Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi.

I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you get the idea. Who would pay for search, right!? I signed up for the free trial, fully expecting to walk away.

But have you noticed how the quality of Google has steadily deteriorated over the last decade or so? How it now just surfaces ad filled garbage, listicles, and regurgitated content, ad nauseam?

I'm sure it's not just me who prefers what Google used to show around 2011.

Kagi is like the Google of 2011. Except, better. You can combine a bunch of domains you think are related and create a "lens" to just search them. It comes with a bunch of pre-built lenses, so you can search for academic results, or forum posts or pdfs. You can tell Kagi if a website is good or not, and it will then tailor your results according to your preferences.

It kind of feels like what Google could have been, if the brilliant minds employed there weren't just tasked with chasing billions more in ad revenue every quarter.

Honestly, its results are better than Google's. Forget the lack of ads and them not tracking you and not selling your data (from which Google Search apparently makes on average $300 USD every year from every user). Just purely based on the search results, Kagi is better.

I've recently converted my plan to a "Duo" plan, and the SO, who doesn't over care about privacy and ads and stuff, also likes it. #win

Similar here. I didn't know Kagi until, as I remember, there was an article here on HN. I thought too why should I pay for search?

Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results - now Pinterest, Stackshare and all those AI-generated content filler sites are gone from my search results. Search results are great and it's just worth it.

The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is location-aware search. For certain keywords (like "gym") it feels like Google better looks for results that are within your area, whereas Kagi needs some more input (like a city/district name).

That's actually something I dislike, I don't want my results to be different based on where I am.

The results that you get in Google also depend on your location

Which is a massive problem. When I travel abroad it becomes unusable as it doesn't give me the usual.

I see you’re in Thailand… all dates are now using the Buddhist calendar. You’re welcome.

Yeah I agree on that one, if I wanted results specific to where I physically am I'd append the city/country name to my search.

Example where this annoys me with Google: if I search for "gdb", the first result is a local burger place named GDB, and not the GNU Debugger

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. If you're looking for something in the area where you live, you kinda need location-based search. Having it something you can toggle makes a lot of sense.

I really love Duck Duck Go's solution: Below the search input is a small toggle, allowing me to toggle whether results are based on my location or now. Most of the time I don't, but every now and then the results improve if I explicitly toggle results for my country on

Edit: I just saw that Kagi supports "regional bangs", e.g. !nl to search results for The Netherlands. This is, for me, almost on par with DDG

Some other stuff works better at Google, like "train from Heathrow to London" gives you the next 4 trains right there in the results. In fact it can give accurate results, link ups, walking estimates between bus routes, where the official transport app or website sucks (like Dublin buses). Oh and shop opening hours, cinema times etc.

Kagi has gotten better at directly providing answers (like 15lbs in kg) but it's still lagging.

I don't know the term for the box that comes up at the top of results and gives you suggestions. I'm going to call it the whatever-box.

The google whatever-box is more frequent than the one at Kagi. Is it better?

The number of times I have googled a question and had weird and probably completely false information inserted (using reddit as a source, no less) is ... well, it's more than I'd like. It's at the point that I try to deliberately ignore the whatever-box at the top of the google search results page.

And if I google for a product, the whatever-box gives me some very useful... price aggregates? ads? reviews? Who knows.

I certainly wouldn't go back to google search just because the whatever-box appears more often.

The only advantage Google so far has IMHO is location-aware search. For certain keywords (like "gym") it feels like Google better looks for results that are within your area, whereas Kagi needs some more input (like a city/district name).

Actually, you can configure this with Kagi and it works really well, at least on my area.

You can set the location for your search, but I find it a bit tedious. You either have to push two buttons (advanced search+change location) or do the search+change location. This is my main gripe with Kagi so far.

edit: I just realized there should be a search bang for this and indeed there is. Adding !countrycode to your query works. Still a bit tedious on phone, but helps on computer.

So far i haven’t been able to blacklist pinterest from image results, however — has that been added?

Kagi basically won me after I realised I can exclude whole domains from search results

I have an extension that does this for me

I'm also a happy Kagi user.

There are only two reasons I still visit Google:

  1. I'm based in the UK and often it shows me shops based
     in the US high up within my search results.
  2. Sometimes I specifically like to visit Google Shopping
     to find the lowest prices online for an item I'm trying
     to buy.

Once Kagi has improved these two areas I'll have no reason at all to ever visit Google (other than Google Maps or Google Translate).

I recommend DeepL for translation. Google Translate hasn’t really improved out the years and I find the DeepL translations superior.

Note that you can also search for something like "translate some sentence to french" in Kagi and get a translation widget, which I think is powered by DeepL. It doesn't show alternatives, but it's pretty nice.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm a big fan of Kagi and it turns out I don't use half of the cool stuff I'm paying for.

Number 1 is the main reason I haven’t made the switch yet. Google local search results are something I care about and use frequently. If Kagi solves local search, I’ll switch completely over to them.

Maybe this means something other than what I'm thinking, but if I search for "pub" on Kagi, I get a list of pubs near me. And if I click on the link, it brings up a map with pins on the pubs in my town.

Kagicis also worse at images, maps, and fresh results.

If you add !gb to your search it will restrict it to the UK.

Yes, also the same experience. Who would pay for search right?

I signed up for the $10 plan, before they introduced unlimited searches. One month I went over and thought ok, I'm not really ok with making more than 10. A few weeks later they switched to unlimited.

