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Comment by d12bb | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

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I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).

All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.

> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index

Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.

I did not intend to spread misinformation here, and would like to hear more about the general-purpose index Kagi is working on. I had based my comment on several Kagi pages, but mostly https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm..., which mentions Teclis as Kagi's own index, but https://teclis.com/ makes it pretty clear that it's a "small web"-focused tool:

> Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.

> Teclis includes its own crawl as well as results from Kagi Small Web index and results with permission from Marginalia Search.

> Teclis works best with broad queries such as 'machine learning', 'vegan diet', 'religion' etc..

Is there another crawler doing the general-purpose stuff?

Not in production yet, so will have more to share in time.

Fair enough, thanks for replying!

How broad will they be? Do you aim to ever have large scale indexing of the web?

Hey do you guys have posts or sharing about it? It would be awesome to see what you are trying to accomplish, maybe it's time to post on HN ;)

Hurry. Google might give up the ghost on its search product and maintaining indices on anything not geared for LLMs.

I'm not sure antitrust will help you.

So you will stop buying Yandex data at some point?

I care more from breadth of the dataset than politics in my search engine, thank you very much.

For everybody else there’d Google I guess.

What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?

I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?

There is a very easy 90% solution to that: massively downrank everything with ads with some exceptions added as needed.

That's what SlopStop is for :) developing methodologies that scale for detecting slop.

I mean it sounds like that already has a lot of overlap with our Small Web indexing efforts, so that part of our indexing efforts could be an extension of that. A lot if this is still in development though so I can't speak on specifics just yet.

How do you build a search index in the days of Anubis pages everywhere?

Anubis is easy, just use a whitelisted user agent or a headless browser if some sites disable that - you need one to index web app abominations anyway. Cloudflare and Google reCaptcha are bigger problems.

https://roundproxies.com/blog/how-to-bypass-anti-bots/

> We're actively working on building our own indexes

Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".

Wikipedia is prob in "other sources", as they actually say they have a direct license for it.

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search#:~:text=Wikipedia,...

Lol everyone has a direct license for Wikipedia.

It's funny you say that as we just switched the Wikipedia widget over to our own internal index. We don't intend to stop there either.

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.

There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.

But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.

Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.

> Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism.

That and the fact Universities provided free, fast and unmetered internet access. I doubt they would be running anything if they had to pay $1/hour like regular people had to in their dial-up days.

Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.

When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.

That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.

Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.

I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.

The thing is, even today much content on the internet is still made for free without anything being paid to the author - we just have third-parties who have inserted themselves to profit from it. That's mostly a failure of society to provide the needed infrastructure as a public good.

BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.

You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.

I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.

It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?

From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.

> nothing that requires human input is free.

TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.

Of course we put labor into it. It's not some seance or wormhole communicating with the software dimension.

This is the way FOSS is meant to work. I got jobs where an employer was happy to run other people's FOSS software "for free", happy for me to contribute bugs/requirements/patches back upstream, and happy to release our own projects under FOSS licenses.

It is a win-win for all involved. That's the whole point of it.

You seem to imply that work on FOSS projects is a second-class activity, meant to be done after companies and employers have secured their revenue sources.

This is like trickle-down economics for FOSS and it doesn't work.

I wouldn't call it second class. Maybe second-order?

To me, it is no different than management, planning, logistics, marketing, etc. which is done for the purpose of supporting some other objective.

It simply means that you perform software development as work-for-hire in support of that other objective, rather than for the purpose of licensing revenue. It provides wages for services rendered, just like the vast majority of other job types.

It just doesn't provide for scalable virtual rent extraction for a "publisher" or other middleman. To me, that is a benefit of it. It removes a bunch of perverse incentives from the table. Incentives that tend to harm the developers and users for the benefit of those middlemen.

In principle, I don't disagree. The problem is that in practice the large corporations managed to neutralize any chance for independent by commoditizing the software service layers that supported their business and invest all their resources they could to package their proprietary solutions on top of it, AWS and "OpenElastic" being the textbook example for it.

The one way to get out of this mess would be to have the market paying a premium for companies that do R&D in FOSS directly. It can not be a secondary goal, and we can not be telling them they shuold find some other way to make a living.

That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)

You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts.

But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.

The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort. (Just an example)

And prior to whatever IBM did in 2000, I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job.

