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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 i

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.
      - hgoel 2mo ago
        They sent out emails where you had to put in the order, IIRC $5 shipping so not entirely free. Maybe it was limited to early subscribers or something.
Cider9986 2mo ago
I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources. It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
CoffeeOnWrite 2mo ago
My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works. If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
- Zambyte 2mo ago
  > If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us. Why?
  - john_strinlai 2mo ago
    i am not sure i understand your question. presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
    - Zambyte 2mo ago
      > presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
      - Alexvb 2mo ago
        My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.
        4chandaily 2mo ago
        I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
threecheese 2mo ago
Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.
tensor 2mo ago
It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like. I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
- mstade 2mo ago
  I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
  - tensor 2mo ago
    I guess I should mention that I'm using the deep research assistant, not the quick one.
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
  I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster. I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
- StilesCrisis 2mo ago
  "Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.
LarryDarrell 2mo ago
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant. On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching. On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
- II2II 2mo ago
  > On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles. Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
  - Forgeties79 2mo ago
    But it is new. We have clearly crossed a threshold, and we know when it happened: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
    - II2II 2mo ago
      Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.
      - Forgeties79 2mo ago
        There is basically only before and after Google. No search engine was ever as important to the Internet. It’s basically a pillar of what we have now.
        fermuch 2mo ago
        I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.
nvarsj 2mo ago
Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered. I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
  Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
  - nvarsj 2mo ago
    Eh I feel like search results have been pretty bad for years. SEO and fake page link farms ruined it. ChatGPT is trained on all of Reddit and internet forums where most of the useful info is. It just automates the drudgery.
- freehorse 2mo ago
  > Traditional search days are really numbered. There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
manewitz 2mo ago
I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
- meatmanek 2mo ago
  I thought the Kagi API was entirely pay-as-you-go. EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
  - cmrx64 2mo ago
    they recently made some changes from their v0 API to this new v1 with a more complicated model
  - Gareth321 2mo ago
    I also see $5 API credits. I would also like to know if this is part of my $10 subscription each month. Edit: this is a one-time promotional credit. One must pay for credits thereafter, in addition to their subscription.
    - execution 2mo ago
      I also confirm the $5 you get is only promotional credit. I tested on my local LLM chat via Open WebUI, 2 requests from that cost $0.02 (so $4.98 left), and after my monthly Kagi renewal an hour ago, it did not reset, I am still on $4.98. You are probably better off using Kagi Assistant anyways, as you get $10 there on the $10 Professional plan. For local LLM web searches, to save on cost I will stick with the Brave Search API which gives you $5 free every month.
DavideNL 2mo ago
> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. " which model?
- delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
  I find Kim best. I used 4.5, now 4.6 reasoning.
  - DavideNL 2mo ago
    > > "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. " So this has nothing to do with the Kagi AI assistant then... it's just the model that's perceived as "good". My point is, there are cheaper ways to get access to the model, without a Kagi subscription...
- flipbrad 2mo ago
  Deepseek v4 Flash and OpenAi GPT 5.6 Luna are on their free plan, which is fab. I'm not sure more is needed, for web searching.
- IIsi50MHz 2mo ago
  Kimi K2.7 Code, for me. It's the first model I've used that usually writes working code, somewhat rarely breaks stuff when adding or changing features, and usually fixes a bug correctly just by providing a traceback or description. Kagi Assistant defaults to the last-used model unless you got there from a Quick Answer. Several times I forgot to change models, and interrupted K2.7 Code, but after a failing to notice the model a few times and getting usable results, I now usually just leave it alone. Unless I want a quicker answer and doubt a "Code" model will grok me.
claytongulick 2mo ago
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1]. I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material. I use it all the time. I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search. With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
- freediver 2mo ago
  Feels nice to read this, thank you.
  - GoAwayKagi 2mo ago
    [dead]
    - monk_grilla 2mo ago
      Do you even know what it is? Kagi Assistant is just one part of their offerings. They are a search engine first and foremost. And as you can see many people in this thread are singing the praises of all parts of the Kagi offering. Creating an account just to hate on a company trying to shake up a monolithic and user-predatory product space is just sad.
jkkola 2mo ago
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
  It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free. Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
cavoirom 2mo ago
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-research-specialist.md https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
hs86 2mo ago
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps. This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs. Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
- sgc 2mo ago
  I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
- ac29 2mo ago
  I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too
varispeed 2mo ago
Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?
- gilfaethwy 2mo ago
  Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort. Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ https://kagi.com/smallweb/
chronos00 2mo ago
I do like that it tends to reword your search query into the way you meant but couldn’t find the right words in your head.
Arubis 2mo ago
I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.
QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.
- freehorse 2mo ago
  I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good. I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
sippeangelo 2mo ago
I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?
- vogelbirb 2mo ago
  If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features. But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
kelnos 2mo ago
> They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information. You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.
josh_p 2mo ago
I made (vibed) an extension for pi that wraps their search and extract APIs. The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes. https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi

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.
    - hgoel 2mo ago
      They sent out emails where you had to put in the order, IIRC $5 shipping so not entirely free. Maybe it was limited to early subscribers or something.