The lens feature is great. I have one for searching my company's public documentation etc.

The redirect thing is great too, it can rewrite URLs on the fly, e.g. Reddit -> old.reddit.

I have used other search engines in the past, like ddg for a long period, and others. I always ended up just doing !g on every search.

Kagi is the first where I don't notice I'm using another search engine and actually if I'm on Google I notice my experience is worse!

Great to see updates like this, in the months I've been using it it has improved so much already.

Reddit to old.Reddit as a feature is enough to make me look into this as a replacement search engine. My search experience for specific information that’s kept on subreddits has been hell since they introduced new Reddit.

If it can automate for me navigating to Reddit, then modifying the url to old.Reddit, and hopefully not accidentally clicking on the page and needing to reverse back or get redirected based on the content, then that’s probably worth 10 dollars a month already

There are also browser extensions which can do that redirect, but of course the story of browser extensions on mobile OSes is quite sad, and I'm sure Reddit will get rid of the old UI of these days anyway

the story of browser extensions...

In general is that you can't ever trust them apart from a few very large ones.

A redirect extension is ripe for the usual blackmarket shenanigans.

They’re simple enough that you can fork an open source extension and review the source with relative ease, freezing it.

I have my own omni extension made up of copy pasted open source extensions. I normally wouldn’t go through the effort but web browsing is crucial and frequent enough to be worth it and it took less than a weekend to get it up and running, especially with Plasmo. It’s also another reason to prefer Firefox and MV2

Who's got time for to review every open source project they use, thousands of lines of code though?

You can also make an empty reddit account and switch to old reddit style in settings.

I desperately wish I could use kagi but tying my identity to my searches is an automatic nogo. Is kagi interested in offering a Mulvad-grade option where everything is in ram and NO data is tied to my account?

Kagi, if you're listening. Please.

Use a burner credit card?

Don't have'em in my country unfortunately.

To clarify what I think you're suggesting for non-Mullvad users:

- Payment can be made in multiple forms which are not tied to a customer identity (you can even mail them cash) - Accounts are not username/password, no personal info is requested. When you pay you're given a randomly generated account number (currently 16 digits) which is valid for the time paid and each connected device, up to 5 simultaneously, will receive a random name.

More info here: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvads-account-numbers-get-lon...

This is a great suggestion for opening up as a more general purpose search engine. The history on/off option is nice but not an adequate guarantee for many situations. Searching for regionally banned or "unfavorable" topics while traveling or living under a regime, consulting legal information, or just plain old porn searches are all situations where one might consider having their name, email, and credit card stored with the potential to be linked a bit too risky.

We do not need your searches, they would be just a liability for us, check our privacy policy [1]. But since this is difficult to prove we also allow bitcoin payments for people who want to ensure anonymity on their end, while still paying for the product.

[1] https://kagi.com/privacy

They don't keep and tie your searches to your account. There is an option to enable history but it's disabled and doesn't let you enable it, but there is a message saying that they might add features that use this but since there is no feature currently you can't enable it.

Exactly, it reminds me of this:

"Drift to low performance is a gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance."

-- From the book "Thinking in Systems".

A very fancy way of saying that the best way to boil a frog is to heat it slowly.

until they jump out.

if they can

For me, Chatgpt / Bard and similar (Perplexity) has replaced 85 percent of Google searches so I feel Kagi will be a step backwards in this regard

Perhaps better than Google, but the whole paradigm shifted

Kagi has FastGPT and the AI assistant mode (available via several bangs like !fast, !expert, and !code). Though the latter is beta and only available to Ultimate subscribers

One thing I like about Kagi's FastGPT is that it always includes citations in the output. This emphasises that I'm still doing a search, just with a fancier interface, not consulting an all-knowing oracle.

When I ask an AI tricky questions, the responses usually point me in the right direction without fully solving the problem, so those citation links are really useful.

With Bard in particular, I find it often gives a confident but incorrect answer. When I point this out, it apologises then gives another incorrect answer, and so on.

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

I feel like people are sleeping on Kagi FastGPT, its their amazing search combined with their summariser and a llm model that gives me the answers directly without having to search myself.

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

totally agree!

Same for the Kagi Universal Summarizer: https://kagi.com/summarizer

I swear! Kagi FastGPT gives you references too!

For me, Google search started declining dramatically in quality when they took away the Plus Operator ... which was probably around that time

You would think a mega company would think more long term then that

"doublequote" word to make it required.

Even this isn’t reliable anymore. I had a double quote word that was being spellchecked. Even the ‘-‘ operator would still include words i explicitly avoid. This isn’t all the time but it happens frequently enough to be annoying.

Sounds nice…

I just don’t use search enough to want to pay. Perhaps that is because it is not so great though.

Kagi has a reasonably generous free tier. If you don't use search heavily, that's for you. If you do use search heavily, it lets you "try before you buy".

Ditto. Got to know Kagi via HN and found myself needing to use Kagi more often.

Google search feels more like shopping search nowadays.

I tried out Kagi, but then I asked myself: “why pay for it if it's only marginally better than Google?”. Then I realized Kagi has won. The sentiment about non-Google search engines used to be something like “XY is slightly worse than Google, but it respects your privacy, why not use it instead”?. The trade-off is no more. So I am customer since then. Love the domain ranking system.

I hope they will continue to focus on their core product and don't branch out to do something else.

I tried a lot of search engines and the one that didn't irritate me with out of place results was swisscows.