> The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort

Yeah, and it was a BBS ran and backed by a software development company that used it as a channel to promote and sell their software. IOW, they were not offering the infrastructure "for free".

> I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job

Which means that there was someone paying your employer to support it. Again, not doing it "for free".

I think you and the others responding to me are just trying to disprove the specifics of my comment but entirely missing the meat of the argument: I am far from being "a 27 year-old who just graduated business school", but I agree with GP said: people will not pay for digital services unless they absolutely have to, so companies that try to make a living by offering a quality service in exchange for payment will invariably lose to someone that offers their product "for free" but exploits their customers elsewhere.

>>Google won because it was a single text box.

I remember a colleague around 1998, he said: "how will they ever make money? Its just an empty website?"

LOL

You are arguing GP's (WarmWash) point and not even realizing it.

Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats

About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.

Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.

I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.

But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(

Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.

A company can be successful without dominating the world.

> Nobody wants to pay for anything

Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site

Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.

I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.

The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.

Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)

They are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.

If anything, this makes me want to pay them twice. Once for search and once for exploiting google.

"... didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to ..."

"... I thought their aspirations were higher ..."

It sounds like the decision to send search queries (and money) to Kagi was based at least in part on reasons other than the quality of the search results

This is interesting psychology

What if all (cf. only sum of) the money sent to Kagi was actually invested in an alternative way to search the web without using an index created by a corporation or a non-profit with commercial subsidiaries

Defensive HN replies may focus on the quality of the search results from commercial indexes, e.g., "Google is the best. That's why everyone 'chooses' it."^1 But if the consumer is choosing Kagi based on other reasons, e.g., "investing in additional search infrastructure", then clearly there is more to these decisions

For example, some search engines claim to be planting trees or some such. Nothing to do with the quality of the results

1. Apple is being paid 20+ billion for choosing Google as the default in iOS but Apple's choice is not based on the money. Yes, that makes sense

I'm into sustainable, long-term vision. I feel like the plea for Google to make their index open has a lot of good points, but I also think it will go nowhere. So I could view Kagi strictly as a service, like a guy who mows my lawn, but part of the reason I'd pay for search is to build an alternative to all the crap out there. I stopped using Google search years ago and think DDG works Just Fine (I know there are detractors). I get DDG's play and it makes sense to me. I guess I need to reconsider what I think I'm paying for when I give Kagi money. I do think their search results are better, but generally not enough that an extra subscription is worth it.

Qwant and Ecosia try to build their own index: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-sta...

I do not believe that Qwant can produce something good, they always were a company to extract money from the french taxpayer to wrap bing results.

I use and enjoy Ecosia, it works pretty well for most use cases. Unfortunately it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage.

One the things I hate about Google is being forced to have location-aware search. I love how Kagi actually lets me override the country.

I would enjoy a world where this was much more configurable.

I don't think they papered over this? They've been transparent about paying to scrape other indices while they work on their own.

I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.

Yes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.

And they're not exactly wrong.

We really should be investing in a public index infrastructure instead of yet another private search company that puts on a nice face while they are the under dog.

I think your statement is correct in the absence of a clear statement of direction and/or product launch by Kagi. I tried Kagi for a year and came away disillusioned as you were.

They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.

I don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox

I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.

On numerous occasions, I had issues with YouTube and Firefox that were fixed by changing the user agent to make it look like chrome.

I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.

This is incompetence, not malice. YT devs would skip testing on Chrome if they could get away with it, but are forced to.

Incompetence at scale is malice. We're talking about a mega-corporation gobbling up some of the brightest minds of our generation, not some garage startup that is barely able to keep the lights on.

I'll agree with some of the brightest minds, but some Googlers I worked with were mediocre at best.

Also, I don't really understand what your catchy phrase means. Google's management is being malicious by not forcing their employees to not be lazy?

> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google

Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.

Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.

I have found few CEOs capable of telling nothing but the truth. Based on that, I am nearly certain that lying is part of the job description.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

I don't walk around recording every conversation I have.

I'd also argue that calling a tech CEO a liar is far from extraordinary. It'd be extraordinary if I accused him of honesty.

Only problem is that the original quote you commented on was not kagi lying, as they actually say the same here

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

You said that you were not surprised that kagi was lying, only that they were not in this occasion. When you accuse somebody of lying it makes sense to provide at least some evidence of that.

At the very least, they are very clear about which indexes they use and how.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.

