Using Kagi Search with Low Vision | Hacker News Reader

Using Kagi Search with Low Vision

veroniiiica.com

269 pointsspeckx90 comments

Kagi has been one of my all time favorite products. It has enriched my search experience drastically. One of my favorite features I don't see talked about enough is the keybindings. Using vim keys for navigating search results is such a fantastic user experience, and much like normal vim I'm not sure I could go back to navigating search any other way. I also really appreciate their AI quick-search feature is explicitly opt in and trigger by adding a "?" to the end of search. Their selection of widgets is also quite nice and I find my self reaching for them quite a bit.

I just don't understand how they can think that not giving me a single free search per month is a good idea. I used Kagi when they still had a free plan and it was fine but I still preferred Google. Now I can't even try it again to see if it has additional value.

Do you think the potential upside is worth the $5 it would take to explore?

no, I check every few months and only do a few searches at most.

If you weren't convinced the first 100 times you tried a product, what is the reason to keep trying?

Sounds like you're just not the target audience, then. Not every product has to have an ads-based or freemium business model.

They offer a free trial with 100 searches

Not promising it would work, but I would email support and ask to have the trial reset for your account. Companies are usually cool to restart trials if you ask.

I don't need a trial reset, I never used mine yet. I want to compare searches between Kagi and Google every few months to see if it got better. I used to recommend Kagi to people but when it's completely behind a paywall it's not easily recommendable anymore.

When you recommend a restaurant to a friend, do you expect that restaurant to offer your friend a free meal to see if they like it?

No, but it they make a monthly subscription to the restaurant, they should get a mean before hand.

Isn't that exactly what the free trial is for? Am I missing something?

Well, yes. You are right.

But as I read the OP it is that he objects to the barrier of entry. He would prefer (possibly very harsh) rate limiting over the hassle of registrering an account. Maybe combined with a weak "nag" screen.

It might be hard implementing in a bulletproof way as IP restrictions are easy to circumvent. But it might be "good enough" to drive more adoption.

I'm a bit on the fence. It would be an interesting experiment.

You can subscribe and let it sit. If you don’t use it for a month, they refund you that month. You can compare at your own pace.

If you want to hear from a happy Kagi user, I can say that I used Google thrice in the last two years, and it didn’t bring better results than Kagi.

You don't even need to verify your email, so just create a throwaway account, it's not that hard.

Kagi now gives you 50 free searches, at least if you're not signed in.

Signed in? Do you mean, subscribed? I can't seem to use Kagi without loggin in.

This approach ignores 99% of the value of Kagi. Google provides atrocious results compared to Kagi once you've taken a few minutes to use the basic Kagi features.

As a business you don't want to serve everyone. That's why many companies after a while raise their prices, even if that prices out the enthusiast market they served at the beginning so they can go further up market.

Often times it does not make sense to serve free users who are often causing more hassle than it's worth. Having a free trial and then either converting users or not makes sense, but serving a user who uses it for a few queries every month ("I check every few months and only do a few searches at most") potentially does not exactly make sense business wise or even warrant the time building that free tier for an audience that's not willing to pay anyway.

I have been using Kagi for years. I use the family plan for my wife and I. I love it and will continue to use it until it either gets bad, they sell it, or get an ipo. There is no noise. Google, to me is just filled with noise. I used to love the innovation and used many of their products. Their search is now filled with ads and you no longer get good results, in my opinion. Their AI will also have ads: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-l... Kagi is refreshing, the results have gotten very good. Occasionally there have been poor results with items at the top that should not have been, but I have noticed that it has been corrected quite quickly. Kagi does not retain any of your search terms nor does Kagi Assisstant. To me, Kagi gives me results like google used to, there are No ads, and they do not retain your search terms. I will gladly pay for that.

I love when people make personal websites (seemingly) purely for themselves. The design of this website really reflects the perspective of the author in a way that was immediately apparent. I've never seen a website with a menu that large.

This author is excellent. I found their blog earlier today when relaying advice on setting up an iPhone for someone to use after a stroke. ( https://veroniiiica.com/iphone-accessibility-settings-for-st... )

My eyesight is not even that bad, but I fpund the large contrast and for really easy and enjoyable to read.