I was exactly the same. I tried various search engines but always reverted back to Google after a while. I think I stuck with DDG for the longest time but it wasn't enough to win me. And somehow Kagi managed to do it and now I'm a very happy paying customer of theirs.

Kagi is ok but I don't understand the level of gushing over it that I see here. I got the 100 query free trial a few months ago and haven't used it up yet. So I'm not willing to buy a monthly subscription for something I'd rarely (won't say never) use. A flat $20 for 500 queries would be fine and might last me a year or so.

Be careful with the "100 free searches" limit, it's not always really 100.

If you click the "More" button at the bottom of the search results page it reduces the number of free searches left.

In hindsight, it probably means they're re-running the search again with different parameters, thus "using" another free search.

However it's not at all obvious to the user that asking to display more results from an existing list would do this. :(

Frankly, it seems a bit dishonest to me. Which is unfortunate, as I otherwise liked Kagi.

This is my only “complaint”, having used it as a paid service and now just on the free trial after cutting subscriptions en masse. I was doing some research and had maybe five tabs open to different searches, had a browser update, then after the reload I had five less searches available. In your example they are actually running a new query, mine I wish the result could simply be cached since I’m a logged in user etc. I was disappointed but not sure what they should really do– flash a warning to all new users? Perhaps just when they bring a similar query, “hey we noticed you’re making another search, this time it slides but normally it costs another search”? Like others in this thread I’m hoping they can drive down the cost of unlimited searches rather than spend time creating special cases for us plebs.

In my case, if they'd just made the "More" button say something like "More... (search again and display new results)" it would have been clear what would happen.

That's very much how new/intro users should be treated, if not all users.

And I would have subscribed. Alas, they didn't, and I just can't mentally clear the hurdle of paying money to a place which I feel deceived me. So, I didn't become a subscriber. :/

Heya, I work at Kagi. This sounds like a great idea, thanks for the input! We'll put it on the requested features list (which our users contribute to).

Cool. Any chance you could let me know if it's implemented? I'll likely subscribe at that point. :)

I agree they should make you aware of that more directly when using the feature/before registering but to be fair it's in their FAQ.

Heh. Didn't even know they had an FAQ. :(

I'm also not sure I quite get the love. I got the free trial, and I've set it as my browser's default search engine for now to get used to using it. The problem for me is that it's at best equivalent to, and at worst a lot poorer than the same search in Google. Which is a shame, because I've been finding Google less and less useful recently.

Maybe I need to fiddle around with the settings more, get some better filters in there. But part of the advantage of Google is not needing to fiddle - it knows that I probably want programming results if I search for "rust" and things like that. I'll stick Kagi out a bit longer, because I really like the idea of it, but I've been fairly disappointed so far.

EDIT: one specific criticism is that I speak English but live in Germany, so I typically want English-language results except around German-specific things where I want local results more. Setting my location to Germany results in a lot of German results for unrelated searches (e.g. documentation for some library, or information about an actor), but setting it to "international" makes it harder to find the local results I'm often looking for (e.g. libraries in my local area). Google isn't great at this either, but it gets it right a lot more often.

Why not just use bangs to change from the more common to less common region on a search by search basis?

Or just use the programming (or other) lens for documentation

Thanks for mentioning bangs! I'm having the same issue as in the parent comment and didn't realize you could use bangs to set the location.

Still not an ideal solution for me, because it requires me to plan ahead when typing the query (or rewriting it later, which is slower).

Bangs can go anywhere in the search term, and if you press "!" on the search results page it focuses the search bar and types it there.

That could work, but it's not perfect. I think part of it is that it's all very contextual - for example, if there is an English language version of the exact same content, then I almost always want the English language version, even if I'm searching within Germany, plus there's a bunch of exceptions where e.g. I always want German Amazon (because that's where my account lives).

Google mostly gets this right, at least in my experience, although it's become a lot worse recently. Having to configure it with bangs might work, I'll have another go at that in the future.

I set mine as international, and when I want a local search I add the bang for my country (that's !de for Germany).

Do you still use other search engines?

You should start to do your everyday searches on both and compare the results. For me, this showed that kagi can save me time, I'm rarely scrolling to find good results where on DDG or Google I'd rephrase and search again often.

I don't like Kagi for other things, but that's not the topic here.

I mostly use DDG. Kagi results are comparable. When DDG fails I sometimes resort to Google. I can't use Kagi routinely with just 100 queries but I try it sometimes. It is subject to the same spurious results as the others afaict. And I haven't yet seen it find anything that the others missed.

The thing with Kagi is, you can demote or remove the domains which you don't want to see, making it more yours than Google.

Also, not having ads and results manipulated for money is a real, underrated gem.

I tried Kagi for a day, and signed up right away, and I don't care that I pay for it. It works wonderfully.

If you think Kagi is comparable to DDG maybe it doesn't make sense. For me DDG is terrible, while Kagi is comparable to Google.

You are clearly in a different usage bracked to me.

I had the opposite problem, I used up my 1000 searches within a month and didn't want to pay more than 10$.

They since introduced unlimited searches for 10$ so I'm pretty happy.

I’m in the same boat, I think I actually used the 100 searches up in two weeks or so. I remember wanting to search something on the couch and then being told I’m out of credits, throwing money at them was a no-brainer at that point. I think if OOP hasn’t used their 100 searches up in a few months, maybe they just don’t really need a search engine that badly? If you aren’t in the market of moderate to heavy search engine use, then paying any amount of money for one would also not sit right with me.

