Try Switching to Kagi | Hacker News Reader

Try Switching to Kagi

daringfireball.net

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About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.

This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.

What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.

I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)

That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.

I'm not sure if it's a Norwegian law or an EU law, but companies here are forced to regularly send reminders that you are subscribed to them, I've gotten them from all the major streaming services I've subscribed to.

Huh, Norway is not in the EU.

They are part of the European Economic Area, which means they belong to the EU market and their regulations (without voting rights), but they get to keep controlling their fisheries

So, in this context, they might as well be

They have access to the EU market through the EEA but do not abide to 100% of the EU rules, regulations or laws. And they can have their own rules/regulations/laws.

We lack such strong consumer protection laws in the US, so I'm pleasantly surprised when something so basic like this happens.

On the contrary, they are the rare SaaS that proactively avoids charging you any period you don't use it.

Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43308930

Hey,

As I mentioned in my previous comment, it does not convert IF you do not have a payment method set. In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.

I did mention a workaround we could do, and that's something that we will ensure gets done asap.

> In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.

Is this even legal? Ok, maybe in the US...

Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.

This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.

With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.

That comment from an actual human being, sir, more than anything else, would be by itself a reason for me to switch to Kagi everywhere.

Fortunately I already switched to Kagi everywhere...

Huh? They are scamming someone,

> I do understand how this may be unexpected.

is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.

How does this make you want to be their user?

Have you ever written software? Especially to manage payments? This is a very plausible bug around a corner case. Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers that they're also trying to win back, or maybe sometimes bugs happen.

Having bugs is okay.

That particular reply however is gross and controversial on so many levels.

If you have a bug at a partner, you don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected". If it affects multiple users, you don't do opt-in refunds (which is again, illegal, and is a scam if intentional).

> Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers

They've just admitted it?

Dude what's your angle here. Scammers don't offer full refunds.

Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen.. And is also taking the user input back to his employer to hopefully find a way to improve the user experience.

It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.

> Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen..

Yep. That explains why is it gross, controversial, and admits a scam. Which is okay, I guess. I've read much worse. (For example, in this very thread. From the person I'm just answering.)

I was just surprised that someone reading it felt that he needs to give money Kagi immediately. We are different.

> It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you.

First, no, it's not legal. Especially with

    but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

Second, they at Kagi didn't want this (according to what they said). It just happened (again, according to what they said). No refunds tho (again, according to what they said).

I clearly skimmed the thread too much. The quote from your e-mail is definitely misleading.

I do not like to see a helpful engineer being given a hard time.. But that is a worse look for Kagi than I was aware of.

> will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users

What more do you want? A user complained, they offered a refund and they said they would look into fixing it.

Automatic refund everyone involved?

so should they refund everyone who had free trial and started paying afterwards? what if they wanted to start paying?

And what if they simply missed that it continued charging with the stripe email? It’s a dark pattern that they should fix.

They are fixing it. The only debate in this thread is whether they should automatically refund everybody who might have been affected, regardless whether that person intended to continue or not. That's a pretty different thing.

I don't see how this is a debate. People unsubscreibed Kagi, they never subscribed again, billing them is illegal, period. (And even if it were legal, why would anyone want to that in the first place? If I operated a business I most certainly wouldn't want to bill people that are not my users.)

"wHaT iF tHeY wAnTeD tO sTaRt pAyInG?" was just a joke on twisted cartoon scammer logic, not an argument.

Anyone that wants to use Kagi again can click on the subscribe button.

No that’s not it. The contention was around two things 1) the dark pattern and 2) should they refund everyone.

I get it, people love Kagi, I do too. But this is a bad pattern that they should never have allowed on the first occurrence.

Yes they said they are looking into fixing it but it was a soft commitment and they also should think about refunding folks.

> don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected".

This is why companies end up having PR people. An attempt to sound understanding can can easily be scuttled by an unfortunate choice of words. If the programmer had shortened that sentence to "I do understand.", there would not have been a chance to construe an attempt at downplaying the situation.

As far as I remember, this ‘try us again for 30 days’ promotion was explicitly for previous subscribers, so I would not say this was a corner case.

Ah, if that's true that does make this a little less excusable. I still don't think it's nefarious, but I do think it's a pretty bad and embarrasing bug on Kagi's part.

I realize Kagi is loved here, heck I use it myself but this pattern does come off at best lazy engineering and at worst scammy. Their marketing email pitches it off as no strings attached but there is a case where it will auto charge you at the end.

I think some of the ton is a little aggressive but it does seem like something that a lot of other companies would maybe get called out for.

I agree, they should definitely be called out for it. However, I also believe a little grace and understanding from the users is called for. They're a small team trying to do their best, and they've taken concrete steps in the past demonstrating their committment to customer service (i.e. not charging you for a month if you don't use your subscription).

I will admit that I do have a reflexive allergy to conspiracy theories when people jump way over Occam's Razor to get there with little to no evidence, and saying that Kagi is just a "scam" is firmly in that boat IMHO.

> and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund.

Please consider whether they can authenticate a user based on an HN comment and HN profile. The request for the user contact the company directly makes sense.

> Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.

Have they known about the bug before? For how long? Perhaps it's not an automatic refund because they need to confirm the underlying issue, figure out which users are affected, and only then get management to to sign off on it.

Egg on face from Hackernews has been known to turn the eye of even Google.

There is tremendous power here.

It’s plausible that I didn’t see the email because it got spam filtered away, so I totally believe that one was sent.

On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.

[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]

Depending on the dates, "no fee if you don't use it" might not have been in place yet

> But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons

A bit off-topic, but rather than scrutinizing credit card statements, I find it much better to get email notifications of transactions - that way I can review transactions as they’re made and fresh in mind, and I notice fraudulent or unwanted transactions right away.

> This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present.

Blaming Stripe?

> Blaming Stripe?

Explaining Stripe?

Email is not the best notification method these days. I'd suggest having a notifications delivered directly in kagi's interface as well. Maybe a banner for an ending trial period.

I have been using Kagi since the start. You guys are doing an incredible job.

Hey, I've been a subscriber for a while. I love it. I wear the tshirt.

Thank you.

Thank you for stepping up but here's a tip - don't blame Stripe. If you use a 3p in your service, it's now apart of your service and you're responsible for that.

I appreciated the extra detail, and took it as something "Here's what we think caused this, and we're taking responsibility for finding a way to prevent it."

YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.

FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all

Why not just avoid their services instead of pirating their content and matching the ethics of their execs?

Why not just do something else than watch shows your friends and family are watching?

Clearly, they enjoy the content. You don't just stop enjoying things like that.

I think the point the OP is making is that just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I agree.

If you feel streamers are offering a bad deal, don't take them up on the deal and find something else to do. If you want to watch shows your friends and family are watching, take the deal.

Ah, I thought they were just confused.

Hey, what do you do for living? Can I have some of that for free?

Sure! https://kagi.com/search?q=how+to+make+websites&r=us&sh=jJWfn...

Oh wow, thank you.

because their services aren't fungible

It's not piracy because they've made it clear that digital ownership is not actually ownership.

As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.

I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.

You should be more worried about Meta doing piracy than individuals: https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...

Why? They've gave it back to society in form of Llama models; it's a great and strongly positive development.

So copyright matters only sometimes? If that’s so, I bet anyone who consumed pirated content has had some positive impact on the society because of it.

The ends justifying the means is a pretty popular argument these days.

I agree, and I am?

Shoplifting and copyright violation are not comparable.

Most of us on this site produce copyrighted works for money. Many of us are pretty knowledgable about how copyright works, as it's an integral part of our livelihood. So please don't try to promulgate that weird media industry propaganda here.

Ah yeah the weird propaganda that people labor to make creative output, and if you value that output and have the means, you should consider paying for it.

Also, read what I wrote: "if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act". What specifically bugs me is less so the act - I assume few among us haven't engaged in illegal streaming, paywall bypassing, password sharing etc. - it's the weird contortions people go through to frame piracy as a noble endeavor vs. just admitting they're being too cheap to pay for something.

For me it is rather can no longer afford, and cutting back on dependency on USA.

But if I understand correctly, you aren't cutting back your dependence on the US. You are cutting back on paying for your dependence. If you really want to cut back, consume non-US media.

They are quite comparable, and it's not media industry propaganda. I'm old enough to remember life before mp3 sharing. The only way to get music was from a CD, bought or stolen. I didn't steal CDs, so when "free" mp3s were available, I didn't take them either.

Commit theft if you want, but be an adult and acknowledge it for what it is.

As long as your time is worth <$50/yr...

I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.

Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.

10 dollars is like, a sandwich. Access to your search engine for a month is less useful than a sandwich?

Did you miss the part about them using DDG? They do have access to their search engine.

If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.

I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.

> 10 dollars is like, a sandwich

In Silicon Valley?

Does Kagi only want to sell to techbros?

How much can a bana- er, sandwich cost?

I just checked McDonalds in my hometown in Idaho. A Big Mac is $5.99 for just the sandwich and $10.68 for a meal. A Double Quarter Pounder is $8.29 for just a sandwich.

McDonalds is definitely on the cheap side so $10.00 seems like a reasonable estimate of “sandwich money”.

No need to invoke tech bros or silicon valley. Certainly no need to invent a motive.

Nice troll. A footlong Ultimate BMT is $11.29 in Wichita before taxes (I just checked).

Kagi builds an excellent product for a very fair price. Direct your ire elsewhere.

A footlong is rather big for an average sandwich. Half of that is easily a large sandwich by themselves. So the cost for two large sandwiches.

Eating a sandwich over two sittings is easier than using 1 month subscription over two months, at least in my country.

$10 is a reasonable price for a sandwich in any decent sandwich shop in the US.

I live in Mississippi, crappiest economy in the nation. I assume people are thinking they meant the cost of a homemade bologna sandwich or something, otherwise this conversation is pretty absurd.

I'm in the capital city of Germany, a sandwich in the bakery around the corner is about 3-4 euros.

Wish I could say I was surprised. I bet the bread is better too.

^ In America, you have to remember that we overpay for crappier food.

Depends. Not always.

But there is this one shop selling shawarma sandwich made to fresh bread that costs 3.90€. And that is already a good lunch.

A döner sandwich can cost 2.90€ the cheapest.

Bakeries have baguettes with cheese and ham for 4-5 euros.

If you go to Mitte, a döner can already be 6-9 euros. And that is expensive.

Food is currently very, very expensive in the US.

Went to Europe a few years ago and I remembered previously that food prices in Europe were high. But this last time, I noticed they were consistently ~5 euro/dollars less than it would be in the US. I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s only gotten worse here. Typical restaurant entree is maybe 17 dollars. Fast food is now about 12 dollars for a meal. At least in DFW Texas.

I suspect the US definition of sandwich is different to the European one, but genuinely not sure. Curious — can someone give me a few examples describing the $10 sandwiches you get in the US? Are we talking warm, ordered off a menu, good quality meat, filling enough to serve as a meal?

This whole conversation has reminded me of the $5 milkshake conversation in Pulp Fiction.

I’ve signed up for the Kagi trial, so far I’m liking it. Breath of fresh air compared to the free ones. Best result, first position.

No, but they also don't wanna sell to the entire planet. There's definitely a market for a 10$ search engine, since it doesn't make money by maximizing eyeballs it doesn't have to cater to the planet.

Not everyone has a cooled mattress, AC, car etc.. "Are all those things only for techbros"?

$10 is many sandwiches.

It’s also less than a single sandwich. Not sure how “it depends on the sandwich” adds to the conversation. The point still remains.

The point they were making is: look, it's so cheap it's the cost of one sandwich.

Does that point still stand if it's not the cost of one sandwich, unless you're paying a fortune for a sandwich?

If a diff shop has a sandwich that is 90% as good and is free but has ads plastered all over the walls, I will probably take the free sandwich.

The cost of a sandwich ranges beyond $0.50 to $200.00. It depends on the sandwich adds about as much to the conversation as "it costs less than a sandwich".

And to be clear by "beyond" I mean some sandwiches cost less than $0.50, and some sandwiches cost more than $200.00

"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"

The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.

I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.

Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.

I think it’s important to divide your subscriptions into different categories to make wise choices. My categories are utility, tools, entertainment, education, and 501c.

I have no problem paying for tools if the value is there, so I minimize my spending in other categories. Every quarter I review subscriptions, switch some from monthly to yearly to save money, cancel some, adjust levels on others.

If your point is that buying many things can add up to be expensive...yes? At what price point would you stop saying that is true? If it's 2 dollars someone would be listing all the things they buy for 2 dollars that add up to get expensive. Let's leave out the price of all our only fans subscriptions and consider the thing we're talking about

Kagi isn't competing against no access to a search engine, it's competing against Google, DDG, etc etc which are free (or more specifically, you could say ads are the cost).

