This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.
What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.
But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.
I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.
- It removes ads for my kids, which are going to watch YouTube no matter what I do
- It includes YouTube Music, so I don't need a separate Spotify subscription
- It sends money to creators based on what I proportionally spend time watching, rather than based on how valuable of an audience I'm deemed to be when an ad slot is auctioned
- It is a signal that I'm willing to pay for content, and I want platforms and creators to continue offering that option
For those who haven't tried this yet: the bookmark for Wikipedia might look something like this:
Name: [SEARCH] WIKIPEDIA
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
Keyword: w
Also, you might want to disable the other search engine and portal page features as much as you can. This requires setting some preferences not on the Preferences pages, so going to `about:config` preferences, to set, e.g., `keyword.enabled` to false.
Note that you control the keywords. So I thought Wikipedia deserved a one-letter keyword. But `a` went to archive.org Wayback Machine (which also meant I could just prefix any URL with `a` and a space), while I made myself spell out `amazon` every time I was in danger of unnecessary consumerism.
I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.
Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.
I have no problem paying for tools if the value is there, so I minimize my spending in other categories. Every quarter I review subscriptions, switch some from monthly to yearly to save money, cancel some, adjust levels on others.
If sandwiches are $10 for you and not worth much, might I ask you to support my subscription instead? Because when I make a sandwich myself, the costs are approx 0,50 EUR, and that is the type of food I can afford.
It is the same with this 'it is only a cup of coffee' or 'only a beer'. I don't drink beer, I do drink coffee, but when I did drink beer the special beers were lower than the prices of the ones you pay in pubs. As for coffee, it just shows you're from San Francisco or something, cause we got free coffee at work in our culture here.
Moreover, there's enough people in this world for whom $10 a month is a huge deal, and all your comment shows is that you're either unaware of such or simply don't care.
Kagi needs to not just be worth $10, but also worth ($10 - ads) more than the alternatives.
I only subscribe to Spotify, YouTube and Kagi as "online services". Video media I happily sail the seas for and I don't mind evil megacorps "losing" money on my behalf.
And to be clear by "beyond" I mean some sandwiches cost less than $0.50, and some sandwiches cost more than $200.00
Does that point still stand if it's not the cost of one sandwich, unless you're paying a fortune for a sandwich?
If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.
I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.
In Silicon Valley?
Does Kagi only want to sell to techbros?
I live in Mississippi, crappiest economy in the nation. I assume people are thinking they meant the cost of a homemade bologna sandwich or something, otherwise this conversation is pretty absurd.
Went to Europe a few years ago and I remembered previously that food prices in Europe were high. But this last time, I noticed they were consistently ~5 euro/dollars less than it would be in the US. I was pleasantly surprised.
It’s only gotten worse here. Typical restaurant entree is maybe 17 dollars. Fast food is now about 12 dollars for a meal. At least in DFW Texas.
But there is this one shop selling shawarma sandwich made to fresh bread that costs 3.90€. And that is already a good lunch.
A döner sandwich can cost 2.90€ the cheapest.
Bakeries have baguettes with cheese and ham for 4-5 euros.
If you go to Mitte, a döner can already be 6-9 euros. And that is expensive.
This whole conversation has reminded me of the $5 milkshake conversation in Pulp Fiction.
I’ve signed up for the Kagi trial, so far I’m liking it. Breath of fresh air compared to the free ones. Best result, first position.
Kagi builds an excellent product for a very fair price. Direct your ire elsewhere.
Not everyone has a cooled mattress, AC, car etc.. "Are all those things only for techbros"?
I just checked McDonalds in my hometown in Idaho. A Big Mac is $5.99 for just the sandwich and $10.68 for a meal. A Double Quarter Pounder is $8.29 for just a sandwich.
McDonalds is definitely on the cheap side so $10.00 seems like a reasonable estimate of “sandwich money”.
No need to invoke tech bros or silicon valley. Certainly no need to invent a motive.
I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.
With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.
Fortunately I already switched to Kagi everywhere...
There is tremendous power here.
> I do understand how this may be unexpected.
is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.
How does this make you want to be their user?
That particular reply however is gross and controversial on so many levels.
If you have a bug at a partner, you don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected". If it affects multiple users, you don't do opt-in refunds (which is again, illegal, and is a scam if intentional).
> Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers
They've just admitted it?
It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.
Yep. That explains why is it gross, controversial, and admits a scam. Which is okay, I guess. I've read much worse. (For example, in this very thread. From the person I'm just answering.)
I was just surprised that someone reading it felt that he needs to give money Kagi immediately. We are different.
> It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you.
First, no, it's not legal. Especially with
but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
I do not like to see a helpful engineer being given a hard time.. But that is a worse look for Kagi than I was aware of.
What more do you want? A user complained, they offered a refund and they said they would look into fixing it.
"wHaT iF tHeY wAnTeD tO sTaRt pAyInG?" was just a joke on twisted cartoon scammer logic, not an argument.
Anyone that wants to use Kagi again can click on the subscribe button.
I get it, people love Kagi, I do too. But this is a bad pattern that they should never have allowed on the first occurrence.
Yes they said they are looking into fixing it but it was a soft commitment and they also should think about refunding folks.
This is why companies end up having PR people. An attempt to sound understanding can can easily be scuttled by an unfortunate choice of words. If the programmer had shortened that sentence to "I do understand.", there would not have been a chance to construe an attempt at downplaying the situation.
Please consider whether they can authenticate a user based on an HN comment and HN profile. The request for the user contact the company directly makes sense.
> Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.