Just a couple of weeks ago, and this is a perfect moment to share, a colleague told me how he wanted to reschedule a flight and in a hurry clicked on one of the first Google provided links (ads) and got redirected to a scam site which was identical to the one his airline uses. In the end, he had to suspend his credit card and lost money. He lost more than any of the Kagi billing plans would cost him. But you are right, ppl tend to justify their choices more, especially when they paid for them ;) Still, no harm knowing there is a good alternative out there I guess.

Yeah, my trial was also sitting with unused searches because I treated it as a scarce resource and couldn't search like I would.

Because of GPT4 and Claude 2 chat models available in Ultimate plan, I thought I'd gonna try it for a month.

No problems using it for daily search/google/bing replacement. Just few times I tried fallback to google and the results where either about the same or once the google gave trash.

Yeah, but I bought it for AI features more than the search.

It does seem unremarkable sometimes, but every now and again I'll accidentally search for something in a private browser session (which defaults to google) and I'll immediately think, "these results are terrible, what happened?" and then i'll notice i'm not on kagi. That experience happening about a dozen times really sealed the deal for me.

For me it is a combination of the search results being of equal or slightly better quality combined with all the nice little touches (Lens, auto redirect, etc). I am trying to banish ads in general and Google specifically from my life so I am also a little biased.

Last 2 months I used around 500 searches each month. So, the unlimited pricing is good for me.

I find it kind of hilarious that a paid search engine is highlighting paid articles to help their users avoid them.

we really need a better way of paying for content. There's some attempts going around of browsers or extensions paying sites, but the ones i've seen felt kinda scammy.

i'd love some service where i can put in $20 a month, and it gets split up among the sites i've visited, with options to give bigger shares or exclude sites completely. probably not gonna happen for a while though, having to set up something to receive payments with is just too much trouble for the small personal blogs etc. that have the most interesting content.

Scroll used to basically do this, but then it was acquired by Twitter, lobotomized, and turned into a Twitter Blue feature. After that I gave up on it.

Honestly, I think a service like Kagi (together with their Orion browser) would be best suited to set up a service like this. I've been thinking for some time about exactly the idea you're proposing.

The interface could be so simple: a button in your browser you click to donate to the current open tab. That button turns into a pay button if you've opened a page that demands payment. And the page could specify how much it costs.

Down the road I see a potential bundle / partnership :).

It doesn't say anything about avoiding them. It's just indicating that they are (potentially) paywalled.

To a user willing to pay Kagi for a better search experience that may well be seen as a mark that those articles are more likely to be worth reading.

You’re paying them to rank and collect information from things on the web for you. People can’t subscribe to everything and it’s nice as a user of a search engine to know if it’s a requirement.

Why? There's nothing wrong with paying for something (including some news sites), and when I search for a topic I'm looking for something I can actually read. Knowing that a link will get me nowhere without the credit card is useful.

Many top 10 searches are paywalled and a waste of time clicking on, this seems like exactly the sort of thing people want from a search engine?

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting more investment which never comes without strings attached, or just selling the business.

The best possible, most honest and sustainable option would be usage-based billing, but it appears that Kagi have decided against that route.

I’m a moderately happy customer and would hands down recommend Kagi, but personally wouldn’t use it by default as the inevitable cost of changing my habit again in future puts me off.

Just drop them when they fail/become bad. No reason to miss now for some future eventuality which does not affect the present.

Not sure if that letdown will trump whatever minor time savings I have accrued while it was good, though. To make it worse, first make it better, then make it back as before.

It’s the same reason I choose not to make use of insane promotions that ride app space newcomers tend to provide. I could use Bolt DeLuxe (or whatever is the new hotness in town) for a couple months, but the anticipation of how I will soon suffer as it becomes more and more of a ripoff with incompetent drivers and absent customer support, and how I’ll waste willpower on changing my habit again, makes me wonder if it’s really worth it. Instead I could in meantime exercise my taxi hailing skills (in this analogy, practice crafting queries and otherwise working around the limitations of worse search engines).

Yeah it's a philosophy I've started to adopt. Better to get in when the product is new and there is hype, to enjoy fast-paced improvements from a new competitor that just wants to create a cool product, than to come in later when the hype has died down, the original founders have exited and the enshittification starts.

We all know the hype cycle of programming languages. Hype, disillusion then plateau of productivity. It's not the same with startups: there is only hype, peak, followed a long descent to the mean and death.

The hipsters were right.

Fun fact the LLM features are not expensive to them compared to their search product. Per search they pay at least 2ct.

Interesting, I wasn’t aware. I recall there was a post (from Vlad probably?) where they noodled over pricing plans and IIRC they considered low flat rate insufficient, I thought ML would be it but perhaps it’s the search.

they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers

They went from "a few tiers + pay-per-use above that" to "one low tier + flat rate unlimited" not long ago, don't you think they a) thought it through and b) are flexible enough with their pricing and profitability?

Heya, I work at Kagi, and I did the math for this. Our unit economics are sound, and we don't plan on subsiding usage with ties-attached money. We have abuse prevention mechanisms, and we regularly review heavy use use-cases so we can either optimize for them or offer alternative workflows.

On the flipside, I whole-heartedly recommend Kagi because I haven't gotten the sense they're running an unsustainable VC-backed business. As long as Kagi exists and provides such a competent search engine, I'm willing to give them my money monthly. I don't see an alternative if I want something other than Google or Bing.