Kagi needs to not just be worth $10, but also worth ($10 - ads) more than the alternatives.

It is EASILY worth that. It’s a tool that I use constantly every day for work and at home. I literally never fall back to using Google anymore. Google results turned to doggie doo years ago and getting what I need at the top of the list again is worth every penny. Kagi is like Google from 10 years ago if they had kept optimizing it for quality instead of enshitifying it to increase revenue.

I'm glad it provided you with that much value! When I gave Kagi a try, the results weren't as impactful for me, so paying for the service didn't make sense. Things have different values to different people, and that's okay.

I got a family subscription after saving on hotel bookings after using google, which impressed my wife. I like it for my children because not only does it return age appropriate results, there is no advertising targeting children. It works out $20/month for 6 people, a Christmas present for my sisters, mother and nephew that keeps giving.

Agreed. I've been a subscriber for over two years. At first the depth of search results was not as good as Google's but I used Kagi nonetheless because of the no-ad policy. Today, the results are just as good as Google's and still no ad, making Kagi a no-brainer in my eyes.

It always seems like there's no one less willing to pay for software than those who create it for a living

Pretty sure Kagi’s users are disproportionately software workers by a large margin, though.

It's a sandwich _subscription_. If you keep thinking like that, it's death by a thousand cuts.

I think that's sort of the nature of sandwiches. You have to keep paying for them if you want to keep eating them.

The nature of subscriptions is that you keep paying for them forever whether you're eating them or not. Maybe you forgot about your sandwiches and they're just piling up on your doorstep.

Kagi implemented automatic pausing on your subscription if you don't use it, so it's actually not the same here.

I think Kagi being nice is not a valid argument for accepting lots of low-cost subscriptions in your life.

Sure, but Kagi is one of the ones you'll get the value back out of. And if you don't use it you don't pay.

I only subscribe to Spotify, YouTube and Kagi as "online services". Video media I happily sail the seas for and I don't mind evil megacorps "losing" money on my behalf.

Ok, well I guess it's a good thing we're talking about kagi and not all your subscriptions, then.

For a myriad of reasons I'm cutting back on American subscriptions (am European). Kagi has a soft spot near my heart, so it is likely one of those going out last.

If sandwiches are $10 for you and not worth much, might I ask you to support my subscription instead? Because when I make a sandwich myself, the costs are approx 0,50 EUR, and that is the type of food I can afford.

It is the same with this 'it is only a cup of coffee' or 'only a beer'. I don't drink beer, I do drink coffee, but when I did drink beer the special beers were lower than the prices of the ones you pay in pubs. As for coffee, it just shows you're from San Francisco or something, cause we got free coffee at work in our culture here.

Moreover, there's enough people in this world for whom $10 a month is a huge deal, and all your comment shows is that you're either unaware of such or simply don't care.

Pro tip : there is a DuckDuckGo lite version

As my income drops in slow periods, I pause subscriptions to many things. The very last two I would be willing to give up are (n-1): YouTube Premium and (n): Kagi.

Switched to nebula when they removed YouTube lite and the price was double. Got no ads on my devices anyway.

For me, YouTube Premium (for family) is so worth it because:

- It removes ads for my kids, which are going to watch YouTube no matter what I do

- It includes YouTube Music, so I don't need a separate Spotify subscription

- It sends money to creators based on what I proportionally spend time watching, rather than based on how valuable of an audience I'm deemed to be when an ad slot is auctioned

- It is a signal that I'm willing to pay for content, and I want platforms and creators to continue offering that option

Rather send money directly to creators rather than filtering it through Google.

People just don't do that. If they did, the state of things wouldn't be the way it is. It's also kinda unfair to creators whose content people consume but just don't pay for in any way, because of a variety of possible reasons (they just don't even think about it, or they don't deem them "worthy" of being paid, or it's about having to go out of their way to pay someone, and then people only paying a limited amount of "chosen" people, etc.)

Firefox (and probably others) allows you to set up custom search engines (like Wikipedia). So when I know I am trying to get to Wikipedia or npm or whatever I just do an @wikipedia and type my search.

I’ve used keyword search for many years, maybe since Netscape. Set it up and type “w thing”, no quotes. Can be a lot shorter.

Yep, I prefer the Firefox keywords for various sites, and to disable search support entirely.

For those who haven't tried this yet: the bookmark for Wikipedia might look something like this:

    Name:    [SEARCH] WIKIPEDIA
    URL:     https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
    Keyword: w

Then, when you want to do a Wikipedia search, go to the URL&search bar, and enter `w` as the first word, followed by the search term, such as `w cats`.

Also, you might want to disable the other search engine and portal page features as much as you can. This requires setting some preferences not on the Preferences pages, so going to `about:config` preferences, to set, e.g., `keyword.enabled` to false.

Note that you control the keywords. So I thought Wikipedia deserved a one-letter keyword. But `a` went to archive.org Wayback Machine (which also meant I could just prefix any URL with `a` and a space), while I made myself spell out `amazon` every time I was in danger of unnecessary consumerism.

Also, there’s a shortcut to make the entry. Right click on the search input of the desired page and select make keyword search.

Feel the same. I liked it during the trial, but not THAT much.

Just FYI, if you run out of your 300, you can simply renew on that date. So if 300 searches lasts you 21 days, you're effectively paying between $5 and $10 per month. If you run out halfway, though, it's cheaper to pay for unlimited.

That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.

It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.

> But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not.

The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.

A friend of mine and I split the cost of a family plan ($20/month) and that way we have four extra accounts to use for our family and the like. The amortized cost is pretty reasonable then.

I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.

And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.

I justify it by having less Disney/Hulu/Max and I’ve just cut down on entertainment related subscriptions in general, although you can pry YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands.

I think part of what's tough is I use two search engines + 2 LLM's, depending on what I'm trying to do. It's easy when most of them are free, but if I'm going to pay money it needs to be much better than the rest, and I don't think Kagi is.

> I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?"

I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.

> I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.

Kagi is one of the few subscriptions I think is 100% worth the price. In fact, I’d pay double. Very happy user for almost two years.

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.

I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches.

Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.

I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.

A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.

Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country

It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.

Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?

I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...

For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.

If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.

This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)

Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.

Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.

You can use https://google.com/ncr which doesn't redirect to a country.

try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches

In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.

Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.

that sounds good until you want to buy that uniquely named ingredient in the usa and it will only give results elsewhere and you have little control

Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.

99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.

duck duck go have a drop down where you select any county anywhere you are.

want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.

Use https://google.com/ncr (which stands for "no country redirect" IIRC). Has been working for me in a non-English speaking country for a very long time.

> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.

Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?

On a search for "avi to mp4":

- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

Google clearly wins there.

Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.

Happy paying customer of Kagi here. because to me intention counts.

Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.

Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.

Happy to pay kagi.

Use an ad blocker.

Now Google has no intention to serve you

I've never had any issue using any Google service with an ad blocker. They make plenty off of me via YouTube Premium and Google Flights commissions - both services that I think are valuable, and one that I actually gladly pay for.

You do you. I do me.

I think Google has the intention to get you to click on their ads. Which they can achieve by providing ok search results.

Did the same here on my Android phone.

Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.

Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.

Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm

It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)

I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.

[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...

So you're saying it's good to have your results influenced by megacorporation exclusivity deals? I didn't use an adblocker because I was using the app, and having to rely on adblockers is cheating for Google, the services should be judged as is. Google isn't above blocking you from their services for using adblockers, too, as we can see from Youtube

Did I say that?

I hadn't heard of that deal. How is that not blatantly anti-competitive?

The best part about Kagi is that if the default results don't seem helpful, one click restricts results to only discussions and forums, which is usually exactly what I want to do next.

Google supports that too. After searching, click “Forums” in the top bar.

Avi to mp4 is best done with an ffmpeg command written by an llm. But OK, I get that that was not the point.

If you already have ffmpeg, you shouldn't need an LLM to write `ffmpeg -i video.avi video.mp4`.

The llm will tell you there are lots of interesting options.

As will the manual of ffmpeg itself, for what it's worth.

Yes, but a llm (or good old stackoverflow) are faster for most people.

There's pretty much nothing you can't do with ffmpeg https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=KJJOhnoa-2bFLkt5

If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.

Which is to say, I highly recommend using an LLM for exploring commands to run in a terminal. Once past the learning curve, it is a good way to avoid dozens to hundreds of cryptic short-options (just ask for only long options).

> If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.

Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.

I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.

The interesting thing is that there are objective measurements about code (like unnecessary commands in answers, or code which flat out never worked), in which generally people are not great. The amount of bad answers on Stackoverflow and on most of the blogspam is staggering. Even reference documentations are bad or wrong many times. LLMs work with that. They won’t be better than that.

> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.

That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).

I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.

Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."

This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.

It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)

I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.

Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.

> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them

One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.

> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.

I would be very interested to know if Kagi starts to down rank a site for everybody if lots of its users manually down rank it.

I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.

Use reader mode on your browser, and you can read most of the paywalled sites.

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.

This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).

For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:

- w3school

- GeeksforGeeks

- real python

- programiz

- code academy

And only after do I get the official python docs.

On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.

Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.

I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.

Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).

Here's some stats that kagi publishes on how people are using their blocking and a great place to great started with it as well.

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

You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Normal users don't want to have to remember magic incantations to not have to sift through malicious "businesses".

Normal users also don't want to have to go through curating their own blacklist of sites to get decent results.

Sure, but given the shit state that Google is, I argue that normal users would rather have to curate their own blacklist a few times instead of being subjected to (at best) SEO spam or (worse) malicious websites.

That's why I use Kagi.

You can do that on Kagi, too. You just don't _need_ to.

I haven't set up blacklist for my kagi account. Searched for "python sum", got a link to the python doc as the first result. So imo. you dont need a blacklist.

Is it worth $10 so you don't have to search the Python docs directly? That seems terribly wasteful (monetarily, computationally), when you could use something like devdocs, among dozens of other options.

one I like to use to demonstrate is "how to fix a leaking faucet"

Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers

Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.

I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.

I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.

To me, it is not the results that are the kicker. It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.

And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.

> It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Can you explain what this means in more detail? (To be clear, I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm asking for a sales pitch :) )

Google's customers are the companies who pay them to place adverts in search results. The results page includes them and it's not always clear at a glance which results are promoted/paid.

Kagi makes this a non-issue.

I use an ad blocker.

> @dh nats !

This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.

> @hn !

This brings me directly to the front page of HN.

> @gh jj !

This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

> !guixc how do I install nginx?

This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.

> !p nginx

Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.

The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).

Something tells me that Gruber has been betrayed by supposedly "premium" subscription services in the past.

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.

I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.

Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.

The assistant recently was made available to all tiers, with only the more expensive models being limited to the higher tier.

Assistant was surprisingly useful. In a couple of occasions I had it find me research papers I didn't know existed for a problem I had been working on for long. However the realization for me was that I shouldn't neglect search abilities of the LLMs I was already paying for. I tried to replace my Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions with Assistant but the usage limits were too low for me. And for the cases where I wanted to use long context of Gemini models, the assistant had an arbitrary limit of only 32k I think.

However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.

What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?

GP literally said in their first sentence that results quality wasn't improved with Kagi.

I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.

User scripts and browser extensions to the rescue, at no cost but time invested in setting them up.

I have had a similar experience. After using Kagi, I don't really get why someone would pay for what they are offering today.

This has also been my experience. The search quality is no better. When I ask people directly what they like about Kagi, it's all about the customization stuff (custom search operators; denylisting domains; etc). I do see the appeal of that, but I don't personally care enough about those features to pay for it.

You also get Kagi assistant which is nice

Same

Part of the problem is that Google has been actively sabotaging google-fu for quite some time now. E.g. ignoring quoting in queries.

This is so infuriating that it single-handedly made me start looking for alternatives.

There is a noticeable friction now in using Google for searching. A pretty good example of how a decent product gets ruined by accountants and shareholder demand.

Agreed. It is a major annoyance and the primary reason I was exploring other options. However, even though it is infuriating when google refuses to not respect my query, the number of such queries for me are limited and thus I can use Kagi(and lately exploring search in ChatGPT). The amount of such searches I have needed haven't exceeded 100 on Kagi so I haven't had the need to resubscribe yet but if they do I guess I will maintain the subscription. However with the response time issue I doubt I would ever want it to be my primary search provider.

As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.

Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.

Absolutely agree.

Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.

If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.

Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.

This. I didn’t know it was EU only thing, but sometimes you have a map displayed in Google search results and there’s no way to actually go to Google Maps beside clicking “directions” button (and I think even this button isn’t always there).

