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Comment by ArtificeAccount | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites.

I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for. That was back in like 2010. To me that's the old, and useful, search engine that I want.

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I switched about a year ago. At the time it did seem like a step up from Google results. But there's been an increasing prevalence of low quality results. Blogspam, AI websites, etc. Obviously not blaming Kagi here, web search has gotten hard recently.

Is Kagi still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point I feel like I'm with them out of inertia more than being an avid supporter. One of these days I'll re-evaluate Google and decide whether to switch back or not.

It does occasionally surface interesting results from small sites that you wouldn't get on Google. I do find that to be useful.

Kagi definitely isn't a bad search engine by any means. Honestly if you haven't used it, try the 100 search free trial on one device. Maybe you'll like it. This feels more like a general decline of the open web.

I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved is what's keeping me with Kagi.

Is usage based pricing available?

I'm thinking of trying it out Kagi, but adding another monthly commitment is what's holding me back.

A single credit top-up and occasional usage until the credits run out sounds good to me.

Edit: Kagi has a starter plan with 100 free searches: https://kagi.com/pricing

Also, from the Kagi privacy pass FAQ at https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq:

    *Do you plan to allow purchasing privacy pass tokens without having an account?*

    Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be 'loaded' with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know *here* ( https://kagifeedback.org/d/6163-kagi-privacy-pass )  if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it.

Personally I don't like being signed in during searches, this seems like a good solution.

"the effort involved"

Feels like your comment saying it was too much effort to cancel Kagi took more effort than cancelling Kagi.

Actually their payment model has some baked in niceness.

If you don't use the service in a month, they just refund you. This has kept me from unsubscribing for years now. Some months I use it, some I don't.

It's more of hassle to unsub, and re-sub again when I want.

I think you're right, haha

It’s definitely not Kagi’s fault. The AI slop is simply taking effect and I feel sorry for them. I never expected them to match Google’s quality, but I was impressed with how close it was when I used it a few years ago.

Kagi used to use Google's search API. They discuss the current state of their index here: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Buried under a lot of complaints about fairness, Kagi mentions they are still using Google search results, just without authorization.

> Because direct licensing isn't available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page).

So in one sense, yes, Kagi isn't quite Google, but in another sense, it very much still is.

Everyone has to answer for themselves why they would be OK with Google hoovering up their data in order to deliver substandard results, vs Kagi actively working to remove low-quality results all while collecting no personal data.

Yes. I use both (Google only at work) and Kagi is certainly no worse and comes with the massive benefit of simply not being Google. It's worth paying for for that reason alone, even if the engineers at Google are constantly working on making sure I'm tracked anyway.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience, Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's "better than Google".

"Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites to exclude from my search results are two features that I remain willing to pay for, however.

DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free

Only up to five of them, which is almost completely useless.

Blocking Pinterest is not completely useless.

The top seven blocked domains on Kagi are all Pinterest: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

Failing to block Pinterest and then also having no room for anything else is almost completely useless.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.

I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

I’m confused by this comment. The original comments talk about Kagi not living up to the hype. You say you’ve had the same experience and wish you could get LLMs to use Kagi for web searches?

Especially odd as that’s exactly what Kagi assistant already does. Maybe they’d just rather use their key than pay Kagi for LLM based search.

On that note, Kagi research is legit amazing. There have been times I’ve spent 30min searching for something without success. As a last resort I asked Kagi research and it found why I could not. More than one option even. Now intend to use almost more than normal search.

Yeah, I agree with other comments here that the traditional search offering has gotten a bit worse (I think because the whole web has gotten worse), but research surfaces great results. Forums, small blogs and websites with authoritative views on subjects I search for. Really great. Yes, it is as expensive as any other AI pro plan unfortunately, but worth it for me.

I'm extremely confused by these comments. Are we all using the same google? Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I just did a search on Google and 1/2 the page was a combination of google AI result and ads. Below that there were 2.5 links visible. One reddit result, and two blogspam.

The exact same search on Kagi ('best lllm for coding') nets reddit, hacker news, and some other forum results right at the top, followed by a long dense list of links to various sites (including some of the same blogspam of course), but over all the results are hugely more rich and varied and also not at all the same.