They've repeatedly adjusted their pricing and usage rate billing based on their needs so that I don't feel there's a real risk from abusers/exploiters. They seem to be pragmatic enough to clamp down on that kind of thing as soon as they see how the costs develop under current circumstances and caused by what users/user habits.

I have that faith in them because so far they've been very transparent in their blog posts about when they've made changes and why.

I like Kagi , I do. I like the ranking, I like how I can search for controversial people and not have my intended search target censored by obfuscation. Kagi just gives me the data. That’s great!

I pay the 5 a month but I run out mid month which makes me not use it and breaks the habit and worry. I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month.

I guess I’m a heavy user, one day supposedly I had >30 searches (that I don’t recall). I want to pay but not that much. So I just learn to live with an inferior product.

So now I’m stuck between wanting to pay more and wanting to outright cancel.

Although sometimes reading HN news updates feels a bit weird/ad like (watch how negative downvotes get greyed out) I enjoy seeing them work on it and wish them the most success.

Ps I do appreciate their ios and mac apps that help with safari. Sadly I think all the spotlight, look up, and Siri searches still get processed out of kagis world. Obviously, not in their control.

Good luck Kagi.

I’m considering the 10 a month but then I think I get 500gb e2ee cloud+email+email hosting+vpn+a couple of other small things from proton for $8.33 a month.

Just because Proton is a great deal doesn't make Kagi a worse deal. This kind of logic never made sense to me. The products have nothing in common, so why the comparison?

Then, also think about why you're worrying about spending $10 per month on a product that you think is great? Is that an amount of money that has any impact on your current life situation? I think a lot of people can't break the habit that everything on a computer has to be free.

Absolutely. $120/year, to me, is cheap to have a search engine that actually, fundamentally works. That it keeps me out of the Google ecosystem a bit more is a massive added bonus. I pay similar to stay out of gmail and the rest of the G suite.

I get that some people have a different financial situation and I respect that, but the cost seems deeply negligible for the benefits of a tool I use tens to hundreds of times a day.

a solid search engine saves me far more then 120 a year in my time. Even just for work stuff if it saves me an hour or two over the entire course of a year it was worth it

I really hope they keep lowering the unlimited searches price. I'm pretty sure I use way less resources than my $10 pays for, but I just wanted it for the peace of mind - if enough people like me subscribe, they'll probably be able to lower it even more.

alternatively, I don't know how deeply embedded the LLM stuff is in kagi, but I really do not need that, so maybe a plan without that, since that is the stuff that requires a lot of expensive compute.

As mentioned in another comment, a plan without the LLM stuff wouldn't really lower the price, as search is the most costly thing they have, the LLM features are dirt cheap compared to searching. (>2ct per query)

FYI Kagi is working on an email offering. Check out #email on their discord.

It’s $10. Is there anything you use less frequently than a search engine in your life that you pay $10/month for? Coffee, eating out, etc?

And sure, I hope they lower the price, but for the hundreds of searches I do every month, not dealing with ads in my face is wonderful. And companies need to pay the bills somehow.

Kagi is currently great. Can someone explain what makes it more resilient to AI-generated garbage than Google? (If at all)

Of course, I can't prove it, but the search results on Google look like they tried to win the spam wars with some variation of page rank that's skewed by "big brand power". Like they have some seed list of trusted brands, and graph proximity to that boosts your site over the pure spam. That, of course, penalizes genuinely good content that has no such proximity.

Kagi's various posts about their algorithm consistently talk about the value of "non-commercial content" and indexes to make sure they don't get lost. Like this post: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.htm... Which sort of sounds like the same idea, but with more time and attention to curating a better list.

I imagine the reason we get all the AI garbage is ads. kagi downranks sites that contain a lot of ads, while google, who obviously gets their income from ads, pushes them. that alone is bound to make a massive difference.

there's more, of course. but it's plenty for me to decide that i have no problem paying my $10 a month to not get 8/10 results that are ads.

Google is selling ads - their search is designed to show you whatever will push more ads. They not only have no incentive to hide SEO nonsense if it has advertising, they are clearly breaking search to push more advertising in the results.

So I suppose the answer is that Kagi (and DDG, and Neeva-RIP) has (or have) no incentive to include spam, while Google is heavily incentivized to not only show it, but to make it appealing and promote it.

I think at some point in the past Google shifted it's stance of SEO from "if you do SEO you are cleary trying to game the system and will be punished" to "we are generally okay with SEO as that easens the burden of trying to guess content, and will only rarely punish it".

One instance that seemed like a turning point there was their reversal on the search penalty of genius.com after they were found gaming the system, something that I think was enforced much harder in the past.

So I think with embracing SEO spam to some degree (in combination with generally tailoring the behaviour of the search results more towards "consumption"), they must have lost parts of the resiliency. In contrast Kagi seems to be very alergic to SEO spam (AI generated or not), sometimes even too much.

I am still not convinced that I should trust Kagi. Why should I use my email address to log into the system? They say that it's for them to know how much credit you have left. Mullvad does generate a unique number for you, which you can use indefinitely.

If you don't trust something, you should follow your gut instinct.

Do you think something or somebody becomes more trustable if the repeat "Trust me, bro" to you? You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?", especially on a message board full of strangers. An dishonest person will repeat a thousand times that you can trust them, while an honest person probably will take offense.

