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Comment by BinaryPie | Hacker News Reader

Is Kagi worth paying for? It's been on my radar for a while.

I’ve enjoyed it. It’s the first time I’ve not been left wanting by a search alternative. If it were to go away tomorrow, I’m not sure what I’d do for search.

Im happy with it. I have filters which will try to find search results from before 2022, which has greatly improved the quality of results for me

The domain-block feature makes it worth it for me. Finally no longer having medium or userbenchmark pollute my search results.

This. Or quora or pinterest or twitter/x or etc etc

I can outright block domains or just adjust their weight. Great for my personal prefs but also huge with the family account and helping keep the BS out of sight for the kids without going full restrictive.

You can self host searxng and block domains - increase priority on some etc. I do it myself.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

Just be aware that a small percentage of your money would be going to the Russian government: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/

also duckduckgo use(d) yandex. not many alternatives in this space

I use duckduckgo and live in a neighboring country, so I know Russian well (thanks, imperialism) and have to search things in it from time to time. It's still good at those queries, so this is just an excuse.

they used yandex up until 2022, and now they use bing and other

The EU is still buying billions of dollars of fossil fuels and other resources from Russia.[0]

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/3/how-much-of-europes...

Nefarious actions by others shouldn't justify your own. We can do better.

It's a matter of scale. Objectively, yandex is a great resource, and Kagi's results would be degraded without it. Pennies per user go to them. The sum of the entire money that has ever transferred from Kagi to yandex is what? 30 seconds of EU oil and gas purchases?

In short: pick smart battles.

I try not to buy from US companies these days, but Kagi is really so good that I make an exception here, despite the US government getting some of my money.

So Yandex is one of their data sources? Is that allowed under new sanctions?

My wife and I got the duo package because we do a lot of writing and need citations and sources. Compared to google and DDG it is less noisy and returns fewer spammy pages. We’re giving it a year to see if it is worth it.

Absolutely, yes. It has completely replaced Google for search for me. Good AI search as well if you're into that (but they don't force you to use it!).

I think generally yes. I tried it out for free for a while, found it was substantially better than Google and DuckDuckGo, and paid for a subscription.

Recently it has not had such a strong quality margin, which I suspect is due to the AI slop that all of the search engines are fighting against (due to errors both ways in their detection). I'm hoping this is temporary.

To be clear, I don't use any of their features except search (and domain filtering).

I think so. I switched to it because I have YouTube tv - essentially Google as cable tv provider - and noticed how commercials became too correlated with recent Google searches for comfort. The only time I end up switching back to Google is for looking up local businesses reviews.

If you expect it to be as good as peak google results, no.

If you need something that’s very noticeably better than its competition, then yes.

If you are okay with all of the terrible that comes with using LLM services as a search engine replacement, then probably no.

If you despise the amount of second guessing and source checking required to use LLMs as search tools, then yes.

It literally gives you google results (+ additional search providers, usually not in top results)... without the added spam. It's therefore superior to "peak google results".

What are you talking about LLM services? default search behavior does not use any LLMs (except any Google might use to reorder their top 10 results internally).

I wasn’t particularly impressed when I have the free trial a whirl - it’s not as bad as DDG, but it’s not anywhere near as good as Google.

Have had the family plan for over a year. Worth it for me. Just so easy to customize.

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