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I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasion
by d12bb 4mo ago
I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
- vitally3643 4mo agoI've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now. If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it. It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way. Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoIt was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
- piva00 4mo agoSame to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
- theshrike79 4mo agoIt's good when you know you just want the meat of whatever you're looking for and KNOW every page answering your issue has massive amounts of fluff around it. Something like "how can I access the root filesystem of proxmox?" and you'll get an instant answer instead of a link to the whole ass Proxmox documentation.
- data-ottawa 4mo agoI mostly interact with their AI through bangs. An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary. !ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results. I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search. Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
- seviu 4mo agoThe small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration. I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
- daft_pink 4mo agoI know right. It’s simple. Google pays them over a billion dollars and Kagi doesn’t.
- BirAdam 4mo agoHowever, Apple does allow DDG, Ecosia, and Bing. They just don’t allow Brave or Kagi.
- trollbridge 4mo agoEasily fixed by installing Brave Browser.
- alex1138 4mo agoI get annoyed at Whatsapp and see it as a case for antitrust but apparently Google is just as guilty of this
- xp84 4mo agoUsing third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy. Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
- amelius 4mo agoKagi uses Yandex which is Russian.
- mystraline 4mo agoYandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall". Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies. I just use the tools that work.
- tokai 4mo ago[flagged]
- onetokeoverthe 4mo ago[dead]
- subscribed 4mo ago[flagged]
- troad 4mo ago[flagged]
- subscribed 4mo ago[flagged]
- troad 4mo agoThe US attacks on Iran is a different event altogether from the Israeli genocide in Gaza. You're conflating discrete conflicts with different parties and different modes of engagement. The US attack on that school is atrocious and I condemn it. While possibly a war crime, it does not meet the definition of genocide, unlike Israel's conduct in Gaza, which certainly does. There's no evidence of recent US conduct amounting to genocide (much historical evidence vis-a-vis American Indians though). To the extent you wish to penalise complicity in genocide, go for it, but I will notice if you're oddly selective in which genocides you apply that standard to, and which you don't. (Which countries traded with Burma during the Rohingya genocide? Do you know? Do you care?) > brown children What does the children's colour have to do with anything at all? Do we grade the severity of war crimes by the (perceived? assigned?) race of the victim? Horrific thought.
- Izmaki 4mo agoI'm curious: what is your use-case for a search engine that justifies Kagi over free search engines? Are you not finding your results on page one, first try, with other engines?
- mjamesaustin 4mo agoThis is constantly the case, anytime I Google something more obscure than the front page of a top 50 website. Even when Google gets it right (often they don't) I have to wade through a bunch of AI slop and countless ads. After that, it's dozens of SEO referral link sites trying to sell me garbage. Kagi gives me better results by default, no ads, and I can customize results by prioritizing or blocking different domains. Very much worth the small price.
- subscribed 4mo ago[flagged]
- vitally3643 4mo agoI grew up in the 90s, in the fourth grade we spent a whole week learning how to effectively use search engines and what research even is. So I have some pretty solid opinions on what makes a functional search engine. A good search engine shows you the results for exactly the query you entered. A good search engine does not discard your entire query to show you what it thinks you meant. A good search engine supports and respects modifiers and advanced queries: AND, OR, NOT, quoted strings, plus and minus. It gives you advanced parameters like publish/retreival date, categories, origin. If there are no results for your exact, specific query, a good search engine shows you zero results. A good search engine does not waste your time with literally infinite fake results tangentially related to what the engine decided you meant instead of honoring your query. I gleefully pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine. It does all the things a good search engine should do. It does not do the things that bad search engines do. Kagi has put great effort into designing a search engine that maximises your ability to find the thing you're looking for. Because I pay Kagi with cold hard cash, I do not have to instead pay Kagi by consuming thousands of fake "sponsored" search results. I enter a query, and Kagi gives me precisely the results for that query and nothing more. It's really that simple. I pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine, and most other search engines are not good. Google isn't even a search engine anymore. It's a heuristic ad delivery mechanism that happens to also surface indexed web content. Your query is a suggestion and is usually disregarded completely and replaced with a more lucrative query. Google hasn't supported advanced search in over a decade. No plus or minus or quoted strings make any difference. I heartily encourage you to learn about search engines and try one. I doubt very strongly that you've ever used a proper search engine. You've most likely only engaged with heuristic ad machines before. Try a search engine, you'll never want to go back.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoI tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge
- Forgeties79 4mo agoUsed it a few times today, first hits were what I was looking for which is definitely not what I experienced last time. So far so good!
- jvidalv 4mo agoI mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially. I only use Google to search for reddit posts. The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
- captainbland 4mo agoI do try to search but often the results are pretty low quality.
- wongarsu 4mo agoIf you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries
- blazarquasar 4mo agoWe must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web. Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made. According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month. I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
- treis 4mo agoCan you give an example of your searches? I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
- blazarquasar 4mo agoAlong those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481 By “their own index” i assume you mean training data? If so, thats a big part of the issue for me. As an example, if I ask an LLM for some part of the Zig stdlib, I will get an incorrect answer 10/10 times because it will refuse to look up the latest documentation.
- kimos 4mo agoMy wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
- prism56 4mo agoI enjoy my Kagi usage but there are still a few things I use the !g or !gm bangs for. Shopping and finding locations is definitely one.
- kimos 4mo agoYes, I am also hopelessly tied to Google Maps. Which I think is relatively distinct from web search, IMO.