Just recently I’ve created a bang in Kagi which redirects me to Google Maps roughly around my home with a query that I typed.

Would an OpenStreetMap integration be sufficient to replace this functionality?

In my opinion, no it's too shit compared to Google Maps, Apple Maps is also not great. Kagi have their own maps, which it seems is based on Apple Maps. Apple has no information outside the US (heard its better in the US but I just know it's not great in Europe or Africa). Things like operating hours.

FWIW I found Google Maps to be terrible on that front in Japan. Posted operating hours seemed to have no particular relation to whether a restaurant would actually be open or not.

Not OP, but I heavily rely on Google Maps reviews. Haven’t found another platform that replaces them.

I assume it’s region specific. There used to be alternatives in my area, but they’ve all died, and even with all the fake Google reviews, it’s the only way to get an idea about restaurants.

Just to add a different voice: I prefer OSM and for me it would be great.

No, Google Maps is miles ahead of all competitors.

In what ways when compared to OSM?

User content. Businesses update their info on Google Maps, users upload reviews and photos.

Here is your comment should you wish to copy it and try again: I never run into a business that doesn't exist on Google Maps and I rarely run into incorrect hours. I constantly can't find businesses that I'm looking for on OSM and they never have correct hours.

I use OSM for many directions, after looking it up in Google Maps and copying the plus code because it doesn't come up in OSM reliably.

Yeah that’s the only type of search that I always append the !g to

You can shorten that to !gm if you want to go straight to Google Maps.

Or just set up a browser search keyword/engine to go straight to Google Maps if that is what you want. I have Kagi as my default but have a small handful of keyword bookmarks set up for when I am making something that isn't a general web search. "m <location>" for Google Maps, "i <title>" for IMDB, "p <query>" for Kagi image search, "d <query>" for D&D Rules Search, you get the idea.

This way Kagi doesn't even see my query, I don't need to wait for the redirect, I get to set up the shortcuts myself and I can switch any of my search providers (even the default) without affecting my "bangs".

Yes, kagi has a Google maps link built in but it doesn't integrate very smoothly. It ends up linking to strange results in Google maps. I would almost prefer that kagi just integrated Google maps until the kagi maps product is mature. It's my only stumbling block using kagi

I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.

I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.

No, thanks, I'll stick to qwant: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...

Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex? It seems weird to me.

They pay for search results to search providers because Kagi doesn't have an index of their own.

In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.

They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.

> Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?

They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.

It’s not funding, it’s paying for a service.

Funding does not imply a lack of receiving something in return, only a flow of money. It can be both

Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.

Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.

Legally they can. But we all know that Yandex had always had very strong ties with the Russian government. I used to work for Yandex for more than 6 years in early 2010s and even then there were signs of the state trying to influence it through censoring Yandex.News and various other means. And these days you have to be very naive to assume that it is not controlled by the state and people close to it.

When I tried Qwant a few weeks ago, its search results were even worse than Google. So, Kagi it still is.

Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".

If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.

It's the same as when Russians are asked about the invasion, "I'm not political."

It's worse. Random Russians interviewed on a Moscow street would risk going to jail if they spoke their mind.

Kagi on the other hand is "apolitical" because it is good for business.

Did you type this comment on a device made in China?

After a quick internet search apparently Google produces Pixel phones mainly in Taiwan with additional processes happening in China and India. What is the point you are trying to make?

You did the meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Being "apolitical" is no excuse for funding a russian company (yandex). If they did not do this I would probably be a paying customer. There is nothing else in this space that has the trust or features that kagi has.

The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).

I would consider reading Vlad's response to this which is extremely measured and not at all "throwing his hands up" at the issue.

As somebody who is also not a Kagi customer because of this the statement of Vlad is exactly "throwing his hands up".

Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world."

All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.

They are contributing to Russia's economy so I'm not sure what you hoped he'd say contrary to that. I don't consider someone buying from US businesses to be any kind of implicit support of my government, while at the same time choosing to avoid businesses from a country in the manner desired here is taking a pretty strong political stance.

I agree. He doesn't take that stance and thus I am not a customer and speaking out about it.

Neither of you wish to link to what you're referencing?

> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary

This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.

I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!

How so?

I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.

The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.

> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS

Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.

I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.

When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.

Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.

> I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work

There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.

Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.

I installed Kagi for Search not even a week ago, so I guess the new app is just too advanced for someone like me.

I've also found that the extension configuration isn't very durable. I wound up having to re-do the arcane setup process semi-annually on each device or my searches would 403. Eventually just gave up. Brave search seems to work just as well.

How Apple haven't already lost a massive anti-trust case is beyond me.

I think there might be more to it. While it might just be me, I think Kagi could use some improvement here. I've been using Kagi with Safari on Mac for about a year, and never got the search extension to work consistently. It would sometimes give me Google, and sometimes Kagi. And sometimes it would give me one site then switch to the other after a several second delay.

Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.

(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)

Hmm, fair enough. Do you think there is something Kagi could do to make this easier?

I don't know the details well enough to pinpoint the problem, but the fact that StopTheMadness is able to redirect consistently and the Kagi extension wasn't makes me think there is something they could fix to make it work better.

No, it's "hard", because it requires an extension to monitor all requests to a different search enging and hijack those to perform a redirect.

This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.

If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.

In comments on Mastodon he also finds a way to twist this into an anti-EU rant: https://mastodon.social/@gruber/114418346006131728

Yeah, this is tedious.

It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.

I find it a little surprising that the blog famously censored by HN is still able to land on the first page of HN

The countdown has begun. Get your comments in now!

I see Gruber on here fairly frequently. Enough to say that articles from his blog are not a rarity

Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.

Not one click but by no means a byzantine process

This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].

If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:

> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).

[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

Yes, use ecosia.

The extension is a big ugly hack, but you don't have to use it. You can simply set kagi.com as your start page and/or your new tab page.

Orion (made by Kagi) is a WebKit-based browser that eliminates the need for an extension.

For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.

https://kagi.com/changelog

Not only that, but they also have an issue tracker/FR page [1] and a Discord server [2]. It feels way more human and less corporate than Google.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/ [2] https://kagi.com/discord

While this is true, it's one part of Kagi that I wouldn't expect to remain true if they every actually got mainstream success. That human/less corporate feel is less an effect of their mission goals than it is their very small size.

They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.

Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least:

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

I read through the whole opinion piece.

Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.

