Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget
kagi.com
kagi.com
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
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.
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
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.
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
It's the auto-update behaviour of browsers that should probably be criticised here, rather than having general distrust of all extension authors.
But it's not just reddit, you can do like a custom regex replace on any domain IIRC.
You would think a mega company would think more long term then that
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).
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
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
Actually, you can configure this with Kagi and it works really well, at least on my area.
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.
Kagi has gotten better at directly providing answers (like 15lbs in kg) but it's still lagging.
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.
I have an extension that does this for me
I asked the developer for Google Hit-Hider to add the ability to block a 2ld (gov.br) when confronted with many results from 3ld (crap.gov.br, junk.gov.br, chum.gov.br) - and he did. You can trim the domain right in the action window. JS is one of the best people.
Sort of. You can block the domain in the result but not the spammy domain underneath.
If you're getting tons of result with gov.ar (spam1.gov.ar, spam2.gov.ar, spam3.gov.ar) you have to use up your blocklist for each one. You can't block gov.ar.
We can't edit our blocklist directly.
Google search feels more like shopping search nowadays.
"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".
Perhaps better than Google, but the whole paradigm shifted
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.
Kagi, if you're listening. Please.
- 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.
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.
I just don’t use search enough to want to pay. Perhaps that is because it is not so great though.
I hope they will continue to focus on their core product and don't branch out to do something else.
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.
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.
This is a nonsense comparison as the Kagi fee is guaranteed while the loss from a scam is not.
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.
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.
Last 2 months I used around 500 searches each month. So, the unlimited pricing is good for me.
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.
Or just use the programming (or other) lens for documentation
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).
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.
If you search for web stuff on Google, how often do you get MDN as the first result?
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.
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. :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, 5-8 a month I think about less than 9.99+. Probably psychological and financial. Obviously will be different for everyone and isn’t purely rational thinking.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
All links are what Kagi believes to be valid results.
Cannot judge on the quality filtering tho.
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.
The only downside is email unsubscribe links. Those annoyingly tend to be on domains blocked by the various block lists NextDNS uses.
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.
Other than that is works really well!
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!).
https://web.archive.org/web/20231208050228/https://kagi.com/...
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.
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).
It seems as if Kagi has indeed become a truly viable alternative to Google.
Whenever I do use the !g flag, the results over at Google are just awful, sometimes I have to scroll 1.5 screens just to get past the ads. Imagine running a search engine and not delivering meaningful results above the fold.
Google is a zombie company now.
I would jump on a $5/month unlimited queries plan though. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that bucket
1. Some niche domains are entirely not crawled by Kagi. Obviously, Google crawls a ton more and while Kagi can get 90% of what I need, I must fall back to Google occasionally.
2. Searching for restaurants or maps is poor. I didn't realize how much I relied on Google reviews for businesses until I switched to Kagi. Plus, the built in "order" buttons, photos, menu tab etc. are all missing. At least Kagi has a button to launch Google Maps, but I'd like more in Kagi itself.
3. I get results from other countries for Amazon and other web shopping sites even though my region is United States. I can't make them lower priority unless it's in the subdomain.
I use Kagi for search but have to fall back to Google 3-4 times a day at least.
I'm not sure how this is possible, Kagi uses Google's results
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Perhaps those sites are just getting downranked by Kagi's algorithms
No other search engine will be able to compete with Google in the short or medium term on business reviews and opening hours, because the business owners send their information and opening hours themselves to Google, and they have billions of Google Maps users to write reviews. There's nothing Kagi can do to compete, at best they should start purchasing this stuff from Google and integrate it. Or we as users have to learn to open Kagi for web searches and Google Maps for local business searches. That's the easiest way.
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.
I use it in private browsing mode so i can still use the nice search without having to log in every time.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
> the $10 per month unmetered search plan was not financially sustainable for us.
This was in March; fast forward a few months and surprise, they offer a $10 per month unmetered search plan. With unmetered LLM usage to boot?
I think it is obvious from their own math that the only way flat rate would be profitable is if they go for growth-based approach, burn whosever investment money for a bit and accumulate enough light users that they end up fully subsidizing the power users. I.e., they are hoping that the tragedy of the commons will not apply to them. Good luck to them, I guess.
(That, or they have the infrastructure to enforce some limits on unlimited plans. Unlikely, as it is not mentioned on the pricing page. If true, this would mean some invisible and inflexible limits I would have to be constantly mindful of running against—which is significantly worse compared to pay as you go.)
What changed is:
- Price of LLM APIs dropped significantly faster than we anticipated
- Kagi started getting adopted more broadly, which in turn meant more people who do not search as much started using it, lowering our average cost per user
Combination of those two factors made us more comfortable to adapt pricing again and pass all anticipated savings to our members.
Kagi at first seemed strategic with metered paid search, but choosing to go for growth and hoping most users will not search a lot feels like a downgrade from that.
US corporations doing this never offer proper spending limits per timespan (f.e. Amazon and Microsoft offer this but don't offer real limits - their wording explicitly allows them to go infinitely over and you will just be fucked). If they started doing this I would probably unsubscribe tomorrow (I'm currently a paying user), the culture just isn't there for them to get that right.
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"
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.
You're a paying customer, not the product.
I don't see why Kagi can't do the same.
Kagi is "a company created with the mission to humanize the web. Our goal is to amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity, and self-expression." Their goal is a search engine above all.
Mullvad's tagline right now is "A free and open society is a society where people have the right to privacy." Their goal is privacy exclusively in a VPN.
Paying for a random generated ephemeral account would be even better for Kagi but as far as I see it now, it's a privacy nightmare.
I recommend Kagi to follow the model what Mullvad has done for making a product privacy preserving while still being able to make money.
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.
That said, I'm a paying customer and will continue to be.
Perhaps it is your IP range? Do you have the same problem on mobile and broadband?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A discount pairing with Firefox might be good for sales/marketing.
I tried some searches in three different languages, and mostly Kagi didn't identify non-english paid webpages. It could only identify one (which wasn't paywalled at all).
I think Google UK handled this better.
But anyway, we like niche, niche is good, allows focus.
Source: https://kagi.com/changelog
then started to wonder what particle accelerators have to do with browsers.
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.
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.
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.
Or draw attention to content that may be better?
(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...