How I Use Kagi | Hacker News Reader

How I Use Kagi

flamedfury.com

290 pointsmoebrowne320 comments

I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.

When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).

> the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them.

It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.

640 KB ought to be enough for anybody

These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches.

edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments

IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good.

The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.

Are there some recommended curated lists, that I could use being new to kagi?

I don't like pinterest and co. either. (Specific things one likely has to tweak)

Yes, start here https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard (logged in)

FWIW, it's much better to downrank a page than to outright block it. Blocking is for a page you never, ever want to see.

I personally dislike Pinterest and TikTok, but sometimes it might be the only source of an image or video. Blocking means you don't get to see that result.

Most of the time I agree with you, and prefer downranking, but I have to take issue with your example of Pinterest, because my experience with Pinterest is that if I'm searching for a specific image, I will always get a thumbnail of exactly what I want from Pinterest, but when I click on it, I'm taken to a page of completely unrelated results. It is beyond frustrating, and specifically blocking Pinterest was one of the primary features that sold me on Kagi.

Note that the uBlacklist extension also does this - removes custom domains from search results.

But it doesn't sync across computers.

I have a hard time relating to the perspective that Kagi returns bad results, but at least I can remove them.

I know I'm probably speaking to the choir but reports like this always make me sad. The internet and the webpages that filled it used to be so cool. Now its just like three websites that are only really judged by how useful they are to us.

Cool sites are still out there. They never went away. Google search isn’t the web.

> When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted

Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.

The increased fuzzy interpretation is Google's greatest downfall. It takes away any ability to use it as a power user or for super-specific stuff. No Google, you don't know better than me. I need something really specific and you're "smoothing" the results to what some average random searcher might want!!

I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.

It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.

I'm no Google apologist (I use ecosia personally), but did you try using searching in quotes? That should force the search to only find specifically your query directly as spelled. Just curious if you did try it and there was still that "fuzziness."

Google overrides quotes whenever it feels like nowadays. Has for a few years.

  must include: herrings | missing: herrings

"Around" "every" "word" "I" "know" "should" "be" "contained" "in" "the" "result"? :)

I wasn’t really sure about paying for Kagi but I was convinced when I couldn’t find some meme video I saw only a year ago using Google, DDG, Bing, etc., but found it almost immediately using Kagi. I hadn’t realized how bad most search providers had gotten.

I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?

Try Yandex...

Not a bad solution if you're looking for things that are usually removed from results in the west, eg, torrents and stuff like that.

So streaming didn't kill the warez scene, it just got massively shadowbanned?

Yes and no. Because of aggressive action from IP holders a lot of these sites went underground and deliberately aren't indexed in the US and EU but providers from Russia or Switzerland got shadowbanned.

It's certainly not dead, but having access to cheap, high quality, easy to use alternatives certainly stopped many from using "pirated" content.

With price increases, more subscriptions needed, more restrictions, etc, we'll probably see more people sailing the high seas.

Or things from the old Internet that are not profitable, not advertised, don’t use Blog spam tactics, or https.

I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.

Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.

I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.

Pretty much the same boat as far as "a single experience sealed the deal".

Had been having this recurring weird behaviour with the Apple TV. Every time it happened I'd spend a little while trying to search for it and figure out what was going on. The results were consistently completely irrelevant and useless. This had been ongoing for months.

First time it happened after I started my Kagi trial I tried looking for an answer with Kagi. Second result nailed it. Understood what was going on, pressed one button and put it back.

Then knowing the answer I went back and tried the exact same search with Google. I did find the answer... somewhere at result 50+ well past a link to Google Books offering me an article in a 2008 copy of Men's Health Magazine.

Didn't even use up the rest of my free trial. Subscribed right there and haven't looked back.

I don't know that Kagi's always better, but I've yet to run into anything where it's substantially _worse_. I haven't had a single instance where I've exhausted Kagi and tried Google and found a result there instead.

> I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products

You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.

In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.

I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a UX-first company and reasonably priced.

Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now.

Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.

Word of mouth is great. In my opinion its the most trustworthy form of product review. However I've noticed more and more companies advertising via 'word of mouth' they call it guerilla marketing and in my opinion its disgusting and a violation of internet users trust. Reddit is absolutely filled to the brime with this kind of marketing.

> In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.

To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]

[1}; https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/advertising-in-ancient...

> You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.

I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.

That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.

So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.

But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.

> In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google

Could you (or someone) share some specific search terms that you feel are better than Google? I've tried Kagi a few times and felt no significant difference in the results.

Try anything related to visas. "us esta", "canada eta".

On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.

The government sites are the first result for both searches on Google for me.

https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png

https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png

You probably have an adblocker running. I also did this test with ‘Canada eta’ and got the expected result on top. But when I reloaded the page without my content blockers, the official Canadian website was more than 1.5 iPad screen scrolls down.

> You probably have an adblocker running.

Yeah, of course. Anyone with a brain does. But "Kagi doesn't have ads" is a different statement than "Kagi's results are better than Google's." I've never seen anyone actually give a search term that Kagi does better at.

Isn’t a lack of adverts a prime reasons ‘Kagi’s results are better than Google’s’? I hear the odd person say that they like the adverts but it’s hard to believe that’s a plus for the bulk of users.

As mentioned, an ad blocker fixes that, too. Ads aside, the actual search results don't seem to be any different.

Block lists remove a lot of crap and pinned sources add things I want.

You may tried Kagi, but after a week or so of Kagi it was awful going back to Google (plus a blocker).

I had a similar experience. When using DDG my results were never very good and I’d always end up using !g to throw the search to Google. With Kagi, when I checked other engines it would come up empty as well. On more than one occasion I was on an outage call at work where there were many people using Google to find an answer (for hours), and I joined and did a quick search in Kagi and found the answer.