I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time

I also want to add that Kagi recently partnered with a Russian state-owned search engine Yandex: https://kagi.com/changelog#5340. This means they are paying money to the Russian state through taxes and sharing my search queries with it. This was a critical issue for me, and it led me to stop using it and request a refund earlier this year.

Exactly, glad I'm not the only one!

This is a critical issue to pretty much every EU citizen.

And according to the link below, the Kagi founder/CEO claims Yandex is a private company headquartered in Kazakhstan, unrelated to the Russian government.

https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311987220115248

Yes and (for posterity / those lazy to read the linked Mastodon thread), if you read through the linked thread, you see that is nonsense and Yandex is very much a Russian business continually adjusting results based on Russian government input (to cross-check, see Wikipedia on Yandex).

Sad to hear that. I seriously considered registering, but knowing this I can't in good faith pay money to Kagi. I know it sounds petty, but to people in my country this issue is very important.

And for many businesses in the EU it's illegal to transfer money directly or indirectly to Russia. I don't know how this applies exactly, but I know my company cannot legally pay for this

This makes Vlad look much better than the poster thinks. It's ridiculous that the poster is dishing out, but when Vlad offers discussion (not even criticism!) they are like "oh no, I'm just a little nobody getting HARASSED by a powerful and might CEO". They can't take even the mildest disagreement, let alone criticism.

People need to stop posting this blog post as if it's something incriminating, or even negative. I'm sure if GDPR is violated, Kagi will sort it out with their lawyers, but as of now I don't see what exactly are we worrying about. For me it's neither GDPR nor Vlad's "appalling" behaviour and if it's neither, this whole blog is utterly useless

Well, re: GDPR, for one Vlad is abjectly clearly wrong on email addresses not being PII. They are.

The mere fact of him relying on his rationalisation (of burner email addresses) over established GDPR definitions of PII is troubling. To me it rings immature and unprofessional. As a software engineer I shall treat PII with care and account for it. If a CEO is this defensive about their clearly wrong opinion, it's a red flag to me.

Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.

Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.

have you considered proton for emails?

What does Kagi assistant (every plan has sub SOTA a few days back) lack compared to Perplexity?

I jumped to Kagi early on. I was on a friend's machine the other day, and without thinking, ran a default search ... in Google, and wow. Just, wow.

What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.

I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable

Could either of you provide some specific search terms (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search box) that provides better results on Kagi than on Google?

From the article: "Canada ETA"

I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.

I guess I'm a power user, I'm at > Total searches this period 1,216 > Assistant interactions this period 92

I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.

I don’t think I’m a power user and I’m constantly over 1000 searches / month. Just a few days ago I upgraded my plan to the highest tier to play with the better models and in a few days it’s gonna renew for a year at this tier.

If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.

Strangely (or maybe not based on how pricing economics work) this is the most appealing tier.

Thanks for the reply, it is helpful .

What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?

> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?

I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.

Fair point. The analogy is confusing but probably because it involves hydrocarbon subsidies... I mean how is the gas cheaper?! It makes no sense.

I'm sure my playful sarcasm above doesn't come through well, but thanks for the reply it is helpful.

> no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark)

TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.

!code will get you into the proper code assistant.

I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.

For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)

Edit: I got this working.

What do you mean by custom assistants because you can make your !<word> assistants with your own prompt and the model of your choice.

Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?

No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!

From https://kagi.com/assistant you can also click on the down "Model Dropdown Chooser" and there is an entry to make your own assistants.

Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.

https://kagi.com/assistant

Additional details on the blog post about it.

https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all

> https://kagi.com/assistant

Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does

We heard you!

Still doesn’t work for me.

This is one of my favourite features. The UX is so god damn simple that it makes switching to an AI response so ridiculously trivial, I love it.

Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)

Nextdns price is really good. 20 bucks per year. One can only get so many 5 buck per month subscriptions, because eventually they compound and it becomes just too much. It is the reason I haven't done Kagi, but search is getting worse and worse nowadays, so I might just do it soon. I'm typing this because I like to see more 1 to 3 bucks a month typs of services.

The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).

The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")

That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.

I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.

I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.

[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.

Brave user here too. I like it. One thing I really appreciate is the links to your query on Google/Bing partway down the page.

My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill. So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it. It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.

FYI, I think the $10 plan that's now "basic AI" used to just be the unlimited search plan and they just recently added a limited capacity of the AI stuff to it.

I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock).

Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.

Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.

another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.

Some nice features that may not be obvious:

- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"

They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.

Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.

Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.

Of all the arguments, the “but it’s expensive” one is the one I really fail to parse. Search is probably the tool we all use day in and day out - it’s critical to everything we do both at work and at home. Paying for it is only a mind stretch because we’re so used to “free” but really, it’s nothing. Two coffees for a search that isn’t full of shit is an absolute no-brainer in my opinion.

I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.

I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.

But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.

I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.

[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.

Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.

And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!

Kagi also lets you make custom bangs - I've got Google on !f and !h in addition to !g (sorry Flickr and Haskell users) to deal with typos.

For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?

how do you tolerate the sheer latency of running the "vast majority" of your web searches through an llm

How many searches previously to find the right question to ask x search time = total_search_time

# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops

For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.

The LLM can read through the results quicker than you can and provide the information you were looking for.

Well, it provides something at any rate. Whether or not it's the information you were looking for is very much a matter of luck.

I use Kagi as a search engine and Perplexity and Kagi assistant as a research tool. I view those two as different use cases.

I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)

What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.

To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity).

If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.

Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...

If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.

That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).

Thanks for taking the time to explain; what you say makes a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to give Kagi a try.

If you believe ChatGPT is good for such usage, no. But personally I think it sucks at that and have no idea how anyone can stand it.

Just try it, it's free to try.

I know I can use !gm, but is there a way to just make Google Maps the default map provider?

I'm not entirely what you mean with “default map provider” but depending on what you need this may work for you: https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects

Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search

Very likely due to the cost of the maps api.

When I search for a city, along with the list of results, there is a map on the right. When I click on it, it doesn't go to Google Maps.

Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead.

Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.

Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?

Seems to be unburied!

I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan.

Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.

I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.

The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.

Recently converted 2 coworkers to Kagi, their minds we're blown when I was sharing screen and had no ads and relevant search results.

Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.

Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.

I'm actually happy with the duckduckgo results and also have a couple of bangs I use regularly. My biggest issue with using Kagi would be that I have to log in. I tend to clear cookies, either automated when closing a tab or by using a private browser, and would always have to relogin.

