8 ms·

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

• oriettaxx 2mo ago
  omg, great really!!! When will this be available into HN, too ?
  • john_strinlai 2mo ago
    >When will this be available into HN, too ? hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).
    • no-name-here 2mo ago
      I don't see it offhand in the newsguidelines page nor the submit page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/submit https://news.ycombinator.com/submit Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
      • john_strinlai 2mo ago
        it's in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. in other words, its not ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that do not have workarounds.
        • oriettaxx 2mo ago
          uh, I did not know: what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround... (many thanks to them)
          • john_strinlai 2mo ago
            >what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround. right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves. the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
            • oriettaxx 2mo ago
              ah, great. Super clear now, thank you.
      • croemer 2mo ago
        Yes here in FAQs: Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
• pelagicAustral 2mo ago
  Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.
  • Nextgrid 2mo ago
    There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.
    • teroshan 2mo ago
      Exactly: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
  • azan_ 2mo ago
    Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.
    • ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago
      You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results. If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
      • deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      • no-name-here 2mo ago
        Is the idea that you strongly prefer seeing ads instead of paywalls?
        • ohyoutravel 2mo ago
• tempest_ 2mo ago
  I've been enjoying Kagi for the last couple years. Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful. Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
  • datakan 2mo ago
    I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.
    • msdz 2mo ago
      What do you feel is missing for a free news offering? I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
      • mcny 2mo ago
        There are some defects like what does this mean? > dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). --> https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn
        • msdz 2mo ago
          Okay, strange, but that’s a bug, not a web app “feeling barebones” wrt. core functionality for most users, at least IMO. Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
        • giorgio-kagi 2mo ago
          Kagi dev here, sorry about the bug; we had a malformed nested HTML comment that ended up partially rendering. This is now fixed.
• SamBam 2mo ago
  Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
  • demibabs 2mo ago
    Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
    • Shank 2mo ago
      > Do people want actual journalism to go out of business? Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
      • tensor 2mo ago
        Haha you couldn't pay me to read Bloomberg.
      • iamnothere 2mo ago
        Yes, I also liked the crowdfunding model that the defunct YC startup Beacon Reader proposed. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.
      • Barbing 2mo ago
        Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month? Maybe you just want the exclusives which even then they often break stuff (at least Gurman on Bloomberg, especially if you care about Apple/OpenAI).
        • theshrike79 2mo ago
          Yes, so does Economist, The Verge and many many other sites. But I'm interested in maybe 3 articles a month. If I were to pay for them it's like paying for Netflix and watching a movie a month. Or subscribing to a dead-tree newspaper and only reading the comics. I do get that micropayments are hard, but it's not a technical issue - it never has been. It's all about credit card costs and legalese.
• pkilgore 2mo ago
  I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
  • taintify 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • entrox 2mo ago
      Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space. That's why this is a good feature.
      • taintify 2mo ago
        [flagged]
    • jjice 2mo ago
      What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation. I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
    • Barbing 2mo ago
      Did you create a new account to be rude? You’re bringing down the vibe. (showdead enabled in HN settings)
• kkarpkkarp 2mo ago
  Kagi, search engine that costs you to use has something against publishers who require a fee for their content. Interesting
  • frameset 2mo ago
    It's not that they have anything against them, it's giving their customers who don't want to see them the choice not to.
• shahedshah 2mo ago
  Very useful feature to have. I've not dived into using Kagi just yet, but they may just win me over with this.
• no-name-here 2mo ago
  Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
  • SoftTalker 2mo ago
    Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.
    • no-name-here 2mo ago
      Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
• getfacl 2mo ago
  This makes sense to me as a Kagi user. The chance that I'm going to subscribe to read an article I found via a search is zero.
  • bluGill 2mo ago
    If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find). However tracking that is tricky at best.
    • mrngld 2mo ago
      I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice. Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
      • bluGill 2mo ago
        should is the key here. The lack of something to support is reason to not pay. Like you, I lack a good local newspaper. There is the nearby city, but they don't cover the important local news well. Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
      • carlosjobim 2mo ago
        There's still valuable info in your local newspaper even if their agenda is the opposite of yours. You just have to read between the lines and phone their bias. But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• scotty79 2mo ago
  That should have been an option in Google since the first paywall was put up.
  • Nextgrid 2mo ago
    Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).
    • stldtt 2mo ago
      This started with expertsexchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198 but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
• cormorant 2mo ago
  I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.