I switched as well and I actually use the AI assistant since then primarily. It’s awesome to connect search directly with AI, almost always get what I want immediately.

I'm curious, how is the AI assistant experience different from Perplexity or even ChatGPT's search feature? Is it just the convenience of having several models there or are the outputs inherently better because the results are from Kagi's engine instead of google?

To me, the killer feature has been the ability to filter out sites from my search results. I removed all of Pinterest, several tabloids and conspiracy sites, any obvious AI-generated sites that I run into, and just with that my search result quality has increased drastically.

It's a feature that I'd like other search engines to adopt natively.

Imagine if they analyzed all the user-blacklisted domains and deranked them from other (new) users' results. Death of SEO!

I switched last year and haven't looked back as well. Only thing I miss for convenience sake is the Shopping tab but obviously the privacy concerns arent worth that convenience.

Kagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches.

I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet.

As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too

For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.

I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.

This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.

Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.

Yep, I still use Google maps for food discovery. It's very good at that, still, and Kagi maps has a ways to go.

It's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.

I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.

Not trying to shill LLMs but learning German is way easier with them. I've ditched Google translate for everything but simple word translations.

I took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content.

My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.

[0] https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list

Indeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.

I had the same reaction – his list includes washingtonpost.com, amazon.com, alternativeto.net, medium.com, twitter.com, msn.com, etc.

He dumped his entire blocklist, which must include a bunch of sites that he finds personally annoying.

Here is the list of domains owned by the 16 companies discussed in the post that he linked to: https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters/src/branch/m...

The "16 companies" blocklist is pretty extreme too. I sometimes want to exclude sites from it, but that would be against the spirit of the list.

Yo, I'll spend a bit of time splitting the lists up.

Obviously, there are a number of websites in there outside the 16 Companies from the linked article in my post, and the Kagi top blocked domains that I've added myself as I scroll through search results.

I understand that my taste may not be for everybody so will make it clearer in the post and give a bit more options.

Sound good?

Been an Early Adopter, joined January of 2023 and I have never looked back or paused my monthly. I'm currently running with the Ultimate package which is good value for the $25/month price tag.

Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience.

I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.

Do they still use Yandex?

>I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023

I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.

Do you have any links / sources for this?

I think they are referring to this changelog item:

> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.

https://kagi.com/changelog#5340

They were asked to stop and refused:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

They have search results from Yandex among others, yes, and Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore.

See for example https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

> Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore

The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.

You're gonna have a hard time using anything right now if you want to avoid services run in a country not spending on a war somewhere.

It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.

This could easily refer to any of the despots the US backs

Is that some sort of gotcha? By all means, boycott those countries as well. Support from the US certainly is not a free pass.

Follow the logic and boycott the US as well! Now you have zero viable search engines

Can you give me a line-by-line breakdown please? For example, I believe term limits are still a thing.

I have plenty of reservations about the US, but the invasion of the Ukraine is not in the same category as anything the US is up to.

So sure, you are.

Could you give an example of US actions that are comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Atomic bomb. Middle east. Vietnam.

Vietnam I agree with - but it would be weird to protest that now. The atomic bomb is more complicated and even weirder to protest now.

‘Middle East’ is a broad and also hard to compare. Lots of US policy I disagree with but is it like the Ukraine invasion?

Support of Israel is as despicable (if not more so) as support of Russia.

Are you talking about the United States? Like, yes, the Russian regime is awful, but how are you looking around at the the world and not applying the same standards to the US?

Can we just stop at the "yes the Russian regime (and oligarchy and substantial popular support) is awful" part? Because that is really all you need to reasonably boycott Yandex. Is it good to be ideologically consistent? Absolutely! Is it required? Not if you're aiming to reduce the amount of evil in the world.

Redirecting discussion about Russia's shittiness to a criticism of the US is a dumb propaganda tactic that a lot of people here are engaging in. And many others are swallowing. I'm happy to talk about the US or NATO or Israel, just not with the partisans who for some reason assume I fully support any of the above.

The point is, if you boycott Yandex because of Russia, then in order to be morally consistent, you should also boycott Google and Bing. At that point, what search engines do you have left?

I was pretty explicit about saying that moral consistency is better but there is a valid position that is inconsistent but still aims to reduce human suffering.

And that handwaves the equivalence of the US and Russia as well as their relationships with corporations.

You are literally living through a fascist takeover of the United States, and said corporations are happily participating as long as they get a share of the pie.

I know that HN is an American website, and it is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively, but outside the US you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the complete support that US (and its corporations!) have been providing to Israel in its genocide in Gaza.

It is okay to want to boycott one and not the other, but one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.

> is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively

You really gotta see past stereotypes and reductive takes. The absence of criticism of the US in a discussion about two different countries doesn't implicitly mean "Amurica o7".

> you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq...

Those people need to look a little deeper than "these are/were both voluntary wars". If someone is unwilling to engage beyond the shallowest possible academic level, it's not worth the effort.

> one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.

My intent was to defend the people engaging in the boycott. I don't recall scolding people for not participating but perhaps that was implied somewhere. Certainly I have not shied away from condemning Kagi/Yandex/Russia but it's not the same as saying "you should too". In fact, one of my main points has been that ideological inconsistency is okay of not great.

No, you can’t without being a hypocrite. It sure is convenient to take a moral stance when it has no real impact on your life and just throws others under the bus. But try applying your morality consistently and you will find it’s effectively impossible. So ultimately you’re just picking issues to complain about based on the current political climate, not actually taking a fundamental principled moral stance on an issue—you’re not making the world a better place.

Add to that the value that good search provides humanity, even Ukrainians and Russians against the war, and it’s not even obvious that boycotting a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company is doing more good than harm. So you’re arguably actually perpetuating harm more than reducing it.

> No, you can’t without being a hypocrite.