How can you possibly say that a site that gives you 50% ads and a bunch of low quality links is remotely "only a little better" than a site that gives you zero ads and a huge number of better quality links?

I just block all those results on Google for free with uBlock Origin and uBlacklist.

I've been using it for 2.5 years at this point, and have the same experience. I don't think it's hopeless, but Kagi will need to step up their methods. IMO, there's actually a lot they can do here.

I've been using Kagi for ~18months and your description doesn't match my experience at all.

Querying for something like "snowflake json from variant?" in both engines and in google I get a sort-of-right-but-not-really-that-helpful ai summary about "parse_json" function. In Kagi I get an actually useful summary with code examples of parse_json, but also the colon-based syntax for accessing values inside nested objects without needing to parse anything.

I very rarely need to go into a page, I use Kagi quick search summary with the "?" suffix and it almost always gives me a useful answer in one-shot.

But then you're not using kagi search just the LLM

No, the responses are backed by searches.

So some guy does hard work developing some technique or solving some problem. He documents his experience, puts up a tutorial on DO or AWS or somewhere else, and the ads on that document help offset the cost of hosting. Now comes along Kagi, scrapes that data, and presents it to you, their paying customer.

I see a problem with this.

Do you pay LLM providers for agentic features? From your past submissions, you certainly seem to. Do those features make web searches and curl the results?

Were the models underlying those features trained on all available web content, or are they unlike any other enterprise models out there?

At any rate, you should see a bigger problem in what Google does, which you don't seem to.

One way or another the ad driven model has to go. It’s toxic for society.

That doesn't make it the same as search results

Try g.ai. It's stupid fast and uses google indexes. Kagi? sometimes doesn't correctly parse intent, in Google thing you can just ask function doing this and gives you it, with examples, grounding and extremely fast. I'm paying for kagi since the begging and I guess id cancel it because it gives not so much added value

First of all, the parent comment's point is that Kagi is often be praised for being like so-called-old-Google[0]. So it's only reasonable to assume they only care about the links, not the LLM summary. What you described is even further from old Google.

Second, if you want this kind of LLM-digested search result, Google AI studio blows everything out of water (including Google search, obviously).

[0] I've never bought into the idea that old Google was so much better. But it seems to be a very popular opinion on HN. ymmv.

Off topic, but ref

"I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for"

It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that crazy of an idea)

I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though. Of course - multi-device being the norm - complicates things.

That's called search: in history.

That doesn't search the content of the pages you've browsed, though, right?

Right, I misunderstood the case.

I guess because it isn't then trivial for a web browser to do, indexing every text ever rendered?

I think you would need to take it a step further and do full-text search on loaded pages. It's certainly possible but probably pretty data intensive.

There are things like Mymind (SaaS) or Karakeep (selfhosted) that do this, though they require you to explicitly save the pages instead of indexing everything by default

I would really like to see integration between Karakeep and SearXNG so that I could combine online search engine results with my self-hosted bookmarks serice.

I haven't used this but looks someone created a self hosted version of Microsoft's Recall

https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall

>It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen...

The answer to this is complicated.

Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.

The choice to not implement this for the user is very deliberate. It's contrary to the vendor's interests if the browser provides this capability directly to users. If a user's browser can take you to a website directly, then you are not using the vendor's search engine, meaning you are not looking at their ads, paid search results, algorithm, etc. It would severly impact their business model.

This is also the reason why browsers have:

- Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.

- Implement only basic hierarchical organization for browser Favorites.

Directly and indirectly, Google is the central nexus of all modern browsers. Aside from Google Chrome, they also:

- Fund the vast majority of Firefox.

- Pay Apple for preferential treatment.

- Provide the same mechanisms to vendors who base their browsers on Chromium (i.e., Microsoft Edge, Brave).

I would love for this to not be the case. There is hope to be found in small independent browser and search companies/projects.

> both will upload your browser history to the cloud

I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of revenue for this. Seems illegal.