Have they known about the bug before? For how long? Perhaps it's not an automatic refund because they need to confirm the underlying issue, figure out which users are affected, and only then get management to to sign off on it.
I think some of the ton is a little aggressive but it does seem like something that a lot of other companies would maybe get called out for.
I will admit that I do have a reflexive allergy to conspiracy theories when people jump way over Occam's Razor to get there with little to no evidence, and saying that Kagi is just a "scam" is firmly in that boat IMHO.
On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.
[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]
A bit off-topic, but rather than scrutinizing credit card statements, I find it much better to get email notifications of transactions - that way I can review transactions as they’re made and fresh in mind, and I notice fraudulent or unwanted transactions right away.
I have been using Kagi since the start. You guys are doing an incredible job.
So, in this context, they might as well be
As I mentioned in my previous comment, it does not convert IF you do not have a payment method set. In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.
I did mention a workaround we could do, and that's something that we will ensure gets done asap.
Is this even legal? Ok, maybe in the US...
I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.
And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.
I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.
> I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.
I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.
Most of us on this site produce copyrighted works for money. Many of us are pretty knowledgable about how copyright works, as it's an integral part of our livelihood. So please don't try to promulgate that weird media industry propaganda here.
Also, read what I wrote: "if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act". What specifically bugs me is less so the act - I assume few among us haven't engaged in illegal streaming, paywall bypassing, password sharing etc. - it's the weird contortions people go through to frame piracy as a noble endeavor vs. just admitting they're being too cheap to pay for something.
Commit theft if you want, but be an adult and acknowledge it for what it is.
Clearly, they enjoy the content. You don't just stop enjoying things like that.
If you feel streamers are offering a bad deal, don't take them up on the deal and find something else to do. If you want to watch shows your friends and family are watching, take the deal.
It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.
The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
Google clearly wins there.
Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.
Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.
Happy to pay kagi.
Which is to say, I highly recommend using an LLM for exploring commands to run in a terminal. Once past the learning curve, it is a good way to avoid dozens to hundreds of cryptic short-options (just ask for only long options).
Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.
I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.
[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.
This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)
Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.
Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
That's why I use Kagi.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.
And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.
Can you explain what this means in more detail? (To be clear, I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm asking for a sales pitch :) )
Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers
Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.
This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.
> @hn !
This brings me directly to the front page of HN.
> @gh jj !
This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
> !guixc how do I install nginx?
This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.
> !p nginx
Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.
The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
There is a noticeable friction now in using Google for searching. A pretty good example of how a decent product gets ruined by accountants and shareholder demand.
However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.
Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.
If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.
Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.
Just recently I’ve created a bang in Kagi which redirects me to Google Maps roughly around my home with a query that I typed.
I use OSM for many directions, after looking it up in Google Maps and copying the plus code because it doesn't come up in OSM reliably.
This way Kagi doesn't even see my query, I don't need to wait for the redirect, I get to set up the shortcuts myself and I can switch any of my search providers (even the default) without affecting my "bangs".
I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
Kagi on the other hand is "apolitical" because it is good for business.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.
The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).
Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world."
All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
Not one click but by no means a byzantine process
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.
Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.
And for many businesses in the EU it's illegal to transfer money directly or indirectly to Russia. I don't know how this applies exactly, but I know my company cannot legally pay for this
People need to stop posting this blog post as if it's something incriminating, or even negative. I'm sure if GDPR is violated, Kagi will sort it out with their lawyers, but as of now I don't see what exactly are we worrying about. For me it's neither GDPR nor Vlad's "appalling" behaviour and if it's neither, this whole blog is utterly useless
The mere fact of him relying on his rationalisation (of burner email addresses) over established GDPR definitions of PII is troubling. To me it rings immature and unprofessional. As a software engineer I shall treat PII with care and account for it. If a CEO is this defensive about their clearly wrong opinion, it's a red flag to me.
Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.
Thanks for the reply, it is helpful .
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
I'm sure my playful sarcasm above doesn't come through well, but thanks for the reply it is helpful.
TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.
Additional details on the blog post about it.
Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does
I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.
For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)
Edit: I got this working.
Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.
Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.
I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.
[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)
If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.
Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...
If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.
That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).
# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops
Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search
Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.
Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....
> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.
That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.
Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
#!/bin/sh
0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073
yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.
0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.
yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.
This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.
Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.
1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.
2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.
How can I get more details about these filters. Are there existing implementations somewhere online which I can test? Seems pretty interesting.
A search on one of the search engines that indexes HN may provide some pointers. Something like site:ycombinator.com plus [name of filter].
Not sure about "interesting" but these are portable across OS, low resource requirements. Faster than sed. Boring stuff that works for me year after year.
I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.
One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools 2. Mozilla's documentation 3. The Cambridge dictionary 4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology 5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.
I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)
This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.
There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.
I also use a lot the assistant, so I'm happy customer so far.
I'm now paying for:
- Search
- News
- Backups
Of course I'd rather not spend the money, but ALL these services are leagues ahead of the ad-supported alternatives. This is how the Internet should work.
(Edit - formatting)
If you want an official website, always follow the link to the Wikipedia article, and there click on the link to the official website.
Also, I find Duckduckgo a lot better than Google in general.
Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).
Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:
- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia
and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
Check it out: https://github.com/wajeht/bang
Google's results are really awful, and it constantly nags me to install Chrome.
Kagi seems like an obvious acquisition target. They will never raise enough paying subscribers.
It's the first result on Duckduckgo.
Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.
I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...
<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>
For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.
Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi
https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493
Hope you see this!
Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)
Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result
Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?
But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.
It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.
I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