I literally said this. Please read.

> a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company

Should be easy to excise then.

Not if it provides value. And Kagi thinks it does.

Please demonstrate or reason that Kagi buying Yandex’s search index (1) does harm and (2) does more harm than good.

It contributes to the Russian economy and oligarchy, both are key drivers of the invasion. People like you love to say Ukraine won't win the war as if the end of the war is going to be on the battlefield.

Thats not at all what he said.

All countries pay for their militaries. Russia invaded Ukraine and is actively comitting genocide.

There is a difference.

Also, the company is based in a country that has 'fueled' more wars in my lifetime than any other country has in the last 100 years. Definitely avoid.

I doubted this but it's true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)

> Country of origin: USA

There have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.

Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]

[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49

Good links. Him making out that hiding it is to help users is a bit gross.

They would rather live in a world where they can find everything, including 2℅ atrocities they indirectly fund, than not

I prefer that world too.

The only people morally responsible for committing atrocities are those who commit them. Shall we hold the farmers who grow food that Russian leaders consume morally culpable for those leaders’ actions? I’m dead serious. You cannot in good faith actually argue that everyone is indirectly morally culpable for any action that is “enabled” by something they do.

Like freedom of expression, neutral objective search is too important to poison with identity politics and virtue signaling.

Not a great look. Even if you somehow believe partnering with Yandex is justifiable, you should stand by the decision.

My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.

They do stand by it: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

Removing a previously public list of sources after being pressed on their integration with Yandex gives me a different impression.

I’d assumed that stopping my subscription didn’t achieve anything.

Presumably enough have that it hurts a little.

Or they just don’t want to deal with the bad faith actors with overly amplified internet voices cherrypicking Kagi as the next innocent product to torpedo because they aren’t virtuous enough. You can’t win against crazy people in a mob.

That’s an interesting take.

Another view is that they are losing customers due to this, and have chosen to make the information harder to find.

For company that believes in accurate data above all else, its not a great look.

I wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend.

For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.

That's one of the reasons I canceled my subscription as well.

Do you have the same opinion on companies that are based in israel/give money to israeli companies?

I tried to give Kagi a fair shot by using it for a few months. I loved a lot of features, especially the boost/block lists. But I always felt the responses were way too slow for something I use that much. I benchmarked a handful of queries and confirmed they were consistently ~3x slower than Google for normal searches and 5-10x slower for image searches on my home network. I’m sure there are many factors that play into that, so maybe the reason I haven’t seen others complain about the speed has just been that the problem is unique to my network. But ultimately I opted to switch back to Google for my daily driver and just use Kagi for specific lenses.

That is unusual. Have you tried reaching out to support@kagi.com ?

Yep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.

Please reach out to me at vlad@kagi.com and we'll set you up on an account (on us) and I'll personally get involved to see what is happening. Most our searches complete in less than 1000ms. We do dig much deeper than Google though, and we more often than not place what you are looking for in the top 3 results - and that has to count for something too.

Very kind of you! Just reached out. And I agree, the lack of sponsored results among the top 3 and overall quality of the results are valuable.

I've also experienced this issue. Always assumed it's my network or the connection at work.

Sometimes kagi will take up to ~5 seconds to give me results.

If you'd told me several years ago I'd be paying $10/month for a search engine, I'd say that's crazy talk. But it genuinely is worth it.

Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.

Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.

On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.

Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.

Kagi has an optional integrated search AI which you can activate by adding a question mark at the end of your query.

You can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query.

It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.

Ads are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case.

There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...

> Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.

I use Kagi Assistant which uses LLMs from AI companies mixed with their own indexes. It works great and is included with Kagi.

You can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query.

It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.

If you're paying for kagi, you can use ChatGPT or gpt 4.1 mini -- OpenAI uses bing as a backend so it'll be a strict improvement for you

Happy Kagi user for many many months now. The only thing I fall back to Google for are local results (specifically local business search - like restaurants). I still have an Android phone, use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc - but Kagi has almost entirely replaced my standard Google search results.

And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying.

I also find myself using the "quick answer" feature a lot too. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

You can trigger quick answer with a "?"

But also feel free to try adding "!ai" to send the query to the assistant for a deeper dive

I did know about the "?" feature and use it all the time but I didn't know about "!ai" - very cool I'll have to try it. Thanks!

DDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.

How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know.

How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.

Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?

That doesn’t mean DDG is anything special, only that Google has become incredibly bad.

Awesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!

All of these sites pretend to have useful content, but require an account to view it, which makes them SEO spam in my view.

Maybe not a popular sentiment here on HN but I cancelled my Kagi subscription (9+ months) just recently. Increasingly, most of my queries/search have been through LLMs and Google search is just fine (and even better for restaurants, places, and the like). I don't think the improved search experience is worth the subscription anymore.

In Kagi, you can just ad a "?" to your query and get an instant answer, a la LLMs.

Or !ai to route it to kagi.com/assistant with your default model/agent to respond with kagi search results

I really enjoy Kagi for search. It is a significantly better experience. I do still use Google Maps for looking up local things, and I kind of wish Kagi would redirect me there instead of their own maps implementation, which I just cannot imagine will ever be on par.

So is it truly the case that I can now pay for Kagi without my searches being associated to my account? And I dont mean by scouts pledge, but I recall reading something about anonymous crypto tokens?

I'd consider getting an account if so.

Privacy pass exists, but is limited to 1,500 tokens per month (3, batches of 500). Furthermore, they do not allow disabling safe search or customizing the results in any way (including your block lists) when using it.

Also, since they are the token signer, make sure you use a different IP to get tokens signed / when logged in, otherwise the traffic for the "private" searches is trivially reversible.

So... Kinda useless right now?

> Furthermore, they do not allow disabling safe search or customizing the results in any way (including your block lists) when using it.

