ago
There’s also Marginalia: https://marginalia-search.com/ https://marginalia-search.com/
- saltysalt 1y ago
  Very nice!
busymom0 1y ago
What's the cost and architecture of running such a site and crawling all those pages?

phendrenad2 1y ago

I've been using Kagi for a long time, ever since Google decided to censor the internet.

rubslopes 1y ago

Kagi's bang game is so good. A few of my custom bangs: - !w: results from last week only - !y: results from yesterday and today only - !io: Assistant, but offline - !ig: Assistant, but for grammar correction - !itr: Assistant, but for correcting and organizing transcript text - !sh: Google shopping tab

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
xigoi 1y ago
> !w: results from last week only Did you just shadow the Wikipedia bang?
- rubslopes 1y ago
  Sorry, I was actually translating to English. The bangs that I use are in my mother language.

renegat0x0 1y ago

I dumped corporate search for my own index https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database. Screw you guys! I'm creating my own search with open source. ... but seriously it just augments my search.

dsign 1y ago

I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean, I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to support the local merchants as much as possible. Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.

furyofantares 1y ago
> Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well. I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
- busymom0 1y ago
  I face this issue too and can easily reproduce it. When typing in Google search, if I try to place the cursor, it will often register my click on the "microphone" icon due to a tiny delay of the search UI and that opens up the App Store page. When I switch back to Safari, it starts a never ending loop of sending me back to App Store page. I have to kill Safari to stop this.

srhtftw 1y ago

Kagi makes me want to learn Crystal¹ ¹ https://crystal-lang.org https://crystal-lang.org

kawfey 1y ago

for me kagi started out as a few searches and compared between it, DDG and google. and then i ran out of free searches, so I gave them $5. and then i ran out of $5 worth of searches so i kept renewing, $5 more. And again, and again. At this point I had all my defaults set to kagi because I loved it. Just the fact there are no ads or sponsored leads and I can more-or-less kill webpages completely generated and SEO'd with LLMs, I can actually do research again. and then I became a full subscriber, with orion, blacklists, I use the quick answer (LLM) and small web searching fruitfully, and joined their discord. It's been a long time since I fell head over heels for a technology product, and this being something so core to how I use the internet, it's a godsend. Enjoying it at least until they decide money is nice and growth is imperative, they go public, and enshittifies.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Capital causes big distortions: unreasonably cheap products from big companies and unreasonably cheap products from VC backed companies. Plus, habits and market power make it hard for people to switch en masse. Despite a tough market, Kagi succeeds the old way: with better products. Kagi proves plain old commerce - making a good thing and selling it - can win a fair fight against capital. Keep it up folks!

chipsrafferty 1y ago

I dumped Kagi for Google

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

i'll try it when i can pay $5 for unlimited search without AI results (not that it can't be useful; i'm just only interested in the search component).

eskatonic 1y ago

I've been using it for a little over a year now, and I just upgraded to the unlimited search subscription. Totally worth it.

cjk 1y ago

I made the same switch recently. Results from Kagi are night-and-day vs. Google. I do hope Kagi eventually has enough revenue to offer a more generous free tier, though (and without logging in). I fear it will remain a niche thing otherwise.

CuriousRose 1y ago

I love and pay for Kagi, but I am afraid paid search providers are in for a tough time. I am using search less and less, and directing more of my search (~90%) to Grok instead of Kagi now. The exception being price comparisons when online shopping. I want the exact information I'm after, in the way that I want it, immediately. Search cannot do this, unless they amalgamate into AI tools more and more, at which point they are in a different space altogether. Looks like an Uber eating Taxi's business situation again to me.

