Keep up the good work guys!
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
/*
Hide pre-translated webpages.
"sri-group" is main result, "__srgi" are sub results.
You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
*/
:is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
display: none !important;
}*I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.
I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.
But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.
Also, I have no problem with Kagi -- we are actually investors in it. The more competition in the search market, the better.
The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.
We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).
One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:
If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.
What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.
fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.
- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.
- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.
All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.
I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.
I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.
Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.
They currently "support" safari currently by redirecting the searches that go to your chosen search engine to kagi.com with an extension.
What I love most about this fair pricing is it makes it was more appealing to encourage my friends to give it a try. Thank you, Kagi!
I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites suppressed in search results!
Good job Kagi et al!