• Cider9986 2mo ago
  I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs). Paying should get you more privacy not less. I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me. Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser. >Support private, independent search >See search results ad-free >Get a cleaner view on all results pages >Cancel any time Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
  • moebrowne 2mo ago
    Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
    • Cider9986 2mo ago
      Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement: >Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you. https://brave.com/origin/ https://brave.com/origin/
  • robin_reala 2mo ago
    Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html
• r721 2mo ago
  Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
• sssilver 2mo ago
  This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
  • wccrawford 2mo ago
    I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear. I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings. I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work. Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster. In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it. And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
  • magguzu 2mo ago
    Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times). Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
  • dspillett 2mo ago
    There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
• treetalker 2mo ago
  I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time. This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search. It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
• sarjann 2mo ago
  I would like to be able to whitelist some paywall sites, e.g. I have an FT subscription and would like to have that bypass the block.
• OroPla 2mo ago
  While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it. I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches. I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
  • tonytamps 2mo ago
    I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online. You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.
  • JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
    They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search. Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint. Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
• delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
  I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search. Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
  • ohyoutravel 2mo ago
    I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.
    • vincnetas 2mo ago
      i also want stickers...
    • greatgib 2mo ago
      What do you do to get the stickers?!
      • hgoel 2mo ago
        I think the first time around they were included with the free shirt they sent out. Second time they were with the free socks. Maybe general merch store orders might include them too.
        • teroshan 2mo ago
          For some reason I never received any stickers, shirts, or socks here in France. I do remember them asking about shipping information at some point though.
• DeepLogin 2mo ago
  I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private. I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
• taintify 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• docheinestages 2mo ago
  Kudos to Kagi!
• frereubu 2mo ago
  The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber! I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
  • tempest_ 2mo ago
    You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless. Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
  • ymolodtsov 2mo ago
    The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.
    • carlosjobim 2mo ago
      Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong. Edit: Typo
      • CoastalCoder 2mo ago
        Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?
• imnotr0b0t 2mo ago
  The update is useful, especially the paywall filter. I might even consider switching platforms; it seems convenient...
• clickety_clack 2mo ago
  I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
  • tomhp 2mo ago
    Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• jwr 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  • vlyan 2mo ago
    which search engines have no ties to the three countries currently waging illegal wars of aggression? :)
    • robotmay 2mo ago
      Ecosia and Qwant are the two EU-based ones I know of currently, though I'm sure there are more.
  • stronglikedan 2mo ago
    ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard
    • dewey 2mo ago
      Actually it's kinda hard in a world where very few companies dominate the search index market and there's very few players who license out their data, one of them being a Russian one: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
    • dirasieb 2mo ago
      i'd love to see your attempt at a search engine without russian data
  • freediver 2mo ago
    (Kagi founder here) I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms. edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE
• kenanfyi 2mo ago
  I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is. Bang settings: URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s https://archive.is/newest/%s Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want. I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
• dethos 2mo ago
  This is actually an excellent idea. Well done.
• dewey 2mo ago
  Ideally it would have a way to allow list domains for sources where I do have a subscription.
• steveslayer57 2mo ago
  AI slopped extension for supposedly just badging paywalls, not excluding them, https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension
• TiredOfLife 2mo ago
  Have they added an option to not fund russian invasion into Ukraine?
• agentultra 2mo ago
  I’d pay for a search engine these days if it meant good results and no AI. Kagi almost fits the bill. Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
• swinglock 2mo ago
  Have they stopped sponsoring terrorism?
  • emaro 2mo ago
    Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.
    • no_input 2mo ago
      I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
      • neoromantique 2mo ago
        You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'. Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.
    • swinglock 2mo ago
      https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/ https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/
• open-search 2mo ago
  nice
• herpdyderp 2mo ago
  I wish Safari included Kagi as a built-in search bar option!
  • tensor 2mo ago
    It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.
    • Barbing 2mo ago
      So goofy. Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex. The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more: Google Yahoo Bing DuckDuckGo Ecosia
• shevy-java 2mo ago
  With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• imaginationra 2mo ago
  Just enabled it- Love Kagi!
• modmid 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• tqi 2mo ago
  Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
  • JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
    I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far. An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose. Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
  • carlosjobim 2mo ago
    > So what business models are even left? Maybe they can take a hint from Spotify?
• algoth1 2mo ago
  Great decision
• KellyCriterion 2mo ago
  Ah, shouldnt they rather introduce an option to bypass paywalls automaticly to Archive.PH? :-D
• terminal-bloom 2mo ago
  I love Kagi so much. What an incredibly thoughtful, fast, powerful, customizable search tool. I love that I can filter-out / rank / save search tools, and their focus on speed & execution makes it deeply worth a few bucks a month.
• DrDeese 2mo ago
  I have hundreds of pdfs of books, and a thousand dollar library (my friends call it) We have to keep this stuff. This isn't the first time we've lost our books. It happens every 80 or so years
• soufron 2mo ago
  There is not firefox plugin for this?