- kqr 4mo agoWhat are you missing from a decent OpenStreetMap frontend like OsmAnd+? Only business metadata or something else too?
- kimos 4mo agoBusinesses and reviews mostly. Not navigation. I participated actively in the Google Local Guides. I depend on the content from there to discover stuff geographically. But I’m also aware reviews and interactions and even images that look human can’t really be counted on anymore.
- vladde 4mo agoKagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.
- justinclift 4mo agoThe Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since. It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
- vitaflo 4mo agoGaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.
- piva00 4mo agoAstroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer. Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
- oakesm9 4mo agoWhy does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.
- TylerE 4mo agoWell, for one thing at these user numbers using it is close to de-anonymizing yourself.
- jeorb 4mo agoI hope it stays small compared to the tech giants. I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.
- rpdillon 4mo agoI paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
- Matl 4mo agoI am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
- rpdillon 4mo agoYes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.
- subscribed 4mo agoAnd they're not exactly wrong.
- neya 4mo agoThey also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
- hathym 4mo agomy prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft
- ivanmontillam 4mo agoI'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox. We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
- bitomule 4mo agoAnother huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.
- kgwxd 4mo agoNeeding to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.
- hagerman 4mo agoThey do have something called Privacy Pass that lets you search using an untraceable cryptographic token instead: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoI’ve seen this, but can’t understand it. - they issue you a code when you are logged in - they track that code for multiple use - all they can do is claim that the code was securely generated and it isn’t just an API KEY to your account… but they’re already telling you it is database tracked How can you have any even the 1/2 best proof it isn’t just an API KEY that directly links to your account? I see no trust path other than “us, bro”.
- SolarNet 4mo agoI mean its as private as VPNs are and people pay for those too.
- nsagent 4mo agoMullvad lets you have completely anonymous accounts. No log VPNs like ProtonVPN have third party verification (though some metadata has been shared with auhtorities). Does Kagi have the equivalent of either of these privacy mechanisms? Even with the limitations of the ProtonVPN approach, that would be an improvement. As far as I've seen Kagi has no equivalent: it's closed source and has no regular third party audits for privacy.
- account42 4mo agoExcept for a VPN the the VPN company only sees who you are connecting to and usually not the decrypted HTTPS streams. That's defense in depth.
- neya 4mo agoOnce in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
- LAC-Tech 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hiccuphippo 4mo agoYandex also censors political things. Your best bet is to search everywhere because everyone is "compromised" from some side.
- LAC-Tech 4mo agoYes, but it censors different political things. Which is why I do exactly what you describe.
- gjm11 4mo agoKagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have. [1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases. [2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
- agotterer 4mo agoI subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
- steve-atx-7600 4mo agoLocal business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.
- andrelaszlo 4mo agoSame here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
- Fnoord 4mo agoI'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it. I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber). What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
- espadrine 4mo agoI use Le Chat as default search engine, using this search engine string: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%20to%20webpages%20that%20best%20solve%20this%20search%20engine%20query%2C%20ordered%20by%20relevance%3A%0A%0A%s%0A%0A-%20Search%20in%20the%20language%20of%20the%20query%0A-%20Your%20answer%20should%20only%20include%20the%20list%2C%20no%20intro%0A-%20Use%20an%20ordered%20list%2C%20with%20a%20source%20marker%0A-%20Add%20a%20quick%20summary%20that%20answers%20the%20query%20afterwards https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%... (In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.) A negative is the high latency. (Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.) [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-frances-mistral-built-a-14-billion-ai-empire-by-not-being-american/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc... [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo-china-behind-in-ai-is-a-fairy-tale-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...
- isodev 4mo agoI like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.
- pants2 4mo agoI have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower. Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
- idiotsecant 4mo agoI find the opposite, I can count on one hand the number of times I've deliberately resorted to using google search in the past year* *except for maps results, Kagi is absolute hot trash for maps. I automatically append !gm to the end of all mappy-type searches. I wish Kagi would just kill their map product and redirect to google maps.
- princevegeta89 4mo agoI started hating Google Search because of its relentless AI dumps on the results page, but I have also stopped using it at all, more or less. I got the Google AI Pro plan, which gives Gemini access by default with generous limits, and also includes free credits, code assist in VS Code and other editors, and also to Gemini CLI. And I'm just simply using that for all of my needs. It seems to work quite well so far. I see how Google Search is not relevant for me anymore.
- martinsb 4mo agoDoes Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.
- tokai 4mo agoHN users really hate this piece of truth.
- jeorb 4mo agoThe customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine. You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever. Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality. The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.
- gspr 4mo agoI've tried it, too. Loved it. Was nearly ready to pay for it. Then I learned that they source their data from Yandex. To hell with that! I'll rather get my search results on paper via carrier pigeon than support the rape of Ukraine. Do not fund the Kremlin!
- plutokras 4mo agoMy annual Kagi subscription lapsed last week, so I decided to see how DuckDuckGo is doing these days. The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively. Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason. I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.
- drcongo 4mo agoNot something I want to see happen, because I love Kagi, but it surprises me that Apple haven't already bought them.
- hojinkoh 4mo agoEarly Kagi adopter here. I'm actually not aware of most of its AI/LLM features, which is part of why I like it. I noticed Kagi translation when the LinkedIn translator became a meme, but I don't really use any of these features. That's to say, if one day Kagi also forces AI search summary down my throat and hide the search results, I will definitely leave.