VHRanger 1y ago
You are aware that if you're paying for kagi you can just slap !ai at the end of any search query and it'll direct the query to kagi.com/assistant, right? And that you can set the model to answer those query as any of the grok models? Kagi isn't behind anyone else on this AI-powered search, in fact the assistant is nearly a strict superset of all the other ones. You can set the model to chatGPT, claude, gemini, grok, etc. And it'll use kagi search as a backend instead of, respectively, bing, brave, google, google+twitter.
- CuriousRose 1y ago
  Didn't know this thanks! Looks like only Grok 3 mini is supported on my standard plan currently, and I'll have limited tokens to use on Grok 4 (that I'm already paying for) on the Premium plan. I'll stick to my current setup for now but appreciate the input.
  - VHRanger 1y ago
    Fair enough. I encourage you to cycle through the models in the assistant once in a while to see if there's new ones to like. Kimi-k2 for instance was a positive surprise recently and is being added to your standard plan tonight as well as the brand new GPT-OSS models.
LeoPanthera 1y ago
[flagged]

jaredcwhite 1y ago

I dumped DuckDuckGo for Kagi. heh heh Seriously, I haven't used Google in years. I stopped even relying on Google as a decent backup option because it's gotten so-o-o bad. DDG has gotten incrementally worse simply because they're unable to fend off the reams of AI slop taking over everything (and it's also based in large part on Bing's index). I recently tried Kagi now that they have free and lower-cost tiers, and oh wow I can feel the difference. This is like 2010s-era search, and I mean that as a distinct compliment. I signed up and won't look back. The "Quick Peek" feature is truly fantastic…it feels like it's some sort of AI but it's simply just a good set of queries with good excerpts of REAL text from REAL links. Bravo!

7bit 1y ago

I use ChatGPT to get first ideas about what I want to know and then even with Bing, I find the sources that confirm what the AI told me. Maybe I should have looked at Kagi 10 years ago, but today I don't see any value to the cost of subbing to Kagi.

zipping1549 1y ago

It's hard to appreciate something like Kagi when the point of the whole interaction is to minimize the time of interaction itself. But the experience is night and day. I don't see myself going back to any other search engines like DuckDuckGo or, God forbid, Google.

Waterluvian 1y ago

I’m looking at the pricing tiers and I think it’s fine. But what would probably make me adopt it instantly is if I could set a max tier and it would just ramp up the tier each month if I hit it. Ie. I set it to Professional and at 101 searches I’m upgraded to Starter and then at 301 upgraded to Professional. If I forget about it or stop using it or use it far less, I’m not just shoveling money into yet another subscription I have to manage. This is because I don’t have consistent usage habits, and the price isn’t stopping me, the psychology of a monthly subscription I don’t use is.

handsclean 1y ago
Kagi automatically credits you for any month you don’t use it [1] [2]. They also charge only the price difference on upgrade [3], though personally I care about this less now that unlimited is $10/mo. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing [2]: https://kagi.com/changelog#6155 https://kagi.com/changelog#6155 [3]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#if-i-upgrade-my-plan-before-my-renewal-date-will-i-have-to-pay-the-full-amount-of-the-new-plan https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#if-i-upgrade-my-plan...
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month. And it doesn't look like there's any sort of "you only used 20 searches so we'll Free Tier you rather than $10 tier you this month".
  - handsclean 1y ago
    > Unfortunately this is next to no benefit. You're still paying monthly even if you don't use it. You just get a credit for a future month. This is not true, you don’t pay if you don’t use it. I think you’re assuming “credit” means some sort of redeemable voucher, but it’s account balance that automatically covers your next bill. Then at the end of the second unused month you get a credit that covers the third month, and so on.

dave_walko 1y ago

I keep trying and then moving on. Is there a guide on how to actually use all the features or maybe a quick set up guide? I find myself using JUST search and no customization. I have 0 issue with paying if I use it but need a guide or examples. Please share

unstyledcontent 1y ago

Is it just me or do a lot of these comments seem a little too positive? I've never seen a product this hyped on HN. I'm suspicious...

tamimio 1y ago

My problem with kagi is I don’t want my search history to be tied to an account, no matter what privacy assurance there, I have zero trust in anything that I don’t fully control.

nuker 1y ago
This. The article plainly states that too: "The obvious flaw here is that Kagi still records source IP addresses along with Privacy Pass searches, potentially de-anonymizing them"

p3rls 1y ago

i didn't like kagi either at first, but google has deteriorated so much with the constant hindustantimes .com listicles in every fucking search query it's become unusable