You make out like this is a bad thing, implementing these features would undermine your anonymity. It's explained in detail in their announcement blog: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=If%20Kagi,pe...

No, that's an excuse and not a justification.

You have to log in to the extension to use Privacy Pass. They are fully capable of pulling your block list and removing those entries at the frontend.

And safe search toggling via a query string parameter when using a token does not, in any way, expose any reversible information about a user.

As a refinement on this, if you're not comfortable blocking these results entirely, Kagi allows you to lower their relevance in your results rather than simply blocking outright.

It’s so strange to me that I’m now using Google maybe a couple times a month (and then only through a proxy like Mullvad’s leta). This would have been inconceivable 15, even 10 years ago. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but wow, how times change.

I go to Kagi to try it out. Asks me to sign in to do search. That’s just a bad onboarding experience.

Kagi is a paid service. Allowing random people to search for free would defeat the point and make them go bankrupt.

I've never used Kagi before and wanted to try: how does Kagi stack up against Brave search?

Kagi results consume brave search among others before returning the result so should be a superset in quality

Kagi has been a great asset for the past year, their support team is phenomenal and responsive. The result quality is great and have seen co-workers eyeing the service because of what they've seen.

Kagi seems like an old tool for a bygone age. A faster horse carriage, instead of a car, you know?

Use kagi.com/assistant then?

The cars still use that faster horse as a core engine before answering.

Having a better engine makes for better answers keeping the model constant

I pay for both.

If Kagi would offer an easy to use pre-paid option, I would use it again.

Same. It would be great if they had something like the mullvads cards you can buy off Amazon in most countries to credit your account

I thought their maps integration was pretty bad compared to Google, as well as the information widgets. It stressed me, I was always thinking that somethin isn't right and that I'm to blame, because so many love it so much over Google.

Switched to ChatGPT, what is this google thing?

So you switched from one evil megacorporation to another evil megacorporation? Good job.

Can someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use?

I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.

As far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX.

I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!

Thanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search?

Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?

Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.

That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.

Probably they are using 'Kagi Assistant', which is essentially kagi acting as an intermediary to the major LLMs. You get a catalog and a monthly quota.

Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.

Interesting. The lenses sound similar to “Spaces” on Perplexity, where you can segment searches to a specific prompt every go and upload files etc for context. Safe to assume that’s a pretty common feature now, maybe I should look at Kagi again - it’s been a few years since I’ve last peeked at it.

The lenses are more about what results will be returned by Kagi's search. They were originally (and still are) a search feature you can use in regular searches.

For example, one of their default lenses is "Academic". It searches research institutions/scientific journals/universities/etc. So as an example, if I search "ulcer risk of ibuprofen":

The "Academic" lens returns the NIH with "Research summaries -- Preventing peptic ulcers"[0] and ScienceDirect with a paper on "The gastrointestinal effects of nonselective NSAIDs and COX-2-selective inhibitors"[1].

Searching without the lens, I get Healthline's "Ibuprofen and Ulcers: Why They Happen and How To Avoid Them"[2] and Medical News Today's "Ibuprofen ulcers: Effects, symptoms, causes, and more"[3].

You can apply these lenses to searches the AI assistant performs separately from the prompts/context/etc. So, for instance, I can set up an "assistant" based on Claude called "Research" restricted to the "Academic" lens. When I ask that assistant questions and it performs a web search, only results from the academic lens (research institutes, universities, etc) will be returned to the AI.

You could do similar with, e.g., setting up an assistant for "Coding with Python" and creating a lens that's restricted to the Python documentation, one for "Local Knowledge" that's restricted to sites from your region, "Recent Developments" that only considers sites published in a certain timeframe, "eBooks" that only returns epub results, etc.

Your prompt/etc is configured separately as part of the "assistant" you're using. So you could have a research assistant with a prompt that asks it to approach the problem step-by-step and evaluate the veracity of the sources, a coding assistant whose prompt includes the language/framework, etc. But there's nothing stopping you hooking your "research assistant" up to your "Coding with Python" lens.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310269/ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490... [2] https://www.healthline.com/health/ibuprofen-ulcer [3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ibuprofen-ulcers

Kagi has their Assistant which is where you can have an AI chat, deeper than the AI blurb from Quick Answer. It has access to several different models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and others.

Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.

(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)

can you perhaps elaborate on which companies and in what capacity?

Yes, Yandex, they pay them for some of their search results. Here is their own statement, where they refuse to stop, even though people keep asking them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

"people", as in a perpetually offended tiny minority that want the entire world to bend to their comfort bubble. I'm fairly certain you're also one of the users that incessantly badgered them about excluding Brave's index, trying to portray it like the majority of Kagi users wanted that.

Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.

'Offended' is a weird word to describe people choosing to boycott evil.

Yandex is evil?

Boycott particular examples of evil that they disagree with politically.

I am curious about your politics that favor the invasion of Ukraine.

I’m curious about your politics that are comfortable accepting a long list of invasions by the US, but somehow draw the line when it comes to this particular invasion.

I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.

Can you describe my beliefs on US foreign policy in more detail?

The Russian government is evil. Would you describe every person within its borders as evil? Every company?

Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.

With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.

Then get your ass off of the internet because there as so many commercial entities profiting off of every bit of your use.

Joke's on them, I'm using private browsing mode. Hackerman

“Private” browsing mode is a misleading name. It only protects you from other people looking at your search history, not from online tracking.

Was hoping the hackerman thing was a dead giveaway.

Wait until you hear about the EU! https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-russia-ukraine-war-natur...

Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.

This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing.

I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.

Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.

Happily the state of the world isn't the result of recognizing the state of the world, and attempting to avoid hypocrisy. Instead the world is a complex system that defies easy discussions on social media, motivated by overly simplistic and selectively applied moralism.

For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.

