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Kagi Assistants
- jryio 11mo agoI think there's a very important nugget here unrelated to agents: Kagi as a search engine is a higher signal source of information than Google page rank and ad sense funded model. Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth. > We found many, many examples of benchmark tasks where the same model using Kagi Search as a backend outperformed other search engines, simply because Kagi Search either returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher, or because the other results were not polluting the model’s context window with more irrelevant data. > This benchmark unwittingly showed us that Kagi Search is a better backend for LLM-based search than Google/Bing because we filter out the noise that confuses other models.
- bitpush 11mo ago> Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth. I'm not convinced about this. If the strategy is "lets return wikipedia.org as the most relevant result", that's not sophisticated at all. Infact, it only worked for a very narrow subset of queries. If I search for 'top luggages for solo travel', I dont want to see wikipedia and I dont know how kagi will be any better.
- VHRanger 11mo ago(Kagi staff here) Generally we do particularly better on product research queries [1] than other categories, because most poor review sites are full of trackers and other stuff we downrank. However there aren't public benchmarks for us to brag about on product search, and frankly the simpleQA digression in this post made it long enough it was almost cut. 1. (Except hyper local search like local restaurants)
- viraptor 11mo agoThe wrote "returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher" and not "wikipedia.org as the most relevant result" - that's an important distinction. There are many irrelevant Wikipedia pages.
- clearleaf 11mo agoMaybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results. Hey Google, Pinterest results are probably messing with AI crawlers pretty badly. I bet it would really help the AI if that site was deranked :) Also if this really is the case, I wonder what an AI using Marginalia for reference would be like.
- viraptor 11mo ago> Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results. It's likely they can filter the results for their own agents, but will leave other results as they are. Half the issue with normal results are their ads - that's not going away.
- sroussey 11mo agoThere are several startups providing web search solely for ai agents. Not sure any agent uses Google for this.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- clearleaf 11mo agoMaybe we should learn to pass reverse-turing tests and pretend to be LLMs so we can use this stuff lol.
- MangoToupe 11mo ago> Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results. They spent the last decade and a half encouraging the proliferation of garbage via "SEO". I don't see this reversing.
- idiotsecant 11mo ago>Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results. Unlikely. There are very few people willing to pay for Kagi. The HN audience is not at all representative of the overall population. Google can have really miserable search results and people will still use it. It's not enough to be as good as google, you have to be 30% better than google and still free in order to convert users. I use Kagi and it's one of the few services I am OK with a reoccurring charge from because I trust the brand for whatever reason. Until they find a way to make it free, though, it can't replace google.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 11mo agoMakes me wish the Kagi API was available and not prohibitively priced: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html
- daft_pink 11mo agoNot for nothing, but I wish there was an anonymized ai built into a kagi that was able to have normal conversation discussion about sexual topics or search for pornographic topics like a safe search off function. I understand the safety needs around things LLM should not build nuclear weapons, but it would be nice to have a frontier model that could write or find porn.
- VHRanger 11mo agoYou'll want de-censored models like cydonia for that -- can be found on openrouter, or through something like msty
- HotGarbage 11mo agoI really wish Kagi would focus on search and not waste time and money on slop.
- 0x1ch 11mo agoThis is building on top of the existing core product, so the output is directly tied to the quality of their core search results being fed into the assistants. I overall really enjoy all of their A.I products, using their prompt assistant frequently for quick research tasks. It does miss occasionally, or I feel like "that was a waste of tokens" due to a bad response or something, but overall I like supporting Kagi's current mission in the market of AI tools.
- VHRanger 11mo agoIt's not -- this was posted literally yesterday as a position statement on the matter (see early paragraphs in OP): https://blog.kagi.com/llms https://blog.kagi.com/llms Kagi is treating LLMs as potentially useful tools to be used with their deficiencies in mind, and with respect of user choices. Also, we're explicitly fighting against slop: https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop
- saghm 11mo agoIs there anyone selling LLM tools that would claim they aren't keeping their deficiencies in mind or admit that they're ignoring user choices? I'm not saying you are or aren't wasting money on slop, because I have no way of knowing, but it's hard to imagine someone who is concerned about a company acting in bad finding this compelling.
- drewda 11mo agoWhat they saying in this post is that they are designing these LLM-based features to support search. The post describes how their use-case is finding high quality sources relevant to a query and providing summaries with references/links to the user (not generating long-form "research reports") FWIW, this aligns with what I've found ChatGPT useful for: a better Google, rather than a robotic writer.