Nope, they've solved that:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

Session links are what you’re looking for. Privacy Pass doesn’t work if you clear cookies, and in fact will lock you out of Privacy Pass for a month if you clear cookies maybe four times. Ask me how I found out.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....

Always needs an extension. That's not the same as just using Duckduckgo.

Me too, actually. I'm starting to think this "buy Kagi!" movement is being pushed by people who didn't even know they could change their default search provider.

Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.

It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.

I wish there was a discounted plan that didn't include "AI" - if the search is good, that's all I'm looking for in a search engine.

I pay for family plan. It is a little steep to pay $20/month but does mean I feel much better about my 12 year old using a search engine unsupervised (I use controld for blocking/monitoring, have windows 11 locked down as well as iOS locked down too).

I'd not heard of controld before. I was going to ask what's the benefit over pihole but I think they've got it covered at https://controld.com/blog/controld-vs-pihole/

> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.

I did a free 30 day Kagi trial a month ago, and while I'm not sure I'm convinced the search results are better, they're definitely not worse. I've only fallen back to Google thrice, and in every case, Google didn't find anything useful either.

That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)

After using Kagi for two years now, I can't go back to Google or Bing. On principle, I pay for the Ultimate package because I desperately want there to be something besides Google and Bing.

That also is a factor in why I pay for more than I need. I want them to succeed.

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

With DDG I kept looking for better results, which I typically found, not so with Kagi.

DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.

I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.

I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".

The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.

Thanks.

Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.

The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.

Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.

I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.

I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.

I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.

I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.

with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.

Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.

All Google alternatives are very insufficient if you're searching in a different language than English. Except for Kagi.

I do all searching from the command line. No browser. It's funny but I feel like google.com, both www and news, are faster in recent months, specifically, after Google began blocking requests with certain user-agent strings. Because I search from the command line, I do not get any "AI" answers. Obviously command line search is faster than browser-based search. But what I am observing is that command line search now seems even faster than it was in the past.

What tools do you use for command line searching?

Currently, the script looks like this

      #!/bin/sh
      0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073

"0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1

yy___ are UNIX filters written in C.

0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc.

yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL.

This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers.

Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches.

1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time.

2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.

> Currently, the script looks like this > > #!/bin/sh > 0x $1|yy084|yy030|yy073 > > "0x" is another Almquist shell script that can search about 63 different servers that return search results, e.g., Google, DDG, and so on.^1 > > yy___ are UNIX filters written in C. > > 0x uses some yy proggrams as well, e.g., yy025, along with sed and a TCP client, e.g., tcpclient, netcat, socat, bssl, openssl, etc. > > yy084 outputs SERPs as SQL. > > This makes it easy to create simplified "mixed" SERPs with results from different servers. > > Where possible 0x allows for "continuation search". Going past page 1 of SERPs is discouraged or even prevented in recent times, all focus is on "the top result",^2 and some www search engines actively try to block exhaustive research and discovery. By continuing searches over time, e.g., page 1 of results on day 1, page 2 on day 2, page 3 on day 5, etc., one can sometimes avoid being blocked when doing exhaustive searches. > > 1. This is an ongoing experiment. Sometimes a site will "break" if the site operator changes something but this does not happen too often. Majority have remained stable over time. > > 2. This coincidentally benefits an advertising services racket.

How can I get more details about these filters. Are there existing implementations somewhere online which I can test? Seems pretty interesting.

Details are just another computer user, not a "developer", writing their own utilties. Continually editing, updating to suit personal needs. No prerequisites except flex and C89 compiler. Generally, static binaries under 50k.

A search on one of the search engines that indexes HN may provide some pointers. Something like site:ycombinator.com plus [name of filter].

Not sure about "interesting" but these are portable across OS, low resource requirements. Faster than sed. Boring stuff that works for me year after year.

I think I found something, thanks will give it a try

Note there are some web search engines that only block exhaustive searching when the computer user is not "signed in". This could be a coincidence, not an attempt to force computer users into submitting to increased surveillance and data collection foor coommerciall purposes. 0x is written for a computer user who did not "sign in" to websites in the 90s, 00s, 10s and as a matter of habit does not do so today.

I switched out of resentment towards Google and have been pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually prefer Kagi. I still use Google Maps heavily and prefer Google Search for one particular task (finding soccer news) but I am much happier with Kagi as my default search engine. I rarely feel like it's holding me back, and when I do, Kagi lets me get to Google with two clicks. I think I could get that down to one click if I cared... but I don't.

No thanks. I'm not sending money and traffic to Yandex. I'm going to give Qwant a go (French company, headquartered in Paris)

The assistant is nice, you can just drop down and select your LLM of choice.

I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.

Been using Kagi for about 18 months, and IMO well worth it. It does what is says on the tin, it's a search. You use it, it provides good results, and you're done. No fighting with ads, no making you automatically skipping the first few results because you know from experience they are promoted. You control what experience you want with specific domains. Privacy pass means you don't even have to be logged in.

One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.

Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).

So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.

Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.

There's also uBlacklist for blocking domains from search engines, a miracle extension.

Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.

I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g

I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site.

Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.

I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.

German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.

I use Kagi for all my Swedish searches, it works better than Google every time I compare.

Kagi is pretty good. Accessibility in the assistant mode could be cleaned up a little, but it's getting better. I know there's not many people working on Kagi though, but I pay them so I'll give them time.

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".

But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.

I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.

Perhaps you are lucky to stick to happy paths or are not particularly discerning. It's real. https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-wors...

Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?

> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.

Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.

I am a real person, and sponsored links will often span the entire results page with relevant links being 4th-6th.

LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.

Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.

Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.

Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.

https://i.imgur.com/RxSYGIe.png

What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.

You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:

1. w3schools 2. Mozilla's documentation 3. The Cambridge dictionary 4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology 5. More websites about the HTML term

I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.

> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.

I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.

https://archive.is/c1iDr

When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.

My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.

Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.

In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.

Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.

I feel exactly the same way! It makes me wonder what the hell I look for on the internet vs the users complaining about the search results!

I suspect the secret sauce might be uBlock Origin. Even with basic, default filters it transforms Google into a vastly different experience.

No longer usable in chrome, but even then, just.... Idk.

Still works in the Arc browser, which is Chrome-based.

Even if Kagi wasn't better than Google or Bing I would still pay for it, simply because it's not Microsoft and not Google. No way I'm going to give them any money if I don't have to.

I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.

I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.

I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.

