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I 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

by poetril 2mo ago

I 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 2mo ago
I 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 2mo ago
  I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    Over 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 2mo ago
  Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.
  - ijustlovemath 2mo ago
    Curious what your distribution is, as a ~400 person that thought they did more.
- LucasOe 2mo ago
  I do between 2,000 and 3,000 searches per month and have never hit a limit.
LoganDark 2mo ago
I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for. I might try it again sometime.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  I’ve found the opposite. Most notably was when I joined an outage call at work. The call had been going for a few hours. They knew the issue, but didn’t have a fix. There were a dozen or two people on the call all searching for options (presumably all using Google). I went to Kagi and found an answer within a couple minutes that we ended up rolling out. I’m just one person, and that’s just one incident, but it happened pretty early on after I switched to Kagi and had a pretty big impact on my perception of it. I had been trying to get away from Google for many years, and with other options like DDG, I always felt I needed to go to Google for various searches, but so far I haven’t been back to Google at all in several years now.
Shadowmist 2mo ago
Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
- dexterdog 2mo ago
  I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-specific-external-indexes https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-... I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too. For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else.
  - canpan 2mo ago
    I am trying this. I noticed I only browse a subset of sites a lot. Also HN works wonders for finding links. But how do you get around all those bot measures/cloudflare nowadays? It seems only google IPs get a special pass.
    - SyneRyder 2mo ago
      Yep, discovering that you only need a subset of sites is the key. In my case, I still had my entire Firefox browsing history in its SQLite cache, so I tried to index every page I'd ever visited, and had a list of the domains I actually visit. It's the same insight Brave Search had - they used to be a metasearch engine, but they built their own index until they could serve 99% of queries directly, even though their index was vastly smaller than Google or Bing. I struggle with indexing too. I don't do any crawling, just indexing from sitemap.xml files or URLs I add to the queue manually. Also I'm indexing from my own residential PC, not a hosted VPS. Something that helped me was Cloudflare's new crawler API. For all the sites where Cloudflare blocks you, just use their API instead: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/content-endpoint/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/... https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/crawl-endpoint/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/... Also for a quick index bootstrap, the Curlie database can be useful. It's the old DMOZ directory, the open Yahoo competitor, with 1.4 Million websites. A lot of the links are now very outdated, but it can be useful, and it's less than 500MB when converted to an SQLite database.
rpdillon 2mo ago
They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.
- CharlesW 2mo ago
  https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- thinkingtoilet 2mo ago
  Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
  - rpdillon 2mo ago
    I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.
    - Grombobulous 2mo ago
      My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me. I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either. If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription. The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it. I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        This. We are all too worried about the future. Like today's "I won't use Codeberg because tomorrow they could ban all repositories that contain Chinese characters." Well if that happens then you move. We all die in the end anyway.
markovs_gun 2mo ago
What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.

by poetril 2mo ago

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

I 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 2mo ago
I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  Over 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 2mo ago
Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.
- ijustlovemath 2mo ago
  Curious what your distribution is, as a ~400 person that thought they did more.
LucasOe 2mo ago
I do between 2,000 and 3,000 searches per month and have never hit a limit.

LoganDark 2mo ago

I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for. I might try it again sometime.

al_borland 2mo ago
I’ve found the opposite. Most notably was when I joined an outage call at work. The call had been going for a few hours. They knew the issue, but didn’t have a fix. There were a dozen or two people on the call all searching for options (presumably all using Google). I went to Kagi and found an answer within a couple minutes that we ended up rolling out. I’m just one person, and that’s just one incident, but it happened pretty early on after I switched to Kagi and had a pretty big impact on my perception of it. I had been trying to get away from Google for many years, and with other options like DDG, I always felt I needed to go to Google for various searches, but so far I haven’t been back to Google at all in several years now.

Shadowmist 2mo ago

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

dexterdog 2mo ago
I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
SyneRyder 2mo ago
No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-specific-external-indexes https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-... I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too. For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else.
- canpan 2mo ago
  I am trying this. I noticed I only browse a subset of sites a lot. Also HN works wonders for finding links. But how do you get around all those bot measures/cloudflare nowadays? It seems only google IPs get a special pass.
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    Yep, discovering that you only need a subset of sites is the key. In my case, I still had my entire Firefox browsing history in its SQLite cache, so I tried to index every page I'd ever visited, and had a list of the domains I actually visit. It's the same insight Brave Search had - they used to be a metasearch engine, but they built their own index until they could serve 99% of queries directly, even though their index was vastly smaller than Google or Bing. I struggle with indexing too. I don't do any crawling, just indexing from sitemap.xml files or URLs I add to the queue manually. Also I'm indexing from my own residential PC, not a hosted VPS. Something that helped me was Cloudflare's new crawler API. For all the sites where Cloudflare blocks you, just use their API instead: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/content-endpoint/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/... https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/crawl-endpoint/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/... Also for a quick index bootstrap, the Curlie database can be useful. It's the old DMOZ directory, the open Yahoo competitor, with 1.4 Million websites. A lot of the links are now very outdated, but it can be useful, and it's less than 500MB when converted to an SQLite database.

rpdillon 2mo ago

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

CharlesW 2mo ago
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
thinkingtoilet 2mo ago
Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
- rpdillon 2mo ago
  I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.
  - Grombobulous 2mo ago
    My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me. I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either. If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription. The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it. I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      This. We are all too worried about the future. Like today's "I won't use Codeberg because tomorrow they could ban all repositories that contain Chinese characters." Well if that happens then you move. We all die in the end anyway.

markovs_gun 2mo ago

What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.