11 ms·
Back to Kagi
- nemomarx 3mo agoHow'd you solve the Arabic issue? (the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
- Leptonmaniac 3mo ago[flagged]
- throw-qqqqq 3mo ago> but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel Pardon?
- elashri 3mo agoAuthor here (I didn't submit the post though) Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity. Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too) Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
- MollyRealized 3mo agoCould you share the custom CSS you refer to?
- elashri 3mo agoHere it is https://gist.github.com/MohamedElashri/f57894fc368d06d1e448fa43a64bc4db https://gist.github.com/MohamedElashri/f57894fc368d06d1e448f...
- hyperionultra 3mo agoDoes search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
- imzadi 3mo agoLLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.
- fassssst 3mo agoWell you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.
- threetonesun 3mo agoSo a slower search engine with fewer results?
- hilariously 3mo agoDelivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.
- dexterdog 3mo agoDelivery food is worse everywhere I've ever had it.
- hs86 3mo agoCompared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.
- athenot 3mo agoHappy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.
- gaws 3mo agoWhy not use another browser?
- poetril 3mo agoI feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoI dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.
- recursive 3mo agoI've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
- al_borland 3mo agoOver the last 2 months I’ve started to hit AI limits. I don’t feel like I’m using it more than before, but my usage went from $1-2/month to $9.50… where I’m actively avoiding usage to not hit my $10 limit halfway through the month.
- northhex 3mo agoDo you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.
- ijustlovemath 3mo agoCurious what your distribution is, as a ~400 person that thought they did more.
- LucasOe 3mo agoI do between 2,000 and 3,000 searches per month and have never hit a limit.
- HelloUsername 3mo agohtml.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript
- starvar2 3mo agoDoes Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
- Schnouki 3mo agoUsing it in France: yes, it does.
- optionalsquid 3mo agoIt probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs
- brodo 3mo agoIt works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.
- menno-sh 3mo agoI find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's
- fabioborellini 3mo agoFinland: no
- Marsymars 3mo agoFor things to buy yes, though I’ll usually stick “Canada” into the search term. Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.
- imzadi 3mo agoI've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.
- theusus 3mo agoKagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
- Varelion 3mo agoI really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
- Gualdrapo 3mo agoMe too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search. The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
- levkk 3mo agoKagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be. For a price of two cups of coffee.
- moebrowne 3mo agoAI slop is actively down-ranked based on community feedback: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
- Diti 3mo agoI extensively report obvious slop websites. Most of them get rejected/marked as “not AI”. That initiative is cute on paper, but they apparently do not trust the community.
- o_m 3mo agoI've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- optionalsquid 3mo agoYeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
- dmrivers 3mo agoI would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
- eloisius 3mo agoIf you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
- vivzkestrel 3mo ago- start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
- optionalsquid 3mo agoI doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies. However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
- amazingamazing 3mo agoI have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
- everfrustrated 3mo agoI feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search. But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI. I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan. I wish them the best but timing is a b**.
- cavoirom 3mo agoBeside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.
- moebrowne 3mo agoKagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust
- shellfishgene 3mo agoI like the assistant, but now with new fair use billing I run out after 2 weeks with the 25$/month plan. I guess the problem is not that Kagi is expensive but that the big providers subsidize plans more than Kagi could afford, so it seems expensive. Because I have to switch after the 2 weeks anyway I kinda stopped using Kagi assistant and will probably downgrade the plan.
- cavoirom 3mo agowow you're on the higher plan than me. I think Kimi K2.6 (reasoning) is enough for Assistant. The premium model will burn credit too fast.
- mihaaly 3mo agoI think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)
- 3mo ago
- inclinq 3mo ago[flagged]
- johen8 3mo agoWhat made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those
- Cider9986 3mo agoBrave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.
- samuell 3mo agoI'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.
- prh8 3mo agoKagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html
- MattTheRealOne 3mo agoSame. I have been using Brave Search since its launch and it has been great in my experience. I also love that it has its own index. I have tried the free Kagi trial and it seems to work well, but I can't justify the cost for little to no benefit and it still depends on bigger search engines for indexing.