I'm 80%+ sure the claim is BS

It's not BS for the people who don't understand the dark patters that guide users to enabling all of this stuff. That's everyone with a Windows PC who didn't bypass the Microsoft account requirement and went with all of the defaults in Microsoft Edge. Everyone using Chrome Enterprise/Education whose Google Workspace admins don't want to get into trouble for not backing up people's stuff (i.e., sharing it all with Google). Same goes for company Windows PCs set up with Microsoft Entra ID. It's everyone with an Android device and a Google account who wants their settings backed up or transfers to a new Android device. It's in the fine print and legalese for all of these products and services.

> Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.

On the other hand, the additional tools in the Omnibar (calculator is the example most should be familiar with) makes the bar incredibly useful for random daily tasks. Also, it seems that there is an "omnibox" API that extensions can use, which allows them to add their own tools to the omnibar/omnibox. Would be interesting as a form of "assistant" in a way.

> Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.

Citation needed... (I'm talking about the page *content*, not the metadata like url and title)

>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud.

I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)

So fwiw, browsing history shouldn’t be anywhere near that big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses well, if they were to do it I’m sure they’d do it at regular intervals instead of a years’ worth at a time, etc.

And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn’t be kept a secret.

In which case I'd love to know what it was doing sending that much data to Google IPs when I don't use Google services...

I've read all the Mozilla help pages about what automatic connections Firefox makes and it wasn't accounted for there (unless possibly something to do with SafeBrowsing.)

Never thought about this, but it makes sense they don't want a better local search, just for users to rely more on their product. It's messed up - so much time and human potential wasted on poor search and ads.

Thank you! I was wondering why bookmarks are treated so poorly by browser, as if they are forced to include them but hate them with a passion. That explains it. I'm a bit of a bookmark hoarder to the point where I have a local html file that holds and displays all my bookmarks and I've got that page set as my default.

If only some operating system incorporated a way to make everything you've seen on your computer locally searchable, wouldn't that be a neat feature?

I believe there some projects trying this now using OCR IIRC.

Did even Microsoft try something like this? It's of course something you'd only want running locally

I think the joke is that Microsoft did do something very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it got a lot of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms of security and privacy, but I think a lot of people quite understandably don't trust them to implement it (a) the way they claim they do or (b) competently, so even after they made a bunch of changes aimed at making it less scary it's still viewed with a lot of hostility.)

Ah :wooosh:, :D

> no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though

Which company would you trust with this kind of deep surveillance information on you though?

I would trust Firefox if they made a version which did the indexing locally. I think I'd trust chrome as well as long as it was implemented locally.

There's an old Mac app that tried to do it. History hound. It sometimes worked

I’ve been using kagi for about eight months now as well and at least in Europe it’s a significantly better search engine than Google by a long shot. The results are significantly more accurate. I don’t get listicles I don’t get AI spam. I get what I’m searching for, it’s refreshing.

The assistant is a nice addition but it’s search is superior for me.

For over two years I’ve maintained the practice of using Kagi and falling back to Google if I couldn’t find something. I can count the number of successes doing that on one hand. In the meantime I get to support a company which actually respects me as a user and isn’t doing things like tying accounts to browsers, AMP (trying to take over the web), trying to kill adblock, etc.

That's totally fair, though I personally don't share your experience. It could be that we just use search for slightly different reasons.

One of the reasons I love Kagi is that it respects double-quotes for exact matches. This might seem trivial except I remember being frustrated with both Google and DDG years ago for throwing irrelevant results at me even when I'm querying for an exact match. When Kagi was in beta and I got invited as an early adopter, my feedback to them was that I want a search engine that won't throw crap at me when I'm looking for an exact string match. They've honored that feedback! Even though Kagi doesn't necessarily have the most results, I want double-quotes and things like intitle to actually work as expected.

Another awesome thing about Kagi is how it lets you prioritize certain domain names. Likewise, it's great for blocking domains completely. All of this has made my search results very clean.

To each their own. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to me there's no comparison between Kagi's results and every alternative I've tried.

Oh, another thing I like about Kagi is that it's less censored than Google, Bing, and DDG these days. I used to be a fan of DDG until I noticed that results were sparse or nonexistent for anything even remotely controversial I queried. It became too PG-rated.

this is hard to evaluate, but we cannot replicate the old web search experience not just of Google, but Altavista, Lycos or Yahoo, when most of the web is siloed and increasingly botted - simply because the stuff you see in the siloed internet is actively "protected" out of your control

perhaps the best we can do is this "small web" thing which can be seen as some sort of retrofuturistic solution, but of course the siloed internet is a black hole of content and effort, and of course if the small web gets enough traction, astroturfed generative AI content will target it

I've been using it for over 2 years now. I'm quite happy with it. I like that I don't see adds and my searches aren't being used to target ads against me.