Oh you're taking a moral stance? So how do you get by without search? Because surely Google and Microsoft have many other moral problems, likely even the same ones.

But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?

You can install an adblocker and Google/Microsoft end up losing money if you use them. You can't stop Kagi from sending money to Yandex, unless of course you stop using Kagi.

One big reason to use alternative search engines like Kagi is to try to break the search engine monopoly. A bit of a tangent, but I would argue that if search became revenue-neutral, Google would still continue to support and promote it. Control over search is incredibly valuable.

You don’t have a leg to stand on when dismissing criticism as whataboutisms, chief.

“Kagi is superior product and a vital competitor to breaking the search oligopoly — but what about their loose and indirect association with the Russian economy?!”

I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria. Kagi produces a product you find useful, and they are trying to run an honest business model that doesn't focus on surveillance, charges a subscription, and earns that by working to return the best results.

Is it really a net win to boycott them?

> I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria.

I don't think this follows. While some people may use morals as an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.

> Is it really a net win to boycott them?

How much you value that facet is of course a personal decision.

I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.

> it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.

Agreed. I'd need to see evidence of that, though. People are lazy, and they hide behind moral stances that are completely impractical to avoid having to think through the complex moral realities of the decisions we make. I don't have a lot of patience for this. If it's part of a multi-faceted analysis, then I'd expect to see that reflected in the comments the person makes. That's not true in this case.

> I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.

It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.

I've debated replying at all, but I am genuinely perplexed by this comment as a response to the quoted text:

> It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.

Did I imply it was my decision? I don't think I did. In fact, I pointed out that I don't even have the data available to me to evaluate the decision against the decision-making axis I provided (how much value is Yandex providing to the search results?) I am struggling to understand what you're trying to get across here besides contrarianism.

The hard fact of the matter is that you are obviously right: I cannot make decisions for Kagi. This was never in question. I can share my feedback with them and vote with my money.

> Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.

This is another unprovable statement.

No contrarianism intended!

I took your musing about the value of removing Yandex as creating a sort of spectrum of hypothetical products that could be offered, and then musing that some hypothetical one would be better than what exists. My point was: we can only select from what exists (or who exists), and then work with them from there. This was intended to tie into a larger theme I'd been trying to emphasize around choosing a product that's closest to your ideal, and then iterating towards perfection from there. The moral-stand approach is to go with free stuff because you don't want to give money to a non-perfect product/company. My assertion is that single-factor approach is something I see regularly, and an approach that leads to suboptimal choices in the long run.

My statement about Kagi was not indended to be someone we'd prove, but rather what the company themselves has stated as their intention, in contrast to their competitors, who don't even try.

Cory Doctrow has written up some findings with respect to how Google search results are intentionally bad. When Kagi uses Google's index via the API (that's paid!) they can produce a better search product than Google does. That's notable!

Assuming you seriously considered Kagi, and have now chosen not to pay them, where have you turned for search?

You've edited your post.

> Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing.

The acknowledgement that issues are not one-dimensional is not artificial. Sincerely: you're deluding yourself that you're helping Ukraine by not subscribing to Kagi.

Do you have recommendations of other search engines?

Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.

Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.

For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.

For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.

It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.

Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?

If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"

So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.

Or as the saying goes:

Perfection is the enemy of good.

But you don't sanction the country directly, but any company that may or may not support the war in Ukraine.

To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.

In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.

Well, here we're discussing Yandex, there's no "may or may not" about that one: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people

Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.

> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.

Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.

Ok, I did not know those specific details, thanks for providing. I was more talking general. Different story here it seems, but boycotting kagi because of it still sounds extreme to me.

So go head and sanction the US because as far as I am aware its still the largest imperial power in the world

Since I live there, that fails the metric of:

> "minimum impact on my own life"

Which I justified:

> Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?

But you should absolutely feel free to do so if you are so inclined!

You don't have to sanction everything, just as much as you can.

I've never thought about it like that. To me, this is the most interesting part:

> If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"

I wonder how different people decide on different metrics. For me, I probably don't even realize I'm deciding, making it mostly emotionally based I guess. Thanks for sharing with me!

This is a well thought out response that I can connect to. I support the 3 metrics you laid out.

Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith.

Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.

It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.

Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.

I do not accept simply doing nothing.

"I do not accept simply doing nothing."

You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly. Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment. What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.

In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.

Just because you decide to do something, it doesn't mean that you have to do everything. Even if you wanted to, it's likely that you can't.

> In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.

It does help him, but you're not going to support those who do nothing or feed the machine waging war just so Putin's propaganda gets a bit weaker.

If the average Russian doesn't understand that the reaction is due to their (well, mostly their governments) actions, then that's another problem that only them can fix.

Majority of Russian Federation population support occupation of Ukraine - independent polls at the start of open invasion. They would stop only when faced consequences.

Yes. And donating to the ukrainian army directly has direct consequences for exactly those who volunteer fighting against Ukraine.

Punishing all russians, well, punishes all russian independent of opinion.

Do you support any sanctions against Russia?

Yes. Sanctions for military goods. Nothing against the civilian population.

And also against involved persons and organisations of course.

So should Russian oil and gas exports be blocked?

The way it is done right now? That russia sells oil to india and EU buys it from there? Not really.

So if not this imperfect way, how do you block the main source of revenue?

The sanctions are hurting Russia, so it’s at least partially effective.

"how do you block the main source of revenue?"

Why should I? How about not mixing up civilian and military targets? Current trajectory is heading straight into total war, I simply would restrain on target military targets.

> It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere.

That's a good point. It's a nuanced topic and I was genuinely curious. I'm not involved in any international business with Russia, so it's interesting to hear about it from the perspective of someone affected by it financially.

> Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population.

What?

What’s confusing about that statement?