It is nice but the website has some obvious contrast issues such as in the header. "Veronica With Four Eyes" is black text on a dark grey background

I think that's something on your end. Looking at the CSS (and checking in dev browser) it should be #0a0a0a on #fff (light) or #fff on #111 (dark)

I've been using Kagi for a while now and I'm never going back to Google. Everything is just so much better when you are not the product.

The feature that sold me was the domain block feature. Search results are so much better when they dont include SEO'd garbage, sites with entirely AI generated content, or userbenchmark.com

Google a long time ago did that, but I assume those sites are where they get money from and so they removed that choice.

I also love the ability to prioritize domains.

I push docs.rs up because otherwise I often get the crates.io page which I never want.

And I push GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg sites up so I get actual repos instead of product pages.

I use https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist for that. ~10k blocked domains and rules. There is just so so much spam

Observation on the author's site: it's cool you can tell their site is designed for them by them, or other people with low vision. big font, high contrast, etc...

It's also nice for everyone. Like, very readable, pleasant, way better than the trendy modern designs.

I love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that.

I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.

The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.

What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.

I agree, I found it hard and frustrating to read on my (small) phone because the text is just too big. I usually skim long articles to some extent to focus on reading the parts I'm most interested in, but this format makes that impossible. I can't skim anything because barely a sentence is on my screen at one time.

For me too, but I just hit the reader button to get an experience tailored to my needs.

I know it's a completely different thing- but the neurodiverse face similar struggles of having to wade through reams of completely superfluous content to get to anything usuable.

Having done plenty of text to speech testing of my own website, I've never thought to turn it onto a Google search results page. It's abysmal.

Of course Google is an accessibility nightmare.

I've been using Kagi for a couple of years now. For awhile, my work Chrome profile was still set to use Google for search by default because I don't login to personal accounts on it. I didn't use search that often for programming work - I used ChatGPT or Claude much more often - so it was always incredibly shocking to me how terrible Google search was every time I used it.

The AI results were bad beyond all human understanding - the sort of product that I thought only a walking corpse like Microsoft could release so broadly. But, that is essentially what Google Search is now. Clearly no one in a position of responsibility knows or cares about product design or performance and it only continues to exist through sheer inertia.

Switching to Kagi is how it felt when I first used broadband internet in college , or when I switched from Alta Vista to Google: the internet works like it should.

I really appreciate clearly custom websites. My eyes are also quite bad (legally blind.)

Nearly ironically, because the site is already created for low vision, it had issues with the things that I do. Dark Reader froze up (uncommon) and the font was, for the first time, too large.

I am glad to see someone else enjoying Kagi.

I was wondering why my browser was not happy with her site. Indeed, Dark Reader was struggling with it. I've never seen that before.

Legally blind here too o7

Kagi was the best service provider change I've made in years and if anybody cares for an anonymous HN endorsement, they have mine.

Agree. I admit, I was initially hesitant to pay for a search provider given all the free options, but I'm glad I made the jump. Using Kagi feels like using Google in the early 00s.

> if anybody cares for an anonymous HN endorsement

tbf, those are common in every Kagi or Search Engine in general article on HN ;)

- A happy user since the beta days before you even had to pay.

I paid $10/month to Kagi for 3 months. During that time I quickly learned that Kagi's image results were just repackaged google image search; literally the same images returned in the same order as google image search.

I also noticed that Kagi does not ever return more than 250 results. Just 250. Kagi is not the kind of search engine that is useful for someone who is used to web surfing in the kind of style that emerged in the 90s/00s. It is more of a curated corporate search engine that tells you what it thinks you want to see. You are never allowed the resources/results to actually look for yourself.

In the end it was the later that put me off using it. Even though other search engines have been gimped as well (Google only returns a maximum of 400 search results these days, Bing 900, etc) 250 was just far too small to be useful.

...you regularly browse to the 25th page of Google results? Why?

No, I regularly browser the 4th page of google results. Why do you only have 10 results per page? That seems really counterproductive. I wish I could do more than the 100 I set it at.