- itomato 11mo agoI'm seeing a lot of investment in these things that have a short shelf life. Agents/assistants but nothing more.
- VHRanger 11mo agoWe're building tools that we find useful, and we hope others find it too. See notes on our view of LLMs and their flaws: https://blog.kagi.com/llms https://blog.kagi.com/llms
- ugurs 11mo agoWhy do you think the shelf life is short?
- itomato 11mo agoThe implementation technologies are shifting. Model access, training, fine-tuning, MCP, they change week-by-week along with the root need.
- natemcintosh 11mo agoAs a Kagi subscriber, I find this to be mostly useful. I'd say I do about 50% standard Kagi searches, 50% Kagi assistant searches/conversations. This new ability to change the level of "research" performed can be genuinely useful in certain contexts. That said, I probably expect to use this new "research assistant" once or twice a month.
- VHRanger 11mo agoI'd say the most useful part for me is appending ? / !quick / !research directly from the browser search bar to a query
- jen729w 11mo agoI love your `?` mechanic. Brilliantly simple. Thank you from a very happy customer.
- vunuxodo 11mo agoSeconded, I love that the AI feature stays away from me until and unless I specifically ask for it.
- tshaddox 11mo agoI have yet to understand when to use `?` versus `!quick`. The former is much less disruptive since it's very fast and displays an answer above the normal search results. And I haven't played with them enough to know what kinds of things `!quick` is meaningfully better at than `?`. Do you have any pointers?
- adriantoine 11mo agoSame, I'm quite happy with it. I first subscribed because I was fed up with the promoted results in Google but now I find their assistant searches actually useful too.
- milch 11mo agoI've already used the Research assistant half a dozen times today and am super happy with the outcomes. It does seem to be more trigger happy with doing multiple searches based on information it found in earlier results, and I've found the resulting output to be reasonably accurate. Some models in particular seem to never want to do more than one search, and you can tell the output in those cases is often not very useful if the sources partially contradict each other or don't provide enough detail. The best I've found to avoid this is o3 pro, but o3 pro is very slow and expensive. If the Research assistant gets 85% of the results in half the time as o3 pro...
- ceroxylon 11mo agoKagi reminds me of the original search engines of yore, when I could type what I want and it would appear, and I could go on with my work/life. As for the people who claim this will create/introduce slop, Kagi is one of the few platforms where they are actively fighting against low quality AI generated content with their community fueled "SlopStop" campaign.[0] Not sponsored, just a fan. Looking forward to trying this out. [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
- iLoveOncall 11mo agoThe fact that people applaud Kagi taking the money they gave for search to invest it in bullshit AI products and spit on Google's AI search at the same time tells you everything you need to know about HackerNews.
- VHRanger 11mo agoWe're explicitly conscious of the bullshit problem in AI and we try to focus on only building tools we find useful. See position statement on the matter yesterday: https://blog.kagi.com/llms https://blog.kagi.com/llms
- iLoveOncall 11mo agoYour words don't match your actions. And to be clear you shouldn't build the tools that YOU find useful, you should build the tools that your users, which pay for a specific product, find useful. You could have LLMs that are actually 100% accurate in their answers that it would not matter at all to what I am raising here. People are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools, they're paying for search. If you think otherwise, prove it, make subscriptions entirely separate for both products.
- freediver 11mo agoKagi founder here. We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. Life is too short for that. I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist. I also like that Star Trek is still 90% human drama, and 10% technology quitely working in the background in service of humans - and this is the kind of future I would like to build towards and leave for my children. Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it, and that is not going anywhere. edit: seeing the first two (negative) replies to my comment made me smile. HN is tough crowd to please :) The thing is similar to how I did paid search and went all in with my own money when everyone thought I was crazy, I did that out of own need and need for my family to have search done right and am doing the same now with AI, wanting to have it done right as a product. What you see here is the result of this group of humans that call themself Kagi best effort - not more, not less.
- bananapub 11mo agoregular reminder: kagi is - above all else - a really really good search engine, and if google/etc, or even just the increasingly horrific ads-ocracy make you sad, you should definitely give it a go - the trial is here: https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing if you like it, it's only $10/month, which I regrettably spend on coffee some days.
- skydhash 11mo agoI now that the price haven’t changed for a while, but I would pay for unlimited search and no AI.
- Dusseldorf 11mo agoWell, good news. Unlimited search was $10 before. Then they added the AI access for free but, and this part is key, did not make any requirement that you have to use it.