I live in the Eastern Bloc. I fear Russia. We still see the bulletholes in the old houses in the inner city that were done by the "liberators".

If we look at history, Russia government's capacity to withstand punishment of any kind in detriment to its own citizens is limitless. I applaud your determination but I wouldn't expect that to put any kind of pressure on Russia w.r.t its stance on the Ukraine invasion. Things need to get way uglier for Russia before its leaders take any corrective actions and I'd argue we'll never reach that threshold, sort of having (yet) another armed revolution of sorts (which I don't see happening either).

Three years of 10-20% interest rates, brain drain, and war casualties. Their reckoning is coming, just not yet.

How's Putin's approval rate since the invasion?

Dunno. Are there any credible measures of this?

Worth noting that it’s about 2% of their search costs, so at most $0.20/mo of your bill is going to a Russia company (probably much less given they have a profit margin, employee costs, hosting costs, etc).

I like the idea of zero going to help Russian economy (and in turn the war), but a bunch of major companies also do fractional percent business with Russia which I just don’t know about. I don’t want to over penalize the small company that’s honest about it.

It's a double whammy for me as I don't want to support Russia or the USA and I largely don't. But I also work in tech and need to get work done so I have to pick my battles, unfortunately.

Dig deep enough (not even very deep at all, actually) and you’ll find evil. It’s not like the US is in any way squeaky clean.

Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions.

A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely on technical merit: result quality, latency, privacy terms, and legal compliance. The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.

I've written a longer explanation of our position and how Kagi works technically which you can find here https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

The "Google Alert" comment feels unnecessarily dismissive of a legitimate user concern.

The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.

Dang, this is a refreshing take. Going to take a look at Kagi.

If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action, you should reconsider your ability to do so morally

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.

Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"

Is Yandex directly complicit in war crimes?

I can't vouch for the source, but this provides a factual chronology of Yandex's (forced) integration into Russian state propaganda:

https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

Okay, propaganda, sure. Propaganda is a different argument - it compromises the quality of search - and I will happily agree with you. I want to emphasize, that the claim was: using Yandex through Kagi is supporting war criminals. Which war criminals? Which war crimes is Yandex complicit in? I plainly do not accept that propaganda === war crimes.

>I plainly do not accept that propaganda === war crimes

I'd say propaganda is often necessary, and usually successful, at allowing governments to execute war crimes. I think most modern war crimes are lied out of existence by propaganda outlets like Yandex (or any number of US news outlets at other points in recent history).

Following that reasoning, is Gazprom invading a country? No? Then I guess we should buy their gas. Why not send the latest and greatest ASML lithography machine to Mikron? It's not like they're actually launching the missile using the processor they manufacture.

And so on. You can see the problem with this...

It would be interesting to know people’s views on sanctions against Russia, as these are a key tool against Russia and the logic is much as you have described here. My guess is that HN users don’t support sanctions.

They are accused of sending Ukrainian users data to the Russian state.

Also, ‘In August 2024, the company was accused of collaborating with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to direct users to fake websites for the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, groups composed of Russian supporters of Ukraine. The websites collected data from Russians who may be interested in joining the organisations and supporting Ukraine.’

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex

> If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action

Yandex does not equal Russia though.

The United States gov't has participated in what many consider illegal acts of aggression (i.e., war crimes) and do so using tools like PowerPoint. Is it moral to accept Microsoft as a client?

I'm not saying I know the right answer here, but the purity test you're proposing seems quite stringent.

You'll be shocked to learn that some people avoid US products for exactly the reasons you've mentioned. Right now some avoid Israeli stuff for similar reasons. And so it shouldn't be a shock to learn that some people don't want their money to end up in pockets of Russians and their state (via taxes).

So by your logic everyone who participates in capitalism (including yourself) is immoral.

Well, the US and a lot of the US companies fund the Palestinian genocide, and you're OK with that, so people support the genocides they like. So don't be a hypocrite.

In my estimation, Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet both inflict more damage on the world than Kagi. I trust that you judge them equally harshly and do not use them?

A leader who on principle legitimizes and pays companies that are literal tools of oppression will inevitably burn his customers. And isn't it funny how as a paying customer one still has as much say in this as with Google?

this is a terrible response.

Where are your customers? Predominantly the West, likely the US? This is not a question of "geopolitical judgement" but rather of funding a regime that illegally invaded another country, one that is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, one that oppresses its own people and one that directly uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries.

Apply this same argument to North Korea or Iran. Assuming that either contributed meaningfully to the quality of your search results, would you be comfortable sending money to companies based in Iran or North Korea?

You can hide behind your technocratic arguments for a while. Look to Google and Facebook to see where that ends.

It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US? Somehow Ukranian lives are precious, but Iraqi and Bangladeshi lives are not?

I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian, nor do I particularly love either country. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.

[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...

let's not pretend that US democracy, flaws included, is in any way comparable to Russia.

Please, you know this is a bad faith argument, so let's cut the false equivalence.

I dislike the US as much as anyone, but I appreciate that the US is much better than Russia.

How many countries have Russia invaded in the last 50 years? And the same for the US?

The US invaded more and killed more innocent civilians, so pretending it's any better than Russia is hypocrisy at best.

I don't think Russia has many neighbouring countries it can still invade, because it literally already did all of them (except Norway?). And with their size, they have a lot of neighbours. It's very comfortable to restrict your argument to the last 50 years, but the true story of Russia is completely different.

Even the last 50 results in a silly long list.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — Moscow divided Poland with Germany (1939), invaded Finland (1939), occupied Baltic States (1940) — for two years of WW2 Moscow was Germany ally. After WW2 Moscow occupied half of Europe for 45 years, countries become free less than 50 years ago. Moscow made North Korea and China regimes, still supports dictatorship across the world, occupies and annexes neighbors.