You don't achieve anything by asking "why should I trust them?"

They didn't ask that.

They said "Why should I use an email address to log into the system?" (rhetorical) and then gave an example of a service that also needs to verify the user has paid for the service (VPN), but does so without requiring accounts/in a more privacy-preserving way (Mullvad).

But he didn't asked just for a "Trust me, bro". He is asking about why they don't use mullvad which can replace email id. It only seams beneficial to allow that if you promote your service as privacy focused.

You can create an account with an aliased/unique email address.

For me it just brings a lot of peace of mind to be able to click on any link and not have it blocked by ublock or pihole.

All links are what Kagi believes to be valid results.

Semi-off topic, but do you recommend using both uBlock and Pihole? I'm currently a uBlock user (on Firefox), and I was thinking of setting up a Pihole. Thanks!

They might have similar results in many cases, but they're very different things. For a start, if uBlock blocks a domain then it's a click away from accessing it just this once. On the other hand, it only helps in browsers it supports. On the gripping hand, uBlock Origin can block individual resources, not only entire domains.

I'm a happy user of NextDNS rather than a PiHole, but the rationale is the same: use DNS blocking to block stuff that you never want anything on your network to see, and use uBlock Origin for fine-grained blocking of the rest.

I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on DNS blocking, because it won't block at the right level of granularity. I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on uBlock Origin either, because it doesn't work everywhere I want to block stuff.

Agreed, I also use both. NextDNS/PiHole are great because you can configure them as the root DNS providers at the router level and give everyone in your household and guests on WiFi a painless ad-free experience while layering uBlock on top for the sneakier ads like Youtube.

The only downside is email unsubscribe links. Those annoyingly tend to be on domains blocked by the various block lists NextDNS uses.

pihole works by filtering whatever device is on your network, even if it doesn't support ublock... and coming changes in Google Chrome manifest v3 doesn't impact pihole.

Cannot judge on the quality filtering tho.

As a UK user I find Kagi returns results from Australia far too often which is a super weird issue DDG used to have as well

I'm a UK Kagi user and do not have this issue.

Perhaps it is your IP range? Do you have the same problem on mobile and broadband?

It happened at both work and home - my region was always set to United Kingdom and it would still decide I want localised Australian results sometimes.

It may have been fixed since I last used it of course - I just didn't find the results provided by Kagi any better than DDG to keep paying.

We're coming to take over mate. It's the start of the reverse colony

I really like Kagi. The only thing bugging me is there is occasional delays when searching, at least from the UK. Google's instant search definitely has spoiled me there.

I remember trialing it a while back and gave up pretty fast due to the consistent very long delays when searching from Ireland.

Yeah, I wonder if it's optimized for US only right now. If the Kagi team is listening, please fix for world wide :). It's not always bad, but P95 needs work.

Here is a map where they've deployed: https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-11-16/1700178524-...

Source: https://kagi.com/changelog

I don't want to pay for a search service and have 'range anxiety' and self-regulate my usage like I'm driving a 50km EV.

Search is ubiquitous, make a flat rate subscription for normal people and a TOS that excludes non-human abuses. I don't pay for a per call mobile phone plan and I make way more searches.

The limit has been removed from most paid plans since September

https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10

We’re thrilled to announce that unlimited search is now included in our $10/month Professional plan and our Ultimate, Family, and Duo plans.

That's reasonable, and good timing as it could start breaking into the mainstream.

A discount pairing with Firefox might be good for sales/marketing.

The Pro plan is unlimited, though. It used to be capped until earlier this year.

"Sign Up to use Kagi"

Why does one need to signup to use a "privacy" based search engine like Kagi if it needs my email and password?

Can't it just accept a username like HN and be done with it?

I'm trying to use a fake email, tor and a VPN and I'm running into errors, eventually I gave up.

It's a paid service, so you need to authenticate to use it.

You're a paying customer, not the product.

Mullvad is able to do this without passwords and emails AND it is a paid product that is privacy based.

I don't see why Kagi can't do the same.

100% anonymous is possible. I would love my [very, very anonymous] Mullvad account to be matched by kagi. As it is, my options are worse - but free.

How is it for searches not in English?

Do you mean writing non English search text, or for results not written in English?

Both? When I want to look up something in my native language.

10M people European country here, no issues. I get good results in the native language for "restaurants in [random 15K people town]", "[random local food] recipes", info about taxes from gov websites, recent local events, my own name (high school's website), my mom's name (her business website), random hobby forums.

I bought a year of kagi and overly very satisfied. 2 things that annoy me about it: -I randomly get irrelevant international results as a US person (Amazon Canada and Amazon India for instance) -There are inconsistently labeled timestamps on things. I use reddit a lot when reviewing search results. Sometimes the reddit links are timestamped and sometimes they aren't. Leads to end up clicking on a reddit link that is 6 or 8 years old and no longer revelant.

Other than that is works really well!

Reddit time stamps has always been a problem for me in all the other search engines, not for you? I’ve also noticed Bing is now surfacing tons of Reddit results on just about every search but without me typing Reddit. I’m guessing my use of bing chat or something similarly creepy.

You could try work around the Amazon issue by lowering the non US ones and raising the US one

Pretty sure reddit results not being timestamped is reddit itself not giving the timestamp. I have noticed it for a while on multiple search pages.

How's your experience with non-english searches?