If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.

It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.

Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.

I mostly interact with their AI through bangs.

An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.

!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.

I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.

Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.

It was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.

Same to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.

It's good when you know you just want the meat of whatever you're looking for and KNOW every page answering your issue has massive amounts of fluff around it.

Something like "how can I access the root filesystem of proxmox?" and you'll get an instant answer instead of a link to the whole ass Proxmox documentation.

I'm curious: what is your use-case for a search engine that justifies Kagi over free search engines? Are you not finding your results on page one, first try, with other engines?

I grew up in the 90s, in the fourth grade we spent a whole week learning how to effectively use search engines and what research even is. So I have some pretty solid opinions on what makes a functional search engine.

A good search engine shows you the results for exactly the query you entered. A good search engine does not discard your entire query to show you what it thinks you meant.

A good search engine supports and respects modifiers and advanced queries: AND, OR, NOT, quoted strings, plus and minus. It gives you advanced parameters like publish/retreival date, categories, origin.

If there are no results for your exact, specific query, a good search engine shows you zero results. A good search engine does not waste your time with literally infinite fake results tangentially related to what the engine decided you meant instead of honoring your query.

I gleefully pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine. It does all the things a good search engine should do. It does not do the things that bad search engines do. Kagi has put great effort into designing a search engine that maximises your ability to find the thing you're looking for.

Because I pay Kagi with cold hard cash, I do not have to instead pay Kagi by consuming thousands of fake "sponsored" search results. I enter a query, and Kagi gives me precisely the results for that query and nothing more. It's really that simple. I pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine, and most other search engines are not good.

Google isn't even a search engine anymore. It's a heuristic ad delivery mechanism that happens to also surface indexed web content. Your query is a suggestion and is usually disregarded completely and replaced with a more lucrative query. Google hasn't supported advanced search in over a decade. No plus or minus or quoted strings make any difference.

I heartily encourage you to learn about search engines and try one. I doubt very strongly that you've ever used a proper search engine. You've most likely only engaged with heuristic ad machines before. Try a search engine, you'll never want to go back.

For what it's worth I find about the same things using Kagi as I do using DuckDuckGo. But with Kagi I get to pay for the service I use and that's their funding model and that's very healthy so I want to support that.

FYI, we (DuckDuckGo) now have a subscription service (https://duckduckgo.com/pro) and one could always turn off ads on our search engine (https://duckduckgo.com/settings).

I didn't know about https://duckduckgo.com/settings at all, thanks. I really liked the customization of "Startpage".

I'm also REALLY happy to see that you can actively disable not just adds but also suggestions to install tools/apps and newsletter requests. Thank you!

You’re welcome!

This is constantly the case, anytime I Google something more obscure than the front page of a top 50 website.

Even when Google gets it right (often they don't) I have to wade through a bunch of AI slop and countless ads. After that, it's dozens of SEO referral link sites trying to sell me garbage.

Kagi gives me better results by default, no ads, and I can customize results by prioritizing or blocking different domains. Very much worth the small price.

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The small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration.

I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.

On iOS, there is an app called xSearch that integrates into Safari and sneakily hacks around the limited search engine options by watching your browsing history for queries to the search engine you've selected in Safari, then immediately rewriting the URL and navigating to the search engine you actually want.

Obviously this has security implications, but I don't ordinarily search for anything sketchy on my iPhone so I'm personally not too worried about it.

No need for a third party app. Kagi itself has an extension to intercept queries sent to Google and redirecting them on their website.

Then don't buy Apple!

There's more to device quality than whether a monkey can operate it and looks shiny.

I know right. It’s simple. Google pays them over a billion dollars and Kagi doesn’t.

However, Apple does allow DDG, Ecosia, and Bing. They just don’t allow Brave or Kagi.

Easily fixed by installing Brave Browser.

Or a bunch of other browsers. Nothing special about brave.

Just not very practical on iOS or iPad

I get annoyed at Whatsapp and see it as a case for antitrust but apparently Google is just as guilty of this

Using third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy.

Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.

3rd party browsers don't actually exist. iOS Chrome is just V8 bolted onto Webkit/Safari. Chromium is not part of it.

The point was that in a third party browser you can usually set any search provider, not which rendering engine they use.

> Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.

The one third-party keyboard that seems to work is the one from Google, if you want a better experience than Apple’s.