Wars involving Russia in the last 50 years must be around 20, and don’t forget the occupation of half of Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russi...

What makes you so certain the US is less bad than Russia?

Facts. Do you have no moral ground on WW2 Germany either?

Wars are bad and the person who wins is right. That’s how it has been for all of history. There are no just wars. Just, wars.

I’m deeply skeptical of the US. But how are the US and Russia behaving the same way?

Can you give an equivalent US atrocity to what’s happening in Ukraine right now?

I think you might be experiencing a “living through it” bias.

Some people do avoid US companies for the reasons you've mentioned.

People tend to care more about what they are familiar with. Someone in Zimbabwe probably cares more about the war in Sudan and avoids dealing with the countries involved than with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and use Russian products. Same with someone in Iran, they probably care more about Syria and Palestine, and avoid Israeli products while using Yandex.

Maybe it's hypocrisy, but humans don't have the capacity to support every victim of every war.

it is this plus the ability to affect the world.

I have no dog in the US / Russia debate but i recognise that both have tremendous ability to affect the world. Same with China and i avoid chinese products where I can.

That said, i'm much less concerned about North Korea, compared to Russia. The latter has sophisticated weapons and military tactics. North Korea may be an evil state but its small population and economy mean that their ability to sow chaos is limited.

Exact same argument with Sudan, the Houthis, etc. Iran is in the middle of this pack but Russia is far and away the most significant danger.

So why bias the US over Russia on the morality scale?

But someone in Zimbabwe would care if their country commits a genocide. But most Americans don't when their country does it.

We don't even have to leave the African continent do understand that people being okay with and performing genocides, waging war, etc, isn't an exclusive American trait.

I don't know if you should drop Yandex or if the alternatives are better or not, but I feel that you're missing the point here.

You're looking at this purely from a technical point of view. That makes sense when trying to make the best search engine, I guess, but humans are not machines. You talk about geopolitics and search quality, when the guy you replied to is thinking about indirectly funding a machine that is bringing war to a country and killing people (I have friends that have been affected by it).

Your profile says you're "humanizing the web". To do that, we can't ignore what humans are and how we work.

I understand your perspective and don't take these concerns lightly - I was a refugee of two wars myself, so I'm deeply aware of human suffering and its impact. Our mission to humanize the web means ensuring universal access to human knowledge, regardless of politics, delivered with clarity and protected with integrity - for everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances. A search engine that filters sources by political approval becomes something else entirely - it becomes a biased information provider that denies the very universal access we're fighting for. The most humane thing we can do is build tools that serve humans first by providing the best possible search results to everyone - before this conflict, after this conflict, and during all other 100+ armed conflicts taking place in the world today.

An upstream search index is not exactly a source and boy is that one politically biased. Given Russia's efforts towards destruction of civic society everywhere and replacing it with post-truth one, you very much risk compromising integrity by touching their products.

That's a completely valid position to have.

The thing to keep in mind is that for some people, and this includes some of your customers, there are things that are more important than your mission. Right now, some people avoid anything that is related to Israel. When the US invaded Iraq, some avoided US companies. I won't touch anything related to Musk after the two sieg heils and other things. The guy that complained clearly has an issue with what Russia is doing in Ukraine and doesn't want their money to end up in Russia.

It's a free market. You should do what you think it's right and then people will do the same with your product. Some will care more about search quality and pay, while others will care about the companies you decide to work with and use something else.

Would it be possible for users to opt out of Yandex, thus removing any Yandex results from their searches? We can do this with specific websites, why not yandex?

Would it not be possible for the user to disallow certain sources for searching, so as to not pay them for the API call?

I think is a more comfortable position to take.

funny enough I asked what this controversy was about to GPT 4.1 and it said Kagi now allows people to disable the Yandex source from their account settings. That's not true, unfortunately.

I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.

I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.

I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.

I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".

I take it you don't use any phones, especially no apple products then, right? After all, apples gigantic sponsorship of the Chinese government is well covered at this point.

Clothing is also a no-no, right? After all, there is *literally no way to purchase clothing from any store that hasn't been produced - in part - by effective slave labor and Chinese machinery.

Really, consumer boycott of nations is infeasible in a global market. The only thing you're doing is virtue signalling.

This is a silly argument. Clothing is not optional; Kagi is. They are deciding to go without an optional good because they don't like what they spend their money on. I applaud them for it and I like Kagi.

No, internet search really isn't optional. Try it for a month. Good luck!

I didn't say internet search was optional. I said Kagi was optional.

… implication of my comment was: “Which search engine may I use that doesn't indirectly cause harm?”

You're asking a question they aren't. They take issue with the specific spending of money on Yandex. So the question is "which search engine isn't spending money on Yandex"

No, the initial comment did also reference China, which Google and Microsoft are also in bed with... albeit to a much less degree then Apple.

Hence he's on point, as ddg ultimately uses bing under the hood, pretty much all search engines would be out.

A plausible argument could be that you're only using it, not actively giving them money (at least for Google/MS). It'd still call that hypocrisy though, if someone made such an argument.

Conversely, Vlad’s strong sense of engaging in ethical business and utmost respect for and understanding of what it means to remain neutral is precisely why I use Kagi, and why I believe Kagi will beat Google in the long run—why I invested in Kagi.

> why I invested in Kagi

Do you mean in the sense of investing in your tools, or do you mean that you're one of Kagi's investors?

Both.

> ethical business

There appears to be a conflict between ethics. Some won’t let a cent of their money go to Russia. Some will as they value their search engine and freedom of information. You and Kagi have picked one over the other.

It’s also their policy in response to “biasing” search results for suicide by including a link to crisis lines

https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...

Based response, I support that view.

Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.

Disappointing response. Guess I'll continue to avoid Kagi.

> The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.

Everything is politics, whether you acknowledge it or not. And right now you are taking a political stance.