Google has become unusable to search in a foreign language if you do not happen to be in a given country. It's trying to be too smart. It's ignoring double quotes, tld restriction still searches for the sites in a language of the country I'm in, etc... it's really frustrating at times.

Not to mention Google can't search anything old anymore. It's either news or spam. Or irrelevant "autocorrect". And it used to be so great with a little bit of effort. 10+ years ago that is.

Kagi has been pretty good for me for Thai and Japanese results.

I've had countless occasion Google's result is much worse than Kagi, as far as returning actual useful results is concerned. For example, searching for a product in Japanese, Kagi may find fewer results, but Google shows a page full of affiliate spam, which is not really useful.

The only occasion where I found Google remotely useful is for image search and map search.

Kagi is quite good for French.

Are search results on Kagi regionalized? For example do I MUST have region set or they give me best of the best results based on my query? Google is annoying with region specific results in any of their services

The have an "international" region setting, which is from my experience the best option. Unless you want regionalized results.

By default I get international results, and I can switch with a dropdown list where my country is at the top.

If viewing this link in the future, either search for "Dec 7, 2023" or view this snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/...

They really should add anchors on that page, this is not the first time this problem has come up.

Or direct link https://kagifeedback.org/d/2654-dec-7-2023-paywalled-article...

Would be nice to open those paywalled articles with archive.ph.

Kagi supports regex-based redirects, so you could redirect paywalled domains to a paywall bypass website.

That's exactly what I configured right after reading this news, here's a rule I came up with:

(https?://www\.nytimes\.com\/\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}.*)|https://archive.is/newest/$1

Unfortunately, I quickly encountered the "Too Many Requests" error while testing. Maybe I should configure an nginx rule to distribute requests along my multiple VPSes to mitigate this...

I've been using Kagi for a while now and I love it.

My only gripe is the usability on iOS as it keeps logging me off every now and then (it feels like more often than many other sites) which then results in a login screen when you're trying to search something and after the re-login the query you already wrote once is now lost.

not sure if it's possible to set up on iOS, but in settings -> account they offer a "Session Link" that contains a token that will log you in automatically. if you can set that link as your default search you shouldn't have that issue any more.

I use it in private browsing mode so i can still use the nice search without having to log in every time.

IIIUC custom search engines on iOS are a hack and they just have an extension which captures your google queries and redirects them to Kagi.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

They recommend their own Orion browser which is the only browser on iOS that uses a webkit fork, which can install browser extensions intended for chrome and firefox

I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and search results definitely feel much more useful than Google. Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though (think stuff like "sunrise", timezone conversion, currency conversion, etc).

Widgets are definitely not as good yet, though

That's true. The seem to especially be confused with `,` and `.` in fractional numbers; sometimes it recognizes `,` , sometimes it doesn't, but it does use `,` in the results. This leads to the fun result that you can't use the output it gave you as input in a new calculation.

But that's a minor issue and otherwise I'm also a happy paying user.

Kagi still uses Claude 2.0 any ETA on 2.1? Also, the expert command returns mostly wrong answers and loses all of the previous context.

They already use claude 2.1 in the assistant, source: vlad (kagi founder) wrote this on the 22th November on discord.

Thanks Kagi, love these status updates.

Vlad, I know you often read these comments, so here's a suggestion: I would love a way for Kagi to respect my search query and not try to interpret or assume anything is a typo. "Verbatim" feels just too strict (I think the order of the words is important as well, doesn't return more than 2 or 3 links), where the default is too loose.

Sadly, I don't have any examples to share, but it feels that as Kagi improves, it becomes more and more Google-like, as in trying to be smart instead of following my orders. I grew up when search engines searched for keywords, and were not trying to be smart. If I search for—foo bar baz—I want to be shown all pages that contain the three words as I have spelled them. Not presenting any combination of the three as valid.

Search engines trying to be smart make the web feel so small, because all the niche variations and topics are just so hard to search for, and it is the reason I stopped using Google in the first place.

Anyway, I am a happy paying user, and love the product :)

If you quote each word, you get closer to what you're looking for but without quite the degree of specificity that you'd get from quoting the entire query?

Kagi is great but even though it knows my location is the UK, by default is skews to US-located results. I can fix it by suffixing every query with "UK", but its a pain.

That said, I'm a paying customer and will continue to be.

We'd appreciate if you posted an example or two to kagifeedback.org so we can take a deper look. These things are mostly fixable.

According to SimilarWeb, Kagi.com has ~1 million visits per month. Very niche, for now.

That is off by at least an order of magnitude since we have 350k searches/day [1]

But anyway, we like niche, niche is good, allows focus.

[1] https://kagi.com/stats

Kagi search is great and totally worth the $10/mo (I pay for Ultimate to get access to the assistant features but I'm not yet sure if they're worth it, though I'm happy to support the company).

Custom bangs alone are worth the price: I have them set up for LibGen, all my torrent sites, archive.ph, and their summarizer (which I recently discovered is !sum by default, no need for a custom bang).

But my favorite is a custom bang that points back at localhost (via Tailscale hostname so its available on mobile too) running a custom terminal emulator web app. Just using the bang alone opens a new terminal tab in the browser but when using it in combination with a URL allows writing commands like "curl [...url...] | ~/scripts/crawl.sh"

Would you share a bit more about how you have your custom bangs setup? I'm always curious to see the life hacks people implement that speed up workflow processes.

We need this paywall indicator badly here on HN.

