All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
Links: - https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister - Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen... - Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
easier to accuse someone of astroturfing than accept that different people can have different opinions. especially an opinion as world-shaking as not minding ai overviews.
this sort of accusation is becoming pretty common, and eventually going to ensure that the only new users actually are bots, because any potentially new humans that want to sign up are going to get fed up with the llm/astroturfing accusations.
that is basically a direct accusation of astroturfing, man. no weaseling your way out of it.
if you're gonna break the rules and accuse someone of something, at least stand by it. wet-noodle accusations are even worse.
I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.
I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.
We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.
Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.
Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.
Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.
"Yeah, it sounds like a very a common thing back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine
Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.
For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google
As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.
And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.
[1]: https://kagi.com
[2]: https://uruky.com
We also have a no ai version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Google still maintains a web search mode that's free of AI overviews/chat exhortations (as well as ads, if you use an ad blocker). https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=14 is the format of the search URL, and tenbluelinks has instructions on how to use it as your default engine on various platforms.
That said, I've stopped using this as a founder. While I personally like the web search results more (if I wanted synthesis of results, I'd use dedicated agentic-loop-capable tools that are a hotkey away), it's far more important to understand (and empathize with) our users' experiences, good and bad, when they use Google in its full AI extravagance in practice.
The UI has gotten a bit clunkier over the years, but it's still good, still more focused than Google's.
As I write this, I give Google Search a quick try and notice that the first thing you see is a full-screen cookie banner!? On my laptop, I even have to scroll to reach the Reject/Accept buttons, and keyboard controls don't work at all. I can't believe people still use this crap.
Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.
We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.
I've been using Ddg and Brave for general search and Yandex for deep-ocean expeditions (of the jack sparrow variety) and topics that US tech giants censor. I am looking for good Chinese search engine so that I can search things that Yandex censors or when Yandex's bot detection goes crazy (I get blocked with infinite captcha about 25% of the time).
The only thing Google remains good at is local search. If I want to buy something locally, nothing else comes close.
I think the reason is my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches that Kagi's index just isn't good enough for. I am never searching for something like "best mattress" or anything else that is heavily SEO'd - it's always something very specific - so the result page in Google looks pretty much exactly like the Kagi page, only it nearly always has the result I'm looking for where Kagi's doesn't.
The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.
any chance you have an example of such searches off the top of your head that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
I'd guess due to compute constraints, AI overview will struggle to reach truly great quality. That said, for now I find adding this section at the top still useful to me. The broader decline in Google's search quality is the bigger drag on me.
They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for creators.
I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.
On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
(What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them.
DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches?
Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)
Honestly, the answer is so often a little toy search like Marginalia or going straight to the website in question now, its frightening.
Their business practices are just the worst. But are the first 10 blue links they show you usually bad? (Like you know that one of those 10 should be the exact thing you want, so you decide to rely on another search engine instead, & the alternative search succeeds where Google failed)
(Google could give better results to those unloyal to them, as one example, so testing needed! We could be getting wildly different results or just have starkly different usage tendencies, there’s just no way I could disagree with so many of y’all on something this basic assuming no DDG astroturfing or anything unless we’re looking at things differently one way or another)
But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites and gives me 0 or 1 result while Google gives me 5-10 results. Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though.
Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).
DDG catches the fallout.
> Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though
Years ago I remember Google asking the person lodging a similar complaint for an example of a query because they found there was always an explanation. Noticed this no longer holds as of perhaps a few months ago if I’m not mistaken. Even this* fails:
+”omg just tell me no results if this exact string isn’t present come on I even put the plus sign”
Infantilizing for us, maybe optimizing for the 99.5% in reality (understandable, annoying)
*edit, made up example based on what I believe I’ve seen this year
edit:
> DDG brings up relevant results
Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun? Spellchecking e.g. brand names, new/fad current event topics is apparently really hard (IIRC Bing not perfect here either?)
Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.
I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.
Has anything changed about Google search results for you?
I would rather not.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.
Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
Let me correct.
Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.
We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
I use it through OpenRouter - I love how the pricing is per search and isn't a subscription.
It's an AI like Google's "AI mode", in that it also surfaces URLs. I have not found it to be a good search engine replacement.
Google hasn't been "Google" for quite some time.
* I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo before that.