- iLoveOncall 11mo ago> above all else What they've been building for the past couple of years makes it blindingly clear that they are definitely not a search engine *above all else*. Don't believe me? Check their CEO's goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45998846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45998846
- debo_ 11mo agoI think you have a problem.
- AuthAuth 11mo agoKagi is already expensive for a search engine. Now I know part of my subscription is going towards funding AI bullshit. And I know the cost of that AI bullshit will get jacked up in price and force Kagi sub price up as well. I'm so tired of AI being forced into everything.
- progval 11mo agoThese are only available on the Ultimate tier. If (like me) you don't care about the LLMs then there is no reason to be on the Ultimate tier so you don't pay for it.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago>expensive for a search engine. As in, not "free"? Either way, I guess we'll see how this affects the service.
- AuthAuth 11mo agoThis is $10 USD a month to have a search engine. $5 is a more reasonable price but 300 searches is far to little to be useful. Converted to my currency this is over 2 hours of wages for a search engine.
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoI see. $10 is half an hour of minimum wage in my state, and around 1.25 hours of federal minimum wage. For anyone who hasn't been laid off in the US, it's a pittance for US developers. Sounds like Kagi might need to implement some better regional pricing.
- xigoi 11mo agoUnfortunately they can’t implement regional pricing because they have very thin margins.
- ranyume 11mo agoI used quick research and it was pretty cool. A couple of caveats to keep in mind: 1. It answers using only the crawled sites. You can't make it crawl a new page. 2. It doesn't use a page' search function automatically. This is expected, but doesn't hurt to take that in mind. I think i'd be pretty useful. You ask for recent papers on a site and the engine could use hackernews' search function, then kagi would crawl the page.
- Rehanzo 11mo agoWhat exactly do you mean by "You can't make it crawl a new page"? It has the ability to read webpages, if that is what you're referring to
- moebrowne 11mo agoYup, pasting in a URL will cause it to fetch the page.
- ranyume 11mo agoThis query's results are wrong: """ site:https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=arxiv&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... recent developments in ai? """ Also when testing, if you know a piece of information exists in a website, but the information doesn't show up when you run the query, you don't have the tools to steer the engine to work more effectively. In a real scenario you don't know what the engine missed but it'd be cool to steer the engine in different ways to see how that changes the end result. For example, if you're planning a trip to japan, maybe you want the AI to only be shown a certain percentage of categories (nature, night life, or places too), alongside controlling how much you want to spend time crawling, maybe finding more niche information or more related information.
- everlier 11mo agoTheir agents can natively read files and webpages from URLs. It's so convenient, I've implemented identical feature for our product at work.
- smallerfish 11mo agoI tried a prompt that consistently gets Gemini to badly hallucinate, and it responded correctly. Prompt: "At a recent SINAC conference (approx Sept 2025) the presenters spoke about SINAC being underresourced and in crisis, and suggested better leveraging of and coordination with NGOs. Find the minutes of the conference, and who was advocating for better NGO interaction." The conference was actually in Oct 2024. The approx date in parens causes Gemini to create an entirely false narrative, which includes real people quoted out of context. This happens in both Gemini regular chat and Gemini Deep Research (in which the narrative gets badly out of control). Kagi reasonably enough answers: "I cannot find the minutes of a SINAC conference from approximately September 2025, nor any specific information about presenters advocating for better NGO coordination at such an event."
- VHRanger 11mo agoAh yes we have some benchmarks on this sort of misguided prompt trap, so it should perform well on this
- adriantoine 11mo agoI also tried two hallucinations that I've seen in the latest Gemini and Claude. The first one is the famous "how many r in strawberry" and another one is asking about king sacrifice in chess where most LLMs tell you it's a very powerful move and tell you how to do it (obviously a nonsense since the point of the game is to protect the king). Kagi actually got those two correct, explaining how losing your king means losing your chess game, which is quite impressive.
- sometimes_all 11mo agoI tried both these prompts (along with the SINAC one as per GP) in Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3, and they both answered correctly for all three. Both also provided context on the chess question as well.
- VHRanger 11mo agoAll of this will depend on the settings on the model (reasoning effort, temperature, top_k,etc) as well. Which is why you should have benchmarks that are a bit broader generally (>10 questions for a personal setup) otherwise you overfit to noise
- hatthew 11mo agoI'm a little confused about what the point of these are compared to the existing features/models that kagi already has. Are they just supposed to be a one-stop shop where I don't have to choose which model to use? When should I use kagi quick/research assistant instead of, e.g. kimi? I tried the quick assistant a bit (don't have ultimate so I can't try research), and while the writing style seems slightly different, I don't see much difference in information compared to using existing models through the general kagi assistant interface.
