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I 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 Googl
by rpdillon 5mo ago
I 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 5mo 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 5mo agoYes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.
- subscribed 5mo agoAnd they're not exactly wrong.
- neya 5mo 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.
- lambdas 5mo agoI don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox
- wholinator2 5mo agoI'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
- nosioptar 5mo agoOn numerous occasions, I had issues with YouTube and Firefox that were fixed by changing the user agent to make it look like chrome. I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5mo agoThis is incompetence, not malice. YT devs would skip testing on Chrome if they could get away with it, but are forced to.
- account42 5mo agoIncompetence at scale is malice. We're talking about a mega-corporation gobbling up some of the brightest minds of our generation, not some garage startup that is barely able to keep the lights on.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5mo agoI'll agree with some of the brightest minds, but some Googlers I worked with were mediocre at best. Also, I don't really understand what your catchy phrase means. Google's management is being malicious by not forcing their employees to not be lazy?
- WarmWash 5mo agoNobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
- virgil_disgr4ce 5mo ago> Nobody wants to pay for anything Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
- joleyj 5mo ago[dead]
- hombre_fatal 5mo agoTry to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.
- mancerayder 5mo agoThat's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card. Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive. I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
- InsideOutSanta 5mo agoThey are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.
- nobodywasishere 5mo ago> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
- esperent 5mo agoHow broad will they be? Do you aim to ever have large scale indexing of the web?
- echelon 5mo agoHurry. Google might give up the ghost on its search product and maintaining indices on anything not geared for LLMs. I'm not sure antitrust will help you.
- jwr 5mo ago[flagged]
- redeeman 5mo agoyandex provides objectively better results for many things than google/ddg/bing
- pjc50 5mo agoThe results are kind of weird, but it does have one advantage: either nobody bothers to DMCA them, or they ignore it, or both.
- varispeed 5mo agoWestern companies also bought strategically important Nazi Germany industrial products in the 1930s because they were considered superior. Commercial convenience and technical quality are not moral or geopolitical absolution. Would you buy cheap quality gold if the Nazis were selling it knowing what it supports?
- qznc 5mo agoQwant and Ecosia try to build their own index: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-staan-a-european-search-index-that-aims-to-take-on-big-tech/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-sta...
- Kuinox 5mo agoI do not believe that Qwant can produce something good, they always were a company to extract money from the french taxpayer to wrap bing results.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo agoI use and enjoy Ecosia, it works pretty well for most use cases. Unfortunately it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage.
- chrischen 5mo agoOne the things I hate about Google is being forced to have location-aware search. I love how Kagi actually lets me override the country.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo agoI would enjoy a world where this was much more configurable.
- nosioptar 5mo ago> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie. Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
- voakbasda 5mo agoI have found few CEOs capable of telling nothing but the truth. Based on that, I am nearly certain that lying is part of the job description.
- JSR_FDED 5mo agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
- nosioptar 5mo agoI don't walk around recording every conversation I have. I'd also argue that calling a tech CEO a liar is far from extraordinary. It'd be extraordinary if I accused him of honesty.
- freehorse 5mo agoOnly problem is that the original quote you commented on was not kagi lying, as they actually say the same here https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search You said that you were not surprised that kagi was lying, only that they were not in this occasion. When you accuse somebody of lying it makes sense to provide at least some evidence of that. At the very least, they are very clear about which indexes they use and how.
- jmull 5mo agoI think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that. The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny. Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
- yard2010 5mo agoIf anything, this makes me want to pay them twice. Once for search and once for exploiting google.
- nunez 5mo agoI don't think they papered over this? They've been transparent about paying to scrape other indices while they work on their own.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago"... didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to ..." "... I thought their aspirations were higher ..." It sounds like the decision to send search queries (and money) to Kagi was based at least in part on reasons other than the quality of the search results This is interesting psychology What if all (cf. only sum of) the money sent to Kagi was actually invested in an alternative way to search the web without using an index created by a corporation or a non-profit with commercial subsidiaries Defensive HN replies may focus on the quality of the search results from commercial indexes, e.g., "Google is the best. That's why everyone 'chooses' it."^1 But if the consumer is choosing Kagi based on other reasons, e.g., "investing in additional search infrastructure", then clearly there is more to these decisions For example, some search engines claim to be planting trees or some such. Nothing to do with the quality of the results 1. Apple is being paid 20+ billion for choosing Google as the default in iOS but Apple's choice is not based on the money. Yes, that makes sense
- rpdillon 5mo agoI'm into sustainable, long-term vision. I feel like the plea for Google to make their index open has a lot of good points, but I also think it will go nowhere. So I could view Kagi strictly as a service, like a guy who mows my lawn, but part of the reason I'd pay for search is to build an alternative to all the crap out there. I stopped using Google search years ago and think DDG works Just Fine (I know there are detractors). I get DDG's play and it makes sense to me. I guess I need to reconsider what I think I'm paying for when I give Kagi money. I do think their search results are better, but generally not enough that an extra subscription is worth it.
- skmurphy 5mo agoI think your statement is correct in the absence of a clear statement of direction and/or product launch by Kagi. I tried Kagi for a year and came away disillusioned as you were.
- account42 5mo agoWe really should be investing in a public index infrastructure instead of yet another private search company that puts on a nice face while they are the under dog.