- Organize the world's information
- Don't be evil
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil :
> Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!"
That sounds like NY to me.
It's actually still in there apparently
Different people/bots scrape the net and add it to a distributed database optimized for search.
Each query could cost a crypto micropayment to avoid DDoS. Or maybe a slightly larger payment to download the whole database so you can use it privately or create a competing centralized or decentralized search.
Yes, we hate crypto, but it seems useful here. It's bad if 1 entity can gatekeep both the database and access to it, no matter how non-evil they seem now.
We might even index torrents, use speech-to-text for music, movies, video clips and other things like that. So you'll search for a phrase from a movie and it will be there even though no one mentions it on any website.
A couple of issues I can think of with that decentralized approach:
* copyright - fuck it, it's decentralized, it can index whole books, maybe partnering with Anna's Archive or LibGen. Maybe have a copyright-respecting database and another one that doesn't respect it if you foresee the man coming down on the project. Maybe the results from the DB that doesn't respect copyright is merged at query-time with the one that does. Or maybe, the DB that doesn't respect copyright is just a superset of the copyright-respecting DB. I don't know how easy it would be to simultaneously search more than 1 DB.
* privacy - it could run over Tor or at least allow people to access it via Tor. The privacy of the cryptocurrency also seems doable - we have Monero and other private coins but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement private micropayments with these.
* spam, intentionally wrong archives/crawls - pay the people who submit sites something so they financial motivation to not lie. Some consensus-based reward mechanism could be used, not sure which one
* moderation, illegal content - we don't care about copyright but likely don't want real CSAM, real animal abuse and other obviously awful content. Rewards should also be able to be used somehow for moderators or for people flagging content. We might even have a decentralized way to flag/tag content for anything at all - "AI generated" or "human generated", "small web", "uses Cloudflare", etc..
* how the distributed database actually works, how searching it works, who connects to whom when making a query and so on. I hope there are smart people with knowledge on such systems (not me lol) who can shed some light on whether it's possible and how.
&udm=14Read the article.
Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.
Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
If you really want the best search engine, ChatGPT with thinking mode enabled is by far the best search engine technology that exists today. There's nothing that comes close.
This one is also stupid:
> But if a search engine were to operate without ads, could it still make money?
> That’s what Kagi is trying to accomplish. For $5 per month — or $10 for unlimited searches — you can access an ad-free search engine without AI overviews.
UUuuh ChatGPT exists for $20 per month and does the best searches (amongst other things) and is also ad free.
----
Edit: getting downvoted
Firstly, it is pretty obvious to me and everyone else reading that this specific concern that the content producers won't make money is largely performative and insincere.
From the article:
> many users see this as yet another example of a tech company squeezing AI agents and chatbots into everything it can, making it impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot
This is purely ideological. I can say this because Ads, which are the very thing keeping content alive, is the very thing opposed generally by the same people.
Secondly, it is exactly Google, the company that pioneered ads, the thing that people take an issue with, are the ones doing this. Surely such a company knows how to balance ad revenue and long term user growth. If your concern is so valid that content creators won't make money, why do you think Google is doing all of this, especially when they are bound to lose their main source of revenue? It was Google that even made content creation possible by providing revenue.
Thirdly, and I can't prove it but I mean this in an normative and a positive way: AI for search is good for humanity, good for content creators as well. The large second order effects can't be explained but making it quick and easy for users to search and provide results for complicated prompts is a _good_ thing. I generally do click people's blogs and learn more about them and follow them.
In fact, if the concern were actually sincere, we would be seeing the second order effects more lucidly: lower SEO spam and higher quality publications.
I'm already seeing newer forms of content monetisation in the form of substack etc. This is by far a better, more aligned approach than SEO cat and mouse games. I also see advertisements working better because a rich prompt has better CTR which opens up a potentially better content economy. But I predict this very thing would infuriate the same people even more. "How dare I get more relevant ads and make Google richer??"
I'm sure what I typed up would be downvoted because of ideological reasons, but the few that think a bit more deeply might agree and see my point. Performative concern is tiring.
If nobody goes to the websites, those websites no longer get traffic or revinue. In very short order there will be no more websites from which to scrape, and the AI will no longer have new data to summarize.
Where do you think this ends?
By eating the source of their results, pretty soon there wont be any sources that aren't crap.