> Everything is politics, whether you acknowledge it or not. And right now you are taking a political stance.

No, not everything is politics.

Kagi is a well-made tool, and part of the reason why it works so well is exactly because it tries not to be political. Thanks to the founder's reply, we know it ranks its sources based on utility to its users. Part of being a search engine is allowing the users to be exposed to all the information available on a given topic. The user decides how to use the tool.

I am (as many europeans) against the war that Russia started against Ukraine, but that shouldn't prevent me from looking into what Russia is saying about it should I desire to do so, and having the Yandex integration means that I, the user, am in control whether I want to click on the Yandex result or not, but at least I'm aware it exists. If the platform would decide to shut out Yandex, it wouldn't make the problem disappear, it would just remove your awareness and knowledge of it.

One of the criticisms of Yandex is that it sanitises its results to align with Kremlin wishes. If accurate, how does that help you?

For what it’s worth, I went to Yandex and tried searching Bucha, Navalny and a few other topics and the results seemed inline with Google, so I’m wondering about the accuracy of that claim (or is it a geographic thing?).

Thank you for creating Kagi, sorry that you're dealing with misguided folks and thanks for the in-depth explanation.

Would you ever consider switching out Yandex for something like the Brave Search API or Bing (if they aren't already part of the mix)?

While I do understand your position, it's important to understand including Yandex in your index doesn't mean that politics aren't influencing your results; it's not an apolitical position.

By that definition precisely noting is apolitical. And that’s really the point, isn‘t it? Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.

Also, do Kagi’s Russian users deserve to be punished because of their leader’s actions? Is that virtuous?

> By that definition precisely noting is apolitical.

I'm with you

> Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.

Wait, when did I suggest that they adopt values based on "whichever way the wind is blowing"? I'm just asking them to not support the economy of a country whose invaded another free and democratic country for the purpose of expansion, and has engaged in war crimes to do so. People are upset about this, not because it is trendy, but because they think it is wrong.

You’re asking.

There isn’t a moral truth here. It’s just politics. Prove to me that Kagi’s support of Yandex has uniquely enabled a Russian war crime and maybe we could start having a real discussion about whether Kagi is morally culpable. Prove that Kagi is committing more harm than my other options. Prove that Kagi is committing more harm than the good that quality search results provides the world, provides people who are fighting and speaking against the war.

Otherwise yes this level of guilt by hand waving association based on making you feel good in the moment is exactly the definition of virtue signaling.

Brave is part of the mix, and that's also the reason I don't use Kagi myself.

This is the only issue preventing me from buying a subscription. Kagi looks great but this is a major stroke against it for most Europeans.

Choosing to ignore the provenance of your suppliers is absolutely a political decision even if you wish it wasn't.

Your steadfastness against the politics of the "Modern Lens" astounds me. You are a refreshing drink of cold water on a hot Mojave summer day.

I've subscribed to Kagi since 2023, and this response really gives me pause. Any support for totalitarian regimes like Russia or North Korea definitely forces me to reconsider being a customer.

Thanks for responding here. The issue generates strong responses on both sides.

Is there any chance of adding an ‘exclude Yandex’ option to user accounts? No money to Yandex and no improved search results.

I doubt my chances but miss my favourite search engine.

> you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions

I do — I disagree strongly with your choices, which is why I cancelled my subscription and why I bring this up. It's doubly sad, because I liked your service.

This is like people who vigorously criticize Mozilla's moral failings while using Google Chrome. Heaven forbid we choose the option that is 2% evil instead of the one that is 98% evil.

Pretty much. Like everyone's saying... an absolute moral stance here is pretty much impossible to take.

Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month into the economy of a country that's invaded another and sent people in that have literally raped infants to death? Uh, no.

Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month to a company headed by someone that contributes to anti-gay causes and is a COVID skeptic and amplified COVID denial? Also no.

Are those contributions worse than using Google and contributing to their damage of society and the internet?

Are those contributions worse than using one of the AI providers who will gobble up power at absurd rates and contribute meaningfully to the slow death of the planet?

Are those contributions a meaningful concern compared to the fact that I work remotely creating value for a US company whose tax dollars end up going to support Israel and the genocide they're committing in Gaza?

I honestly have no idea. But I can't really see how "not using Yandex" is the absolute stance that everyone should be expected to take, all things considered.

Do you also boycott American companies since America is funding a genocide in Gaza, or is that less convenient?

I'm sure Google and Bing don't show Russian websites including Yandex in results /s

These are EU imports from Russia in 2024 in the energy sector alone:

52 bcm gas to 10 EU countries

13 million tonnes oil to 3 EU countries

2800 tonnes enriched uranium/fuel to 7 EU countries

Source: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/strategy/repowereu-roadmap_en

Inevitably at least one person downvoted this. Predictably so in a thread where people feel entitled to state what "most Europeans want". I am European. Of course I want this war to end today. The idea that a consumer who searches with Kagi is responsible for the war is just … misleading. This is not a question of "picking your battles". Establishment of a fair business model for search could even prevent future wars.

I wanted to point out that holding Kagi to your believed highest standards does lead to moral inconsistencies on a very material level if other providers of commodities are not held to the same standards.

That is not whataboutism.

Now - if you are European and still feel like downvoting me - go to the next MEP‘s local office first and ask them what they do about the facts stated in my first post. After that you are cordially invited to come back and still downvote my posts. Literally any of my posts. Oh you don’t know the address? Try the search engine of choice but don’t think to hard about the global implications of doing so…

Do you have the same opinion on companies that are based in israel/give money to israeli companies?

This thread's responses are a classic whataboutism. Instead of addressing this particular issue, people address others. I support motion for Kagi to drop Yandex integration, because of the reasons cited.

The blocklist thing is interesting, I finally took the plunge and installed the app and extension

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