You could always choose to use software that respects the user's freedom.

Kagi uses Yandex which is Russian.

Its funny because Kagi apparently also uses Google, and Microsoft and other threads were complaining about it.

It sounds like they use everything to give their subscribers good results. Which is what it sounds like I am paying for.

Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru

Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".

Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.

I just use the tools that work.

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> Something tells me you're not much of an ethicist.

Not at all.

Ethicists, in my experience, are hacks that cant actually do, but instead loudly pontificate and deride others who can. They basically run gish gallops and whataboutism to get the real creators to stop.

> "Who am I to refuse medical breakthroughs because they came from monstrous human experiments on prisoners of war? If it works it works!" /s

You can sarcasm-tag this all you want, but the medical experiments the Nazies did against Jews, Romani, Gay, mentally disabled, and others WERE used in this way for the US space and rocket initiatives and the creation of NASA. They were already dead, and the data collected. So yeah, we did use them. And we got further ahead by not having to run more experiments. And the data helped save our people.

Its not a great situation, sure. But whats done is done. No sense in whining and bemoaning "ethics" of corpses. Might as well get some good use out of their abject slaughter.

But does it surface relevant search results?

Many things on the web use Yandex.

I use a great number of russian sites, mostly when I want to download textbooks, audiobooks, etc.

And people who have a problem with that should first fix the failure of the western world to provide equivalent services.

Do you have a point other than being overtly racist?

Russian is a nationality, not a race. You can say prejudiced, but not racist. In this case it's not even a person, but a product.

It's not prejudice when it's based on a post-facto assessment of the Russian government's mobilisation of their companies for obscene and evil goals like clamping down on free speech, persecuting LGBT people, or trying to destroy Ukraine.

"It's Russian and therefore it's out" is a valid stance in light of all the known consequences of using a Russian product. If Russian people do not like this, they are welcome to break their links to the Russian state by emigrating and founding companies elsewhere, or stay and overthrow their government. Either works for me.

Many Russians have learnt to keep quiet about politics so they can get ahead in Russia, and they seem to harbour some deep-seated delusion that everyone from abroad should play along with this for their own convenience and profit. They whisper 'no war' to one another, by which they mean Ukraine should surrender already, so that this whole unpleasantness (to them) blows over, and the rest of the world goes back to accepting their blood money. No.

Germany has been grappling with its own horrific genocide for a hundred years and still hasn't quite figured it out. Russia is, as of the time of writing, currently undertaking one. Come back in a hundred years, maybe we can talk about Russian products then.

What's your point? Yandex is quite a competent search engine

My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.

I enjoy my Kagi usage but there are still a few things I use the !g or !gm bangs for.

Shopping and finding locations is definitely one.

Yes, I am also hopelessly tied to Google Maps. Which I think is relatively distinct from web search, IMO.

What are you missing from a decent OpenStreetMap frontend like OsmAnd+? Only business metadata or something else too?

Businesses and reviews mostly. Not navigation.

I participated actively in the Google Local Guides. I depend on the content from there to discover stuff geographically. But I’m also aware reviews and interactions and even images that look human can’t really be counted on anymore.

The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats

Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.

It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)

Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.

Astroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer.

Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.

Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.

I hope it stays small compared to the tech giants.

I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.

Well, for one thing at these user numbers using it is close to de-anonymizing yourself.

Ever consider that people praise Kagi so highly because it's actually good?

Then again maybe you're the only correct person on the entire internet and everyone else is shills and crazy people. That definitely sounds more likely.

Doesn't "astroturf" mean false statements rather than people just being enthusiastic about something?

That chart is programmed to always shows the same shape, no matter if the number of subscribers increased by 10 or by 10 000.

I noticed if you change to the “all time” view it shows a steady linear growth, with no big spikes or valleys.

Damn, that sounds deceptively done then. :(

Growth is nearly linear for the past 3 years.

A good graph would start at 0

We started saving this data late :)

The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.

You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.

Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.

The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.

Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g

I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.

Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.

Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.

I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.

Local business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.

Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.

They do have something called Privacy Pass that lets you search using an untraceable cryptographic token instead: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

I’ve seen this, but can’t understand it.

- they issue you a code when you are logged in

- they track that code for multiple use

- all they can do is claim that the code was securely generated and it isn’t just an API KEY to your account… but they’re already telling you it is database tracked

How can you have any even the 1/2 best proof it isn’t just an API KEY that directly links to your account? I see no trust path other than “us, bro”.