I don't have low vision (yet), but do a fair amount of my reading sitting ~3m from a 65" screen, and I gotta say, the UI of this blog is lovely for that.

> In the Site Search section, click Add and fill in the following:

> Name: Kagi

> Shortcut: k

> URL: `https://kagi.com/search?q=%s`

looks like one can do this and use search without needing to be logged in. pleasantly surprised to see this. i wonder how they would rate limit users this way.

I have been paying for Kagi since last year and love it. I am not going back to using Google crap.

Kagi is the one and only product I will ever stan

Biggest fan like in the Eminem song Stan

<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stan>

So far, so good. I just let Kagi renew after my first year. The nicest thing is getting relevant search links on the first page or two and not pages of SEO links or ads masked as links that are irrelevant to my search. I haven't even used the advanced features yet but just using it in base mode is a huge time (and frustration) saver for me.

Is anybody else old enough to remember when Kagi.com was a place to pay for shareware?

https://web.archive.org/web/19970105191743/https://kagi.com/

the thing I really miss when I use magic, is recommended places from Google maps, where to watch certain movie/series, a lot of things like that, where you can infer recommendations based on your location. Kagi might be good to filter everything scored "bad", but makes you work more.

We have a big overhaul of Kagi Maps coming, stay tuned :)

Kagi is awesome! Good luck w the updates

Looking forward to this.

How do you feel your data for Kagi Maps compares to Google Maps? It's the kind of thing that's harder to test than switching web searches over to Kagi. I need to already know that the business and transit data is reliable which is why I still go to Google Maps.

Local queries are the I've things I use Google for still -- but Kagi makes it easy, you just start your query with !g and it redirects you. So it's pretty safe to switch the default.

I’m looking forward to it. I never stopped using Google Maps because no alternative was as ubiquitously useful (OSM is better in certain areas, but it’s hard to say when, which eventually resulted in me switching back to GM full time).

The custom css is tight, love using inky blacks on my oled devices with just a single style sheet.

I love Kagi, but it is soooo slow compared to Google. Really annoying...

You mean the search results are loading slow? I’ve sometimes noticed that, but not really to a degree that it was significantly worse than Google.

The whole page loads slow as compared to google. To the point it's annoying. I'm in Europe though.

I just tried it and the search results are terrible. Maybe because Google knows things about me, I guess I can give them the benefit of that doubt.

Clearly inferior to Google though.

Do you have some example searches that you made? I’m not a heavy search user and not a programmer but I’ve still found the experience on par or better for all of my general searching.

I tried with the search I had open which was "cf d1" and I was looking for info on cloudflare d1, Google surfaced it #1 and Kagi it was way at the bottom

For the record this is on Google https://imgur.com/a/De1AVpt definetely not #1

Kagi allows personalization, the difference is you as a user control it. If you used kagi for decade (assuming this is what you used Google for) I am sure the results would be fine tuned to your preference too.

Hmm. This page eats memory on both Safari and Vivaldi and Orion even with Javascript off.

One more reason to love Kagi Search.

Kagi is one of the few services that I will never use, it’s a privacy nightmare. Imagine all your search history are tied to one account, an account that id you with your payment information, and is hosted in the US? Google is better at this point, at least you can use it without an account.

You must be joking. Google ties all of your searches to you wether you log in or not.

I’m certainly not joking. Google when it started it wasn’t as evil as now, but the bigger it gets the more evil it becomes, who knows what kagi will turn into if they got as big as google. But again on principle, can you use google search in the library without an account? Yes. Can you use kagi in the library without an account? No. So whenever and whatever you do, your queries are logged and tracked back to you, only waiting for xyz to be pulled out.

Google still lets you do some things without logging in but that doesn’t mean that they don’t build profiles or try to link them with other activity sources. Most of their revenue comes from advertisers paying for targeting.

The paranoia but also the naïveté of internet tracking is a bit of a rare combination I think. Shadow profiles have been a thing for 15 years or more and they have only gotten more sophisticated. Browser fingerprints are surprisingly unique. Unless this guy is rotating machines / vpns / using qubes / etc Google can very likely pinpoint within a degree of certainly which searches are theirs.

It isn’t paranoia when there are clear facts in here, the first fact is your queries are linked to your account, period. Second fact, you don’t control the server in any way or shape. Third, your identity is linked through your payment information, aka full legal details, not just through an IP. Comparing between all that and browsers fingerprinting is muddying the water, you can use searxng in the middle and anonymize the query, with no profiling cookies etc., adding few extra steps and it’s private for most people unless you are a person of interest, in kagi, this doesn’t exist! Even the anonymizer is ran by the same company, so much trust!

I am not paid to design kagi architecture nor I know the internals, but let’s say I can host that mentioned anonymizer myself (say in Canary Islands), and it pulls the queries from kagi who you have paid for by monero, then the company knows nothing about the user, no profiling, no tracking, nothing, that’s a great starting point.

If this doesn’t exist, using something like searxng is far better (privacy wise), not just as mentioned on how it’s more anonymous, but also it gives you the ability to blend in, rather than looking like a sore thumb in the logs.

Let me get this straight. Your privacy plan is to alternate library computers while searching logged off Google? I'm impressed with your dedication.

> Can you use kagi in the library without an account? No.

https://kagi.com/libraries

Here ya go:

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

Is it open source? Audited? It is like back to how vpn services try to establish some sort of a trust relationship, which imo is more dangerous to have a false sense of trust than none, I prefer no trust at all, zero trust, especially when the service is SaaS in the US.

Man, if only the article I had posted had answered those questions. That sure would be nice

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

https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040521

Yes and yes, since you you apparently aren't capable of reading for yourself

-edit- I decided I didn't like the tenor of the comments I made. This tone serves nothing but to degrade the quality of online discourse so I will say this:

I don't personally have the technical chops to verify the claims that Kagi is making. And no one should blindly trust the statements of faceless companies. For me personally, the claims, discussion in the linked hacker news post, and the direction of Kagi's economic incentives are enough to satisfy me personally. Nothing says that someone else must be satisfied by that level of evidence, which is definitely not proof positive. However, I also very strongly believe that the level of paranoia that it takes to decide that all of that is not enough would also 100% disbar one from using google, even without an account. I do not think that one can honestly say that, with the evidence we have on hand, that Kagi is less privacy protecting that google. They may not be privacy protecting enough, whatever standard that is for someone, but they are absolutely doing more than google.

Great, Can I host it? A memory injection server side exploit can leak/track/ID any person of interest. This is Signal server way all over again. If I can host it, AND the payments in something like monero for the server that aggregates the queries, we have the foundation of privacy, not perfect as there are a lot of other stuff to go through, but good starting point.

So you think being logged out of Google will keep you more anonymous than this Kagi Privacy Pass setup?

Do I think using a search engine that doesn’t require an account and I can get the queries through an aggregator is more private than another that has an account/token linked back to you? Yes.

Just curious, with this privacy pass setup, how do I know that the server generated "auth token" is not actually linked to my account somehow?

It should also work with the Cloudflare privacy pass extension [0] FWIW, since Kagi just implemented RFC 9576 [1]

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9576

Here‘s an in-depth review from 03/2025 where Kagi and Metager are compared by german IT-Sec expert Mike Kuketz and his team.

No privacy-related concerns were raised back then.

It is a german blog (sorry, couldn’t find an EN-version), and a very trustworthy source for me.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/besser-als-google-bezahlsuchmasch...

So make a new account every once in a while if you are that paranoid. The whole value proposition of kagi is that it moves you from being the product(eyeballs for ads) to the customer of a product(search results) This flips the incentive of the search provider from abusing you to serving you. Hard to say if it actually will work. But I applaud kagi for trying.

And it is not like you marry kagi and once you sign up you can never use another search engine again.

They don’t store search history linked to accounts. Logs are only retained for 7-90 days[0].

You can pay anonymously[1]. You can also authenticate anonymously, as someone else already mentioned.

Meanwhile Google retains everything forever and does everything in their power to track everything you do across the web and tie it back to you, logged in or not. This is their entire business model.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin

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