• shuvrojit 2mo ago
  This is what we really need and others should focus on this, niche settings for AI implementations. We are already tired of seeing the same stuff come up again and again when using AI. This is the type of stuff that can make AI more enjoyable and useful
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• rootusrootus 2mo ago
  I hate that our solution to the modern Internet is to engage in technical warfare just to make it usable. Will someone invent a new pay-to-play Internet that does not engage in warfare against its own users?
• tjpnz 2mo ago
  Paywalls fucking suck. No I'm not going to subscribe to your publication just so I can read one fucking article. I would however pay 5-10 dollars a month to get access to a variety of news sites (ad free of course - albeit less of a problem using a real browser with UBO). No such service existed the last time I checked, but it doesn't feel like much of a leap for a paid service like Kagi to facilitate.
• dmtryshmtv 2mo ago
  Would be nice if there was some transparency about which sites this will filter.
• mosselman 2mo ago
  I've been building my own metasearch engine after using Kagi for a long while and I must say that my results are getting better even than theirs. Kagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites. I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases. Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
  • lostlogin 2mo ago
    Any chance I could try it. If it was 50-75% as good as Kagi, I’d pay a subscription. I’d also really like a way to use it in safari/mobile safari.
• simsla 2mo ago
  The thing that bothers me about most paywalls is that they want you to take a subscription to remove it. I've got more than enough subscriptions in my life. Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
  • reaperducer 2mo ago
    Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so. If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each. Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world. The app isn't great, but the price is right. Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link. If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
• Computer0 2mo ago
  This needs to have a whitelist feature, as I am a paying subscriber to a few well known paywalled news sites that I will use Kagi search to find years old articles. But I would like sites I don't subscribe to to be excluded.
• geekamongus 2mo ago
  Go ahead, keep taking my money, Kagi.
• BrunoBernardino 2mo ago
  Interesting! This is something a couple of customers have requested for Uruky (co-founder here), among the highlight/removal of "AI Slop" and "Malicious URLs", but I honestly never thought it would be widely wanted. I guess we're wrong and we might add that soon. Does anyone know of a good (and free as in freedom) source/list for such URLs? They didn't seem to mention any.
• righthand 2mo ago
  How about a setting that removes Cloudflare captcha blocked links from search results? Or let me define a profile of good/bad website practices (recipe blogspam, paywall, captchas, etc) and autodown/up rank for me.
• NameSucksWontUs 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  • select1 2mo ago
    Making a throwaway account to post something utterly thoughtless is certainty a choice.
    • HNRetarded 2mo ago
      [dead]
• TeriyakiBomb 2mo ago
  I love Kagi. I want to see them do well, of all of the search alternatives, this is the only one where I’ve never felt the need to go back to google. I was setting a up a new computer the other day and got confused that the first three links for a search were ads, then I remembered it was google and they hide the things you’re looking for. Site priority, lenses and the slop filter are all icing on the cake.
• john01dav 2mo ago
  I find it ironic that a paywalled search engine is filtering out other paywalled websites
• 1saadcodes 2mo ago
  I really like the direction Kagi is taking here. It feels like theyre' building the product around how people actually use it rather than chasing every new AI trend
• nikolay 2mo ago
  I love it. I don't mind paying; I just prefer to tip rather than pay a subscription! I miss Google Contributor [0]! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
• mett36 2mo ago
  Happy Kagi ultimate user here too from jp. Only I d like to know more about their indexing. This was the primary reason I sw. to Kagi but it seems Kagi is not doing much indexing by itself.
• cavoirom 2mo ago
  Why don't we have a pre-paid wallet that I can pay for each article across websites? it will be the alternative model to ads.
• usern20260720 2mo ago
  I can still read most paywalled articles by either blocking JS or digging into the HTML source code. I wish the browser could handle this issue by wgetting the source and decoding it without giving away any information about the visitor
  • carlosjobim 2mo ago
    The browser already handles this: Activate reader mode.
    • usern20260720 2mo ago
      It’s not enough in most cases. JS must be deactivated beforehand
• Gareth321 2mo ago
  I wish there were a way to use my Kagi subscription with ChatGPT/Claude. I can't switch completely to Kagi Assistant right now as it doesn't have feature parity and the subscriptions with OpenAI/Claude are good value. Paying for API credits in addition to my Kagi subscription seems steep.
• absoluteunit1 2mo ago
  Here come all the Kagi sponsored comments lol
• wolvoleo 2mo ago
  I would prefer if they would auto-forward those to archive.today though.
• MeshCtxAgent 2mo ago
  [dead]
• LowTechHN 2mo ago
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