Unrelated: tried logging in with my Google account (yes, I know it's considered bad practice) and got an error on Google's side that Kagi is blocked.

Kagi is mind blowingly good. It's almost unbelievable first time you use it. Like you forgot that there could be good, interesting and relevant stuff on first page of results.. I am mad at myself for not trying it earlier.

I tried Kagi for a few months this year, and while the overall flavor experience was pretty good, it was not quite there yet for me in terms of result quality. I strongly believe in them and will absolutely try it again in 2024 though, the improvements they make are impressive and I actually miss some features (domain ranking and blacklisting is so great!). Can’t wait to see how the quality of results has evolved.

Subscribed for a year after a free trial. Returns more relevant results than Bing, snappy interface and just overall gives you a good impression. They have a fast GPT powered article summarizer, which I find extremely useful when exploring library documentation. Not something that a plain ChatGPT cannot do, of course, but Kagi is just faster. You should as well check out their lightweight webkit based browser, Orion (MacOS only).

I had huge issues with Kagi because I don't just use google for research, but to find local things like finding a coffee shop in a location or using reviews to see what's going on, or some product I need to buy in my country - 70% of my searches fall in that category and I generally use AI or some light research for programming topics. Although the google results are poorer, the facility offering is far superior and I found I was switching between Kagi and Google too often. I think it's great for research, but not so great for researching day-to-day things you use in real life outside of the computer.

Do they accept monero yet?

I paid for a sub a few months back. It was good, but the volume of my searches is offensive, it was unrealistic to think that I was ever going to stick to the product. Just like someone else posted, I'm trying to cut down on subs at the moment, and this product, as amazing as it is, it's just not beating free google with dorks + ChatGPT.

I'm also a very happy Kagi customer, the price is worth being able to ditch yet another Google product for me (being able to completely block Pinterest/Medium and other annoying domains is great).

The only thing I still occasionally use Google search for is the Shopping tab, which I find handy for filtering results to product listings (though if anyone's got any tips for this in Kagi, happy to hear!).

Funny to see the revival of the dog search engine, after Lycos.

I love kagi. It's the first search product I'm willing to spend money on

First seen timestamp instead.

I have been using Kagi as my default search engine for a month now. It really provides better search experience than google.

Nowadays, Google Search is flooded by SEO. When you search things on Google, you will likely get tons of listicles titled "Top <keyword> 2023", "<keyword1> vs <keyword2> comparison", which barely contains some useful contents. Sometimes, you will even see some AI-generated gibberish articles repeating some basic information about your keywords. It becomes much harder to find useful contents from google than the old days.

Kagi search results have fewer nonsense articles. They groups those listicles together so that you can easily skip them. The feature I like the most is Personalized Results, which allows you to pin/raise/lower/block results from certain domains. For example, I pin wikipedia.org, and block quora.com.

Kagi is really nice but the limit of searches for the $5 is far too low

Kagi’s ability to acquire name recognition among tech-centric people is not only what convinced me to pay for it - it was one of two or three fairly simultaneous things that made me reconsider the magnitude of the financial stake i have had in $GOOG since 2005. It’s less than it was a month ago.

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for about 2 months now. I love it, and feel so far that it's well worth the $108 per year: just by not having to spend mental energy to scroll through the first several sponsored results; and try and decide if a result is paid or not.

I set Kagi to be my default search in my browser (Chrome). For specific searches like stocks, maps or restaurant reviews, I still use the "!g" bang to go to Google.

Never thought I'd pay for search: but very happy with my choice so far. Great to see others agree on this page - as I hope they can maintain this as a viable business, and stick to the principles of users being their customers: and not advertisers.

Feels like a breath of fresh air tbh.

Another happy "Early Adopter"-flag Kagi customer here.

The search results are, ime, superior to Google, and it's great to be able to remove one more Google product from my life. The quality of the reviews sites that come up for product searches is night vs day.

The bang support is awesome (I use "I'm feeling lucky" daily) and I've been using the Universal Summarizer[0] more often lately. Customized promotion & demotion/blocking of domains is seamless and surfaces the content I'm trying to find.

Looking at using FastGPT[1] and Kagi Small Web[2] more. I wish they'd get their forum off of Discord and onto something open and indexable!

0. https://kagi.com/summarizer 1. https://kagi.com/fastgpt 2. https://kagi.com/smallweb

I think i'm tired --- initially read that as particle accelerator and improved widget.

then started to wonder what particle accelerators have to do with browsers.

Does anyone use Kagi for Kids? The Starter level at $5/mo is enough for me so far, so $20/mo for Family is quite a jump. Would love to know whether Kagi for Kids is worth paying for

I have been using Kagi for a few months now and generally enjoy it, but I do think it's biased towards returning results from sites in the US, despite having "United Kingdom" selected in the search criteria.

I think Google UK handled this better.

I've been a paying Kagi customer for maybe 6 months now. It's such a breath of fresh air to be the customer again. Haven't used !g a single time.

Perhaps this is not meant for me. I use gpt-4-turbo frequently, which costs only $5 per month. For the same price, if I were to purchase from Kagi, I would need to limit my quota, like using a different search engine for unit conversion or obtaining a simple Raspi pinout. Why design a product that encourages users to use it less? In my opinion, a $5 with limited searches doesn't justify the cost.

Did google oauth block kagi? It wont allow me to sign up with google because "kagi has not completed the signup process"

Is DuckDuckGo more neutral on doing things like this that help the user but might piss off publishers?