Cider9986 2mo ago

I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources. It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.

delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago

For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.

CoffeeOnWrite 2mo ago

My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works. If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

Zambyte 2mo ago
> If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us. Why?
- john_strinlai 2mo ago
  i am not sure i understand your question. presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
  - Zambyte 2mo ago
    > presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
    - Alexvb 2mo ago
      My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.
      - 4chandaily 2mo ago
        I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

threecheese 2mo ago

Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.

tensor 2mo ago

It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like. I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).

mstade 2mo ago
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
- tensor 2mo ago
  I guess I should mention that I'm using the deep research assistant, not the quick one.
QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster. I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
StilesCrisis 2mo ago
"Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.

LarryDarrell 2mo ago

I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant. On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching. On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

II2II 2mo ago
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles. Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
- Forgeties79 2mo ago
  But it is new. We have clearly crossed a threshold, and we know when it happened: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
  - II2II 2mo ago
    Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.
    - Forgeties79 2mo ago
      There is basically only before and after Google. No search engine was ever as important to the Internet. It’s basically a pillar of what we have now.
      - fermuch 2mo ago
        I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.

nvarsj 2mo ago

Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered. I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.

QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
- nvarsj 2mo ago
  Eh I feel like search results have been pretty bad for years. SEO and fake page link farms ruined it. ChatGPT is trained on all of Reddit and internet forums where most of the useful info is. It just automates the drudgery.
freehorse 2mo ago
> Traditional search days are really numbered. There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.

manewitz 2mo ago

I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

meatmanek 2mo ago
I thought the Kagi API was entirely pay-as-you-go. EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
- cmrx64 2mo ago
  they recently made some changes from their v0 API to this new v1 with a more complicated model
- Gareth321 2mo ago
  I also see $5 API credits. I would also like to know if this is part of my $10 subscription each month. Edit: this is a one-time promotional credit. One must pay for credits thereafter, in addition to their subscription.
  - execution 2mo ago
    I also confirm the $5 you get is only promotional credit. I tested on my local LLM chat via Open WebUI, 2 requests from that cost $0.02 (so $4.98 left), and after my monthly Kagi renewal an hour ago, it did not reset, I am still on $4.98. You are probably better off using Kagi Assistant anyways, as you get $10 there on the $10 Professional plan. For local LLM web searches, to save on cost I will stick with the Brave Search API which gives you $5 free every month.

DavideNL 2mo ago

> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. " which model?

delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
I find Kim best. I used 4.5, now 4.6 reasoning.
- DavideNL 2mo ago
  > > "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. " So this has nothing to do with the Kagi AI assistant then... it's just the model that's perceived as "good". My point is, there are cheaper ways to get access to the model, without a Kagi subscription...
flipbrad 2mo ago
Deepseek v4 Flash and OpenAi GPT 5.6 Luna are on their free plan, which is fab. I'm not sure more is needed, for web searching.
IIsi50MHz 2mo ago
Kimi K2.7 Code, for me. It's the first model I've used that usually writes working code, somewhat rarely breaks stuff when adding or changing features, and usually fixes a bug correctly just by providing a traceback or description. Kagi Assistant defaults to the last-used model unless you got there from a Quick Answer. Several times I forgot to change models, and interrupted K2.7 Code, but after a failing to notice the model a few times and getting usable results, I now usually just leave it alone. Unless I want a quicker answer and doubt a "Code" model will grok me.

claytongulick 2mo ago

I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1]. I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material. I use it all the time. I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search. With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

freediver 2mo ago
Feels nice to read this, thank you.
- GoAwayKagi 2mo ago
  [dead]
  - monk_grilla 2mo ago
    Do you even know what it is? Kagi Assistant is just one part of their offerings. They are a search engine first and foremost. And as you can see many people in this thread are singing the praises of all parts of the Kagi offering. Creating an account just to hate on a company trying to shake up a monolithic and user-predatory product space is just sad.

jkkola 2mo ago

Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.

QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago
It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free. Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.

cavoirom 2mo ago

Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-research-specialist.md https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...

hs86 2mo ago

Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps. This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs. Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.

sgc 2mo ago
I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
ac29 2mo ago
I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too

varispeed 2mo ago

Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?

gilfaethwy 2mo ago
Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort. Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ https://kagi.com/smallweb/

chronos00 2mo ago

I do like that it tends to reword your search query into the way you meant but couldn’t find the right words in your head.

Arubis 2mo ago

I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.

QwenGlazer9000 2mo ago

I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.

freehorse 2mo ago
I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good. I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.

sippeangelo 2mo ago

I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?

vogelbirb 2mo ago
If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features. But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.

kelnos 2mo ago

> They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information. You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.

josh_p 2mo ago

I made (vibed) an extension for pi that wraps their search and extract APIs. The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes. https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi