Kagi Assistant

I really wanted to like Kagi, I'm onboard with paying for search, but I've had had a big issue with its speed when doing the trial to be honest, am I the only one bothered by this?

Perhaps this is because I'm in Europe and it's faster in the US? A search request to Kagi seems to take around two seconds for me (shows as ~1s in the Kagi UI), it just feels really unpleasant compared to Google, I'm used to firing of a couple searches with different wording / terms and go through results quickly, feels like I'm being held back.

Maybe I'm spoiled, but if I'm paying for search I would really like it to be at least on par with Google, the search result quality seems ok from what I can tell, lenses don't really make sense to me, they seem to filter out too many results I would have liked to actually see, but the customization like adjusting the rating of individual websites is fantastic.

If they can manage to bring the speed to match that of Google, I'd be happy to pay for it I think.

Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that Reddit only lets Google crawl them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

I was on the $10 a month plan for a while, but I canceled. Overall the experience of using Kagi was great but not "$10 per month" great compared to free alternatives. On top of that I got the feeling that Kagi is not a super "professional" company; for example by spending huge amounts of money on self-printing useless t-shirts (https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k) or haphazardly suddenly charging tax on subscriptions.

What I want most of all from a search engine is to be "internet plumbing" and mainly stay out of my way, and with Kagi I always had the feeling they would suddenly remove/change/add things because of some strong opinion their founder holds. In which case I don't want to be $108 committed for a year.

I've been using Kagi for a while too (wow, 2.5 years, didn't realize), and agree that the experience and search results have been excellent. I don't use lenses, but make heavy use of bangs, and I like that I can up- and down-weight domains and even ban domains outright.

But I don't really care about AI assistants. If these AI integrations will improve the bog-standard search experience (I type something in the search bar, get a list of results, and click the one I think will give me what I want), that's great. But if not, this is just noise to me.

Can you explain to me why Kagi is so good? I don't use Google Search so don't try the privacy card on me

Maybe they'll offer a "bring your own API key" option some day.

I imagine the intersect between paid Kagi users and paid LLM users is pretty high, and many people probably don't want to double-dip on LLM spending.

IMHO if you pay for them directly already, then probably not worth it. I cancelled Ultimate because it just wasn't feature competitive to me over OpenWebUI, but if you want to be able to try out several different models from different companies without giving each of them a card and using a different interface, Kagi Assistant could be a good solution.

For what it's worth, there's already a free Raycast extension that lets you supply your own OpenAI key which lets you do this pretty easily. Wherever possible, I lean towards the BYOK (bring your own key approach).

https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9...

I’m not sure I read this right, but I think this feature is headed for the $10/mo plan, and currently exclusive to the $25/mo plan only as part of that plan’s early access to new features.

To balance the discussion a bit, I'm someone who pays $25 a month to Kagi instead of paying these companies directly. I like the easy access to the different models and being able to just google with Kagi "!chat (question here)"

You can use something like OpenRouter, which lets you access essentially all commercially available models. Including open-source models. There are no rate limits.

You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and loaded 50$ with credits five months ago, but I still have over 1/2 of it left.

I think it is hard to believe that Kagi would be any cheaper and have no rate limits.

What is the best paid service for private, anonymous, censorship free access to an LLM chatbot? Are there any that let you choose between multiple LLM backends to be able to compare answers or avoid being subject to secret system prompts, while still retaining privacy?

You can not spend the $25 and you will save $25.

Also, if you're already a Kagi Pro subscriber it's really only $15/mo more for access to both models. This is the first time I've actually been tempted by one of these subscription LLMs.

It was a little janky when I tested it in beta and you don't get all the features of paying for ChatGPT directly (no multimodal, no DALL-E, etc) but otherwise yeah it's a good deal.

If you just want text chat with different models it's great.

Paid Kagi user here. I love the AI additions, because to me it's an alternate interface to the core selling point: search.

Whether or not Kagi can achieve more than the "search alone is hard enough" point however is fair - though i've been happy so far.

I think this is very much about search. They just took on what Perplexity is doing with search. And I'm glad because I've been using it occasionally and now I can just keep everything in Kagi.

They're literally taking on competition here.

The move to AI stuff is why I don’t have a Kagi subscription. I really liked the idea of paying for search. I don’t want to give any money to an AI product.

The AI additions IMHO are search. Historically search gave us an ordered list of results, but there's no reason it needs to. The Kagi quick answer for example is phenomenal IMHO. Most of the time I am searching is because I need information for something. The "quick answer" and it's source citing can much more quickly tell me whether the results are worth a click. At this point I would hate to return to the old list of links output.

To me it seems like that's what they're doing here. I don't see right away how this is not their core business.

Kagi Assistant has the ability to use Kagi Search to source the highest quality information meaning that its responses are grounded in the most up-to-date factual information while disregarding most “spam” and “made for advertising” sites with our unique ranking algorithm and user search personalizations on top.

If you hear Vlad talk it's very clear that he considers these things to be part of that core product. The summarizer powers the ability to summarize articles / search results (even video), the assistant and fastgpt power their answer to Google's snippets and quick answers, small-web is the minimum-useful thing to start their own index and not have to pay rent to Bing/Google, and they view Orion to be a long-term bet on the belief that this is the only way they'll get Kagi as a default search engine.

paying user here and i love these new additions and am super grateful they have added them. these tools are a real boon to improving search and for getting information.

I think AI capabilities have been becoming an integral part of modern search. On the flip side you have the SEO optimizations.

Brave Search has offered an AI summarizer and assistant for a long time now. Bing with their OpenAI-powered Copilot. Google with the improved Bard/Gemini more recently. Amazon with the perhaps Anthropic-based Q for Business.

I think the end user is growing to expect the AI-augmented experience from all knowledge lookups. Feedback loop queries have become so natural to me, I’ve been finding it awkward to ask only one search query without a narrowing follow-up query, having the former discarded - kinda no longer adequate, particularly given the SEO-optimized flip side full of junk.

Why should they try to reach feature parity with some other engine that has more developers and more money? That's a losing strategy. They are running their own race and I think it's great. Kagi assistant is incredibly useful and there's no one else doing it like Kagi.

while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.

Care to explain what exactly do you mean by this?

while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas

IDK, I've been very happy with it. Just the ability to consistently pin/block domains is a massive upgrade over Google.

I couldn't disagree any harder. When I can't find an answer, I turn to LLMs. I don't want to read half the docs on an AWS product, I want the snippet of code that I care about. Kagi, as best as I can tell, is the only search service which can answer these questions and also respects me as a customer.

I think of it this way: there's often not a single page (or even small handful of pages) that answer a query. The LLM features answer the question with text that links to the pages, rather than answering my question with pages that might contain pieces of answers.

core selling point: search

The people I know who like to dictate into their phones and who have OpenAI's iOS app tend to open ChatGPT to "search" before they open Google or Ask Siri now.

They're going to go to one thing first, and this puts Kagi as an option.

Apple's alleged integration with OpenAI is presumably rolling in to Sherlock this though.

I agree that they should focus on their core product, but ironically while I use Kagi from time to time, I'm still mostly on DDG- via Orion, a browser I'm willing to pay for.

but its no big deal to scroll past those

For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads.

If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned.

Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly than you do. Which is fine.

sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those

I get that you don't mind, but for me, I would find that intolerable.

Customizing your search results is a big part of it. When I tried Kagi, I did not find it to be a huge improvement on Google until I started adjusting the rankings of my search results. Now I find it painful to go back to Google when I use someone else's computer or device.

The other big part of it (for me at least) is seeing more obscure websites in my results. I have had Kagi for a year now, and it has saved me more money than I've spent on it by making it easier to find specific products at lesser-known shops. These lesser-known shops often have really great sales because they are trying to compete against the big names, and Google pretty much only shows me the big names.

+"Searching" +"Like" +"This" works for me.