I mean its as private as VPNs are and people pay for those too.

Mullvad lets you have completely anonymous accounts. No log VPNs like ProtonVPN have third party verification (though some metadata has been shared with auhtorities).

Does Kagi have the equivalent of either of these privacy mechanisms? Even with the limitations of the ProtonVPN approach, that would be an improvement. As far as I've seen Kagi has no equivalent: it's closed source and has no regular third party audits for privacy.

Except for a VPN the the VPN company only sees who you are connecting to and usually not the decrypted HTTPS streams. That's defense in depth.

Privacy Pass.

Snake Oil.

Like what?

My annual Kagi subscription lapsed last week, so I decided to see how DuckDuckGo is doing these days.

The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively.

Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason.

I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.

I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.

I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).

What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.

I use Le Chat as default search engine, using this search engine string: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%...

(In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.)

A negative is the high latency.

(Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.)

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...

I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge

Used it a few times today, first hits were what I was looking for which is definitely not what I experienced last time. So far so good!

Early Kagi adopter here. I'm actually not aware of most of its AI/LLM features, which is part of why I like it. I noticed Kagi translation when the LinkedIn translator became a meme, but I don't really use any of these features.

That's to say, if one day Kagi also forces AI search summary down my throat and hide the search results, I will definitely leave.

I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.

Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.

I started hating Google Search because of its relentless AI dumps on the results page, but I have also stopped using it at all, more or less.

I got the Google AI Pro plan, which gives Gemini access by default with generous limits, and also includes free credits, code assist in VS Code and other editors, and also to Gemini CLI. And I'm just simply using that for all of my needs. It seems to work quite well so far. I see how Google Search is not relevant for me anymore.

I find the opposite, I can count on one hand the number of times I've deliberately resorted to using google search in the past year*

*except for maps results, Kagi is absolute hot trash for maps. I automatically append !gm to the end of all mappy-type searches. I wish Kagi would just kill their map product and redirect to google maps.

Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.

Not something I want to see happen, because I love Kagi, but it surprises me that Apple haven't already bought them.

Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.

HN users really hate this piece of truth.

my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft

I'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox.

We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.

I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.

I only use Google to search for reddit posts.

The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.

We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web.

Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.

According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.

I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.

You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?

I guess both my job and my personal life do involve a lot of searching, though i’d say that sometimes (a lot of the time) its also my ADHD getting the best of me.

Looking through some of my history of today:

- “github rate-limits”

- “oriental hornet”

- “riva 88 florida”

- “logistic map”

- “zeiss euv mirror”

- “authentik helm”

Just to name a few…

For a lot of these, LLMs would slow me down significantly. Most of the time I already know exactly what im looking for.

Can you give an example of your searches?

I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.

Along those lines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481

By “their own index” i assume you mean training data? If so, thats a big part of the issue for me. As an example, if I ask an LLM for some part of the Zig stdlib, I will get an incorrect answer 10/10 times because it will refuse to look up the latest documentation.

No, I mean they're constantly crawling the web. That gets fed into the next model but it's also searchable by the current one. For example, if you ask chatgpt what the latest shooting at the white house was it will tell you about the one from two days ago.

ChatGPT has effectively assimilated Google search. You can tell it to look up the latest version of the zig docs and do whatever.

Sure, yes. But that has been quite flakey for me as well.

Regardless, if we stick with the example of the Zig docs, using the search and then opening the actual docs is a much better and faster experience for me. I get the context I need, I don’t get the verbose llm output that packages it and I get there faster.

Mind you, I use AI a lot and have subscriptions to all of the major models, but this is just not a use-case I find useful in my workflow.

I also keep trying to use it this way by looking for things such as decent libraries or frameworks for something new im trying out. I’d say that at least 50% of the time I end up searching for myself and finding popular ones that were completely ignored by whatever LLM I searched with. Always a frustrating experience…

If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries

I do try to search but often the results are pretty low quality.

Agents do. I'm actually very curious where does their traffic go.

I've tried it, too. Loved it. Was nearly ready to pay for it. Then I learned that they source their data from Yandex. To hell with that! I'll rather get my search results on paper via carrier pigeon than support the rape of Ukraine.

Do not fund the Kremlin!

I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.

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