- VHRanger 11mo agoQuick assistant is a managed experience, so we can add features to it in a controlled way we can't for all the models we otherwise support at once. For now Quick assistant has a "fast path" answer for simple queries. We can't support the upgrades we want to add in there on all the models because they differ in tool calling, citation reliability, context window, ability to not hallucinate, etc. The responding model is currently qwen3-235B from cerebras but we want to decouple the user expectations from that so we can upgrade it down the road to something else. We like Kimi, but couldn't get a stable experience for Quick on it at launch with current providers (tool calling unreliability)
- hatthew 11mo agoThat makes sense, thanks!
- paradox460 11mo agoOne thing I've wished for is the ability to use my kagi AI features in my editor (currently Zed)
- Rehanzo 11mo agoWe've got an assistant API coming soon™
- teecha 11mo agoCould Kagi Ultimate be a good replacement for ChatGPT? A subscription there would save me some money if it was similar. Just recently started paying for Kagi search and quite love it.
- everlier 11mo agoMostly depends on which features are most important for you. I'm a SWE, so using their Assistant for Web RAG nearly exclusively for work-related stuff and for most of my personal queries. I'm rarely using multi-modal content, mostly sticking to text. They support many providers and new notable models are typically rolled out only a few days after release which is always great to test out. I have a standalone subscription for coding agent LLM. If above aligns - might be a good choice.
- teecha 11mo agoI do a lot of help with spreadsheets and some ongoing threads in ChatGPT. I’m an Assistant Principal so use it to help me get better with spreadsheets, churn through complex formulas, and some other miscellaneous tasks for feedback and assistance. Definitely use a lot of screenshots of things to also help consume info in there. I think I might be stuck with both for a while as I’m not sure Kagi can quite fill this gap yet.
- coffeefirst 11mo agoThat’s what I did and I’m pretty happy with it. I just fall back to something free on the rare occasion I want an image generated (tbh, mostly emojis of my dog).
- Atotalnoob 11mo agoMostly, yes. You have a spend limit, but the assistant has dozens of of models
- aitchnyu 11mo agoI use regular Kagi assistant for most of my questions. I use Openrouter chat to chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT 5 at the same time and continue only the productive conversation. My OR account is for my coding agent and its completely pay as you go, no fixed monthly costs.
- nsonha 11mo agoI use perplexity a lot and pretty much exclusively with "deep research" on. Is this on the same level? Because Perplexity often take more than a minute, and this is only 20 secs.
- milch 11mo agoA query I ran earlier ran for about 70s, and did 12 web searches and 2 site fetches.
- Havoc 11mo agoAn employee above said they’re using cerebas so time may not be a good measure of thinking effort here
- Rehanzo 11mo agoFor most queries it is around the same level. Time spent isn't always the best tell of quality, particularly when the search engine used returns little noise
- nsonha 11mo agoI don't think the reasoning level is what makes it for me. I am treating this as a search engine. I want the thing to fetch/read from index as many pages as possible. Either that or as many agentic tool calls as needed. That takes time.
- spott 11mo agoI want a kagi mcp server I can use with ChatGPT or Claude. I don’t want to use kagi ultimate (I use too many other features of ChatGPT and Claude), I just want to be able to improve the results of my AI models with kagi.
- moebrowne 11mo agoI believe this is what you're after: https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
- VHRanger 11mo agoWhat ChatGPT / Claude features do you use that we don't support? We have an MCP server I can give you access to for search immediately. Down the line a search API and chat completions API to our assistant in the pipeline.
- DontForgetMe 11mo agoAwesome, a search engine with an LLM / AI! I hadn't been sure about Kagi before, but this has really swung it for me, I'm off to sign up post haste. It's a revolutionary move that really shows how fast ahead of the competition Kagi is, how dexterous their fingers at the pulse of humanity, how bold.
- bryanhogan 11mo agoI really enjoy the tone/style of this announcement/blog post. It doesn't feel like it's overhyping something or using "salesy" language. I wish we would see this more often from companies.
- Computer0 11mo agoI'm struggling to find a usecase for the quick assistant vs Kimi K2. Does anyone know any particular situations where the Assisstant is better than the model? I am not seeing how it is different than a model. Only speaking in regards to quick.