Whenever I try this with Google, I can't seem to get it to work though. According to [0], it is not an official search operator anymore.

0 - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Have you tried reporting those queries? I've seen issues like this being mentioned in the changelog with certain keywords.

Yep, either it's gotten worse or they lied about not tracking your history, as it has gotten worse over time and I have found myself adding !g much more lately.

agreed. I'm getting pretty sick of AI summaries that will fully lie to me about things. Google's search summary AI is awful I'd expect Kagi's to be similar.

see roko's basilisk.

uncertAIn.

No, Microsoft and Google and Apple need to know everything you're doing, for the sake of the children.

I haven't used Kagi's Quick Answer very often yet, but when I do, it always cites its sources and I often end up clicking into at least one of the sources to look for more detail or context.

If you publish to make information known, then your incentive is that it helps spread that information to people who may not otherwise visit your site. If you are trying to make money off of search engine traffic then you might not like this much at all. I think most people would rather not be pointed to those sites in the first place, so it’s a win-win if they block crawlers.

If you are selling something on your website, you are just as happy for people to find your information if it is through an LLM or a search engine.

If you are publishing information for free, you don't care how people access it.

If you are publishing just information without selling anything and want to make a living on it, you should paywall it or get with a publisher.

The ability to use lenses with custom assistants is the killer feature IMO.

Want to search for open source projects that implement some algorithm? Create a Github/Gitlab lens. Want to ask it questions only about some framework? Add it’s domain to a lens.

I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs

Yeah, you can set up an allowlist of domains in the lens configuration. I have a "Reddit" lens that essentially just adds "site:reddit.com" to the searches

I use the Programming, Forums, PDFs, Recipes, and Small Webs lenses pretty regularly, though I haven't tried making my own lens yet. The 'Programming' lens is probably what you'd want for your Python script.

Note: I work part-time at Kagi (was a Kagi user before that), not doing search stuff.

If you want to restrict results to a single page you can all to use `site:example.com` in your search.

Kagi's auto summary feature when you add a question mark after your query is absolutely excellent.

It essentially summarizes the top search results for you, leaning in on a strength of LLMs (summarizing) while reducing its greatest weakness (hallucinations).

Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere

Kagi has AI generated stubs for some of the search results, probably originating from some of the search indexes they pay for.

Kagi search isn't free either.

I use Raycast which is a drop-in replacement for Mac spotlight along with the ChatGPT extension that lets you quickly search conversations / ask questions / etc once you provide it with your OpenAPI key.

https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9...

I don't know if they have shortcuts, but if not you could likely add some automation to do it: there's Msty and ChatBox that can use any model.

I agree, but they aren't _that_ much better and I'd rather do a little more digging than support Google. I still find what I need and make good money. I can also rationalize it that I'm not always just taking the first result and actually reading multiple solutions to my problem but yanno, YMMV there.

What does “losing track of the flow” mean to you?

I think it is because bearblog (software we use, or at least the version we have) does not allow custom external in the navigation. But the product website is linked to in the very first sentence, and also from the home page of the blog. Still not good? :)

The Assistant currently has no hard limits on usage. We would like it to stay unlimited and will be monitoring this actively.

Just added to announcement FAQ

Sourcing information from better search results. I cancelled my Perplexity Pro since for any use case I had for it, I would instead use Kagi FastGPT. I tried Assistants (beta) but I didn't think it was anything special, didn't really see a way to integrate it as a daily tool, and ultimately FastGPT gave me the best answer, even better than their gpt4o and Claude Opus/Haiku based assistants.

There are two killer features being no ads, and customise your search.

Don't want pinterest in your search results? Block it:

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Now that's even better. I'm definitely going to try this by upgrading temporarily who knows maybe it'll stick. Good business practice by Kagi.

It is. You can upgrade family members to Ultimate tier on-demand.

As a search provider AI is basically their bread and butter. There is no single useful web search index that does work without AI.

No, not yet at least.

So did I. But for me, it is.