- joshstrange 3mo agoI've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?". I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
- dschroer 3mo agoI have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
- joshstrange 3mo agoYeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited). The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.
- eipi10_hn 3mo agoYou can pay per year ($54 for 3600 searches/year) and see how far you can go in a year.
- mathw 3mo agoYou could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
- 3mo ago
- cavoirom 3mo agoOn Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.
- eloisius 3mo agoI use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.
- selfawareMammal 3mo agoHow about Kagi using YANDEX?
- SadTrombone 3mo agoKagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
- haburka 3mo agoI have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough
- neysofu 3mo agoJust to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats: Jul 2026 939 Jun 2026 1,317 May 2026 1,924 Apr 2026 2,537 Mar 2026 2,183 Feb 2026 2,038 Jan 2026 2,392
- Groxx 3mo agoYep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't. Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM? Instead I just cancelled.
- freehorse 3mo agoIt depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.
- Novosell 3mo agoI seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage. Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
- 3mo ago
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoI don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.
- drcongo 3mo agoKagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.
- browningstreet 3mo agoKagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results
- coldpie 3mo agoI've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
- taude 3mo agoAlso, Google isn't scraping your data....
- Forgeties79 3mo agoPotentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr? Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good. You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
- coldpie 3mo agoI have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoI think it’s well worth it but we all make compromises. I have an iPhone after all lol.
- kefabean 3mo agoIf ARPU for Google Search is estimated to be around $50-$80 per internet user and potentially way more in certain geographies, there could be significant financial savings to be had by switching to Kagi depending on where you sit.
- moebrowne 3mo ago> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
- shibaprasadb 3mo agoI was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!
- mancerayder 3mo agoI hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings. Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins? That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
- maelito 3mo agoI'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant. The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token. This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave. I wonder if Kagi's using it. Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
- real_joschi 3mo agoCorrect URL is https://staan.ai/ https://staan.ai/
- palata 3mo agoI was a happy user of Kagi and I switched to Qwant a year ago because they are based in Europe (Ecosia seems to have US servers?). But I have to say: 1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though. 2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why. I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years. Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.
- alexruf 3mo agoThere's little to add to that. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi. I can understand if people simply don't want to or can't shell out $5 a month, but if someone is able to, those are probably the best $5 anyone who does a lot of internet research and uses AI can possibly invest.
- insane_dreamer 3mo agoI’m a paying Kagi subscriber but hardly use it because honestly much of the time I’m searching for an answer to a specific question not a website to visit and therefor want the AI response without clicking on another website. Unless it’s mission critical but that’s more rare.
- thoopring 3mo agoWhat is the appeal that draws everyone to use Kagi?
- praguegolem 3mo agoThat ability that you are able to rank your own searches.
- nan60 3mo agoI've been with Kagi for about a year now and I have had zero complaints. I love their search to death.
- cautiouscat 3mo agoKagi has been a great and worthwhile subscription to me. It feels like browsing the Google of the 10s in some ways. Way more private blogs and whatnot in the results.
- hgoel 3mo agoI've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout, it's been nice knowing that I can just stop having reddit show up in search results.
- andai 3mo ago> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearrange the UI right before you tap the screen (after about half a second of lag), so that you accidentally click an ad. It sounds stupid but I suspect a non-trivial ratio of their revenue comes from this phenomenon. And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear. I suspect they're taking a similar approach with Google, with the difference that you cannot pay for Google and therefore are forced to have the crap experience all of the time.
- randallsquared 3mo ago> And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear. In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.
- andai 3mo agoMy meaning was that if you pay for Google One or whatever they're calling it now, Google's UX is still ass.
- leoh 3mo agoI have worked for Google on and off the last 6y. When I am not working there, I use kagi. When I am working there, I miss kagi a lot.
- delis-thumbs-7e 3mo agoKagi is great. The search gives you the actual thing you are looking for, but also their translate tool is very nifty, and their LLM assistants are actually better for my purposes than Anthropic or whatever. I have tried the same models via openrouter, but can’t get as good responses, so there’s something very clever they do with their harness. I use their Orion -browser and its summarise -function, which is very good. I am happy to pay for all this, it feels like they actually want to serve you good products, not just steal shit from you and scam you. I have recently started using searXNG, which is ok, and somehow better than mpst for image searches, but not quite as good as Kagi.
