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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone compared Perplexity with Kagi Assistant?

I am always looking for Perplexity alternatives. I already pay for Kagi and would be happy to upgrade to the ultimate plan if it truly can replace Perplexity.

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I had been paying for both for several months, and I decided to cancel Perplexity about a month ago. First and foremost, I feel like the goals of Kagi align more with my goals. Perplexity is not afraid of ads and nagware (their discover feed was like 30% nags to turn on notifications at one point if you had them disabled, and it's still an annoying amount). I also really like the custom assistants in Kagi. I made a GNU Guix lens that limits my search results to resource related to Guix (official docs, mailing list and IRC archives, etc.) which I can access with !guix, and I made an assistant that uses that lens for web results that I can access with !guixc. I can ask something like "how do I install nginx?" and the answer will be about Guix. You can do some customization with your bio on Perplexity, but it kind of sucks tbh. It would randomly inject info about me into completely unrelated queries, and not inject the info when I wanted it to.

Would you be willing to share how did you that? New to both Kagi and Guix!

I can actually just share the lens I made directly with you!

https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8

I'm not sure if adding that to your account will include the configuration I have set to access the lens with !guix, but if it does not, you might want to add it. The lens basically just uses this pattern for search result sources:

logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/, lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/, lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-guix/, lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/, lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/*, guix.gnu.org

I don't think I can share the assistant directly, but if you have Kagi Ultimate, you can just go to the Assistant section in the sidebar of the settings page, and add a new assistant. You can set it to have access to web search, and you can specify to use the GNU Guix lens. You can pick any model, but I'm using Deepseek R1, and I set my system prompt to be:

> Always search the web for answers to the users questions. All answers should respond relating to the GNU Guix package manager and the GNU Guix operating system.

and that seems to work well for me. Let me know if you have trouble getting that set up!

I got a free year of Perplexity thanks to owning an R1. I already had a Kagi subscription, but decided to give Perplexity a try.

I found Perplexity was slower and delivered lower quality results relative to Kagi. After a week of experimenting, I forgot about Perplexity until they charged my $200 to renew my free year. I promptly cancelled the heck out of it and secured a refund.

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