+1 searching anything non-business related is so good compared to the bloated AI + ads Google serves nowadays

The only thing that seems to have gotten a lot worse is the trend of ai articles- which isn't kagi's fault but it would be nice if they could figure out how to filter them. They all follow the same patter- "specific thing you want" with a table of contents with loads of repeated chapters and unrelated information, spattered with effectively random images.

They’re starting to with their stopslop. Sites that are mostly ai content get flagged and deranked. Still not perfect and I think they only just started working on the backlog of reports so hopefully it holds up helping.

Funny to look back and recall how useful web search actually was at one point. Ahh the good old days.

The enshittification of everything has really put a damper on the technological optimism that seemed to be the norm back then.

We had the tech we were always promised and then it got taken away, for... reasons.

I really loved Kagi and was a paid customer for close to two years. But sadly this year I wont be renewing my plan.

Kagi made search feel just “right” it was simple, got the job done and had some really simple but cool search features.

But over time they started doing way too much, and I kept seeing more and more features that I really didn't want. It felt like I was paying for all this while I just wanted to type something on to a text box and click search and see a bunch of results organized according to my filters.

I wish they would just dump all the other nonsense projects like ai and just focus on search only. Or give me an option to pay for search only without any limits.

I do agree actually but I’m sticking with them. Their mission of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one hand they’re marketing to the anti ai crowd while also joining the ai hype? It’s weird.

As I'm not familiar with how Kagi is "pushing ai tools" this is mostly a comment on the framing of your question.

Are you really saying that a company specializing in search - natural language oriented at its core - should not make use of the biggest technological revolution for processing natural language?

No, I meant their push of their assistant, summarizer, and news product (which is ai generated summaries).

I've switched as of a few years back and it definitely works like pre-AI/search index degradation for me. But I def understand search is very user specific based on how you search and what you are targeting.

I feel like I can still do this with Google if I use quotes.

Kagi I've been using and it's fine. Better than DDG for sure. But sometimes I still go back to google to find something kagi is struggling with.

I’ve been on Kagi for over a year and I’m pretty happy with it. At the beginning there were some noticeable differences in results that frustrated me, but at this point I don’t really miss Google except for some of the nice “not web site results” features like calculation and conversion. I mostly go straight to Wolfram Alpha for those now. And for a lot of the “random curiosity satisfaction” stuff where I would have preferred Google results, I’ll now just use ChatGPT or Gemini.

Yep that was my experience to. It wasn’t bad necessarily, but certainly not as reliable / dependable as google, and not worth paying for.

Could just be that I’m familiar enough with google to always be able to make it work for me, could be a frog in boiling water type situation, but… as much as Kagi gets talked up on HN, I was pretty disappointed when I tried it. I was ready to get blown away, and instead I was underwhelmed.

throw a question mark on the end to invoke the AI summary results and I find you can get the thing you're looking for as a reference right away. I've used this to dig up forum posts that are over a decade old multiple times with success. Asking the Kagi Assistant for a list of possible links works pretty well too.

Also on Kagi if you see bad results, you can flag the website to ignore it.

Disagree, I love it, at least as good as Google

I think that's the problem. I used to find it far superior to google. Now, there are a lot of queries where I am unimpressed with the results and end up trying google just to get better results. (like I used to do with DDG)

I've had a few experiences now where someone is standing over my shoulder asking me to look something up, and I search kagi, find nothing, then search google and find what they asked me to look up. Then when they ask "what was that other search engine you used first?" I don't feel compelled to vouch for kagi :(.

For needle-in-the-haystack searches, I find longer quotes works really well (in Kagi or google)

Kagi value proposition for me is not the $5 search but the $10 search plus whatever AI chat model you want (I originally did ultimate when I used it for coding). Controllable search and chat satisfies all my one-shot needs.

I can't really blame Kagi for the web getting bad or for the weak market for secondary search. Part of me wonders if they could use the AI search tools now on the market (now getting lots of investment) instead of the human indexes (subject to monopoly control).

I think it's completely unreasonable to assume that anyone would beat Google at the search game, by outgoogling them.

The reason, that Google is not like it was back in the day is that they are fighting a massive, antagonistic industry designed to game Google. The reason that chatGPT et al improves on search is that there's a effective but very expensive compute layer on top, not that they are better at the Google game. (This extra layer works out fine, because our time is more valuable and Google always came at an insane discount, also thanks to ads)

The good news is that Google search results have degraded so much that competitors like Kagi can compete directly. I moved off Google search completely on all devices ~1 year ago and I don't miss it at all, most of the time I forget I have a kagi subscription.

I am quite happy with my Kagi search results. The biggest weakness I have noticed in my few months using it is that it is a terrible experience for shopping. I believe this is due to similar factors that make it feel like a less spammy ad-ridden experience overall. It works well enough for product research, but comparing across product vendor's product pages tends to suck. I have to use a specific lens to shop for Raspberry Pi or Microcontrollers for example.

I won't add links so it doesn't look like I'm spamming or promoting a service (though I am, but it seems in line with what you're talking about), but there's a product I've built with my wife which has made things a little bit better in our experience because it gives you an option to choose different providers/indexes, thus tailor results to your personal preference. You can find it from my personal website (my username . com).

It's hard to judge one's personal experience with "personalized" search engines. I have personalized search turned off for Google so Kagi is a much better experience for me. I'd recommend leaning more into their feature to lower/block sites from your results, which with Google would require an extension for a similar but degraded experience.

Agreed, I have not been impressed with Kagi at all.

I typed in my dentist's full business name and location, "<name> family dentistry <city> <state>", and it was still #5 in the results. I still, out of habit, tapped the first link and called that number instead. It's ludicrous. In 2010 that would have been the top hit, next to the Wikipedia page on dentistry.

> I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for.

Is that even possible today considering there is so much more information and pages around today than in 2010? Old google worked with old Internet. The old Internet does not exist.

> I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for.

You should try that on more niche user-centric search engines, like https://altpower.app

So glad I discovered it!

In comparisons (often shared here) among SERPs, kagi has tended to have fewer blatant results campers crowding out original authoritative sources.

And yes, Google's founders were right that web ads would kill that experience you want.

I found kagi lacking and very limited unless i paid. Even with a paid sub it didnt feel like good value.

Im using qwant now and i feel its better.

It’s a search engine, not a global grep.

it probably doesn't help that they're constantly bifurcating their tiny team into new projects. their browser is essentially nonfunctional for daily use but they've already moved on to porting it to Linux

I am very impressed. Kagi manages to maintain Google-par quality or better most of the time, whereas DDG became an unusable slop pit a few years ago. I'm a very happy customer and happy to keep paying for both Kagi and Orion, in part on principle and in part because the product actually works very well for me.

I don't even use the AI assistant much, only when there are a lot of disjointed search results and I want a quick summary.

I have the complete opposite experience and it works wonders for me.

Why have you used it for months now if you're not impressed?

Because I'm too lazy to unsubscribe. It's cheap so it's not high on my list of things to do, lol.

I have had a great experience. I can find what I'm looking for and I can block or down-rank sites that are constantly shite. I did find that Google over the past few years has sucked but my Google results were always miles better than most peoples until a couple years ago.

It's interesting to hear that you can't find what you wanted easily on Kagi.

Is that possible today? I have no data but I assume the scale of “the web” grew a couple of orders of magnitude compared to 2012.

Kagi uses Google (and other) indexes.

The main usecase for Kagi is the fact that you can personally uprank/downrank/pin/block sites. And it has a bunch of creature comforts built in like:

- Attempting to detect AI slop, concatenating listicles ("10 best ...") under one search result heade

- Attempting to block translated Reddit results

- Custom lenses that search only coding resources or recipes or whatnot

- Redirects (so x.com > xcancel.com), although I feel this should be a browser feature

- Better translate than Google

There's probably a few things I'm forgetting.

Kagi is abysmal at image search though. Just assume you will have to use Google for that.

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