- hitekker 3mo agoI stopped paying for Kagi after ~2 years. Search quality worsened over time; my brother and I would trade screenshots/complaints of irrelevant results for basic keywords. International searches were even more fruitless. Also, I felt Kagi had too many projects going on. Their whimsical engineer-daycare-esque blogposts did not inspire confidence.
- what 3mo ago> Search quality worsened over time They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.
- vlz 3mo agoThey have their own indexes. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- Melatonic 3mo agoKagi is awesome. Highly recommend it. And Orion as well. The combo of NextDNS + Kagi + occasional VPN (currently on Windscribe since they had a deal through Kagi and seem to have the most real vs fake VPN endpoints) is super seamless and easy
- skrtks 3mo agoI switched to Kagi 2 years ago and I've enjoyed it ever since. In May I decided that I wanted to give some other options a try, also given that I'm now relying on LLMs for some tasks I used Kagi for. I'm running qwen3.6 on my server and I thought it + a mediocre free search engine would be enough. Well, was I wrong. Almost three months have passed and I can't say anymore that it's just getting used to a different flow. Kagi offers something that I can't find anywhere else at the moment. I resubscribed last Monday :)
- shelled 3mo agoKagi, like DDG and a few others around the same/similar ideas, doesn't work as "fully" for certain geographies (I assume many) as fully and wholesomely (as I gather from such posts and comments) it works for certain other geographies (again, I assume not many; for obvious reasons). I gave it a shot, trial and then the Starter pack. In some cases, it turned out to be almost completely futile. Anyway, just like Google Maps, nothing even comes close, for coverage and usability of Internet search, to Google Search for my geography (yes, I asked others as well who tried), sadly. Since then I've learnt to live with `udm=14` and some occasional/rare uBlock Origin tweaks (earlier I used an about:config setting, which might still work, for anyone looking) - in Firefox. On Safari (which is kind of my secondary phone browser), I still keep it as it is, and I use it to actually use the quick AI feature when I might want it, which isn't often.
- pedrosousa 3mo agohow is Kagi for programming searches? I've exclusively used google for years for this.
- ozenalp 3mo agoI started with Kagi in 2024, and sometimes across different/new browser setups I accidentally land on Google and want to immediately throw up. Havent looked backed a single day.
- NamlchakKhandro 3mo agowhy does the kagi website keep trying to reload itself? SUPER ANNOYING
- trippsydrippsy 3mo ago[dead]
- avazhi 3mo agoKagi is great, but it's twice as expensive as I think it would have to be for me to feel like I'm actually getting good value for it, unfortunately.
- ggirelli 3mo agoAny thoughts on Uruky? Just found it by searching for a Europe-based Kagi alternative. https://uruky.com https://uruky.com
- mrsssnake 3mo agoUruky allows JSON formatted output and basically started to use them as API for my private SearXNG instance. Basically using them as paid search API that is much more reliable than scraping DuckDuckGO and Brave, with the benefit of blocking common AI slop sites and manual ranking of domains. Having EUSP first and Mojeek second somehow gives very satisfying results, both small nearby European businesses and big sites are searched up well, even without depending on American index.
- gtirloni 3mo agoSwitched to Kagi a few years ago and don't even consider other options anymore. It's miles ahead of others.
- BiteCode_dev 3mo agoI don't know, I tried kagi but it doesn't seem to have superior results to even ddg. It's even worse for non english content. ChatGPT is better than their agent at everything, firefox extensions can filter domains and ads out of the search results while preventing tracking nand I don't even have to create an account for any of those. Not to mention I actually mostly use search engines to for stuff that are not fuzzy anymore (since discovery with them are now terrible anyway), so I don't get that much value. I really want to like kagi, it ticks all the boxes, but it misses a killer feature that would make me use it instead of alternatives that just do what I need.
- cantalopes 3mo agoCould we stop funding russia's invasion of Ukraine?