I have considered paying for Kagi and I use their Orion browser on my ipad but with current government fuckery making my job less secure than it was last year, I don't think I should.

I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)

Imagine a product so bad they have to dole out gift cards to make people use it. Are you saying you can use google through bing and get paid??

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6UepmSNd3TY

I paid for 3 months. Kagi was okay, but it's not really a search engine like I use search engines. They only ever returned <200 results per search query. So you had to depend on their system to magically know what results you wanted out of everything in existence. There was no way to look through the actual search results returned deeply.

This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.

I use DDG daily and I'm happy with the results. In fact, I've become quite a fan of it lately. And with my ChatGPT sub, Kagi seems unnecessary.

Kagi is nice, I guess. I paid for 3 months, and it suffers from the same fate as all other search engines besides Google: bad search results for anything but English (and maybe Spanish?). Anyway, my language, Catalan, is an afterthought -searching in it will display results in other languages, specially Spanish, which is _very_ bad. Hopefully one day we can have a non-Google search engine that does i18n searches right.

For german it works fine, how is duckduckgo doing with catalan?

That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.

I tried Kagi for 3 months, both for personal and work related queries and honestly I didn't find that many differences with Google. The top results were the same.

There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.

If anything your description could be justification for some people to pay for it.

I personally would pay even if the results were _slightly_ worse. But for me they are as good or better than Google.

I also use a lot the assistant, so I'm happy customer so far.

If you only use it occasionally, you can pay for the 300 searches a month plan and they won't bill you until you exceed that amount

I switched about two months ago, paid for a year. It's such a relief, it's like having search of ten years ago back again. It just works, and no useless crap. Options that make sense to ME, not to the profit line.

I'm now paying for:

- Search

- Email

- News

- Backups

Of course I'd rather not spend the money, but ALL these services are leagues ahead of the ad-supported alternatives. This is how the Internet should work.

(Edit - formatting)

99.99% of the time I use self-hosted instance of Searx-NG https://github.com/searxng/searxng You can easily co-host it with other apps on e.g. digitalocean for 4$ pcm. It's also highly customizable and your instance of Openweb UI can use it as search engine too.

I moved to Kagi when Chrome moved to end Manifest V2. I am aware of workarounds, but I have really been moving to de-google my life. Honestly, I have been happy with the results and I think it's good to have various competitors out there. I even use Orion Browser for most personal browsing, and it has been acceptable with a few bugs here and there.

The ETA scams (which bit me when rushing through an eTA form when transiting through Canada a few years ago) are more sinister than just overcharging you by $70 - it looks horribly like they gather your passport details and way more personal information than the actual eTA application requires, presumably for data brokerage purposes. :|

With current geopolitical environment I would be more inclined to switch to Kagi if they move HQ to EU or Swiss.

> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; [...]

If you want an official website, always follow the link to the Wikipedia article, and there click on the link to the official website.

Also, I find Duckduckgo a lot better than Google in general.

I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing.

Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).

Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:

- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia

and news.ycombinator.com :) of course

I've built something similar. I also added a way to use CLI-like features straight from the browser address bar.

Check it out: https://github.com/wajeht/bang

I've used Kagi for over a year. It's been months since I've used Google. Now I also use LLMs (both local and hosted) along with Kagi, and Google is obsolete for search.

Google's results are really awful, and it constantly nags me to install Chrome.

Nah. I don't do subscriptions for much of anything. I just do fewer searches now that I know google is so heavily slanted toward commercially relevant queries.

Kagi seems like an obvious acquisition target. They will never raise enough paying subscribers.

I have been using it for a few years now and can't live without it. They really nailed it.

>I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th

It's the first result on Duckduckgo.

It's the first result on Google for me, too.

Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.

For those who tried both: Kagi or Perplexity?

I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...

kagi has a free trial (100 searches) so you can just answer this very personal question for yourself.

Based on this alone, Kagi.

<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>

The first answer is to try each one full time for a week and see which one is better for your use case.

For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.

Been a kagi user for years. My only complaint is for a given search it will only return 30ish results vs google that will do about 10 pages of results.

Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi

I have at least one kagi 3 month trial link. If anyone wants it, reply below :)

I would love to try it out, if the link is still available :)

That would be very kind, if you still have it available. I have been on the fence - skeptical as is my nature, but I wonder if I am in the wrong here :)

Here you go

https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493

Hope you see this!

Very kind - thank you! I think I was a bit late or it expired. But it did prompt me to set up an account which I had been putting off. Haha, now off to explore Kagi with my 100 searches to see what it has to offer.

Yes please

Here you go. Hope you see this before it gets snapped up

https://kagi.com/p/TREATEE2F6493

Curious, but how do you get 3 month trial invites?

Kagi sent an email a few months ago.

did this guy sell his apple stock and joined early on kagi private equity?

I would suggest them to open a bit more their free tier. If you want to get people to pay 12-13€/month for search, you have to let check more than once the quality of your service

Just go for metaGer instead. Non-profit and based in Germany.

I tried it a few months back, and it blew me away how much search could be improved. I am now a paying customer and extremely satisfied with the product.

I love Kagi, but they seem extremely hobbled by Bing's terrible index. I occasionally have to switch to Google to find stuff and that makes me sad.

25$ a month user here and quite happy with just how quiet results are, equally so with the Assistant output when I've used it.

searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.

> A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result.

Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)

Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result

Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?

I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.

I only have good things to say about Kagi. The search results are better, I can block or downrank SEO slop while increasing the rank of sites I like. There's no advertising anywhere, no sponsored results, no AI hallucination taking up the whole top quarter of the page.

But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.

I tried Kagi and Brave. I get similar results on both but Brave is cheaper and AI answers.

Kagi rules for search, and they also have the best AI front end in my opinion.

been using Kagi for a few years now. I'm happy. Whenever I have to use Google on a rare occasion I am shocked by just how filthy and useless it is.

Why would you use Kagi over something like SearxNG?

I used Kagi for a while and liked it but I no longer use it because it is a US company and searching with them requires an account that makes tracing my search queries back to me trivial.

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

I like it, but that still leaves metadata like the fact that I have an account at all. With the low user numbers of Kagi any privacy guarantee by them is an illusion. Since Kagi is operating out of a country without any privacy laws that could protect me, I will not use their services.

Have to say my experience differs from what most here have had. Mostly I just saw no improvement over using Google.

It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.

I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.

Fwiw, give a searxng instance a try.

The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.

does kagi censor offensive results?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com