Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
kagi.com
kagi.com
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
I do remember them asking about shipping information at some point though.
It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
Why?
presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
I do not want a click-to-buy button, I want kind of lens that is specialised for shopping within specific regions (the current kagi lenses allow only 10 sites which is not really enough for shopping).
That is quite literally what !research does.
But agreed on local search - I tend to use Google maps for anything local. Otherwise for something I'd buy online, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In contrast, I may start with a page in a website and start going around looking for related products etc. The assistant is not gonna start doing that (I think at least), it just gonna get the page provided by the search results. For this reason, what search results it is provided with is important.
I am also (mostly) buying online, but for certain reasons I want to buy from domestic websites rather than ones based in other countries, if possible. Kagi has not been great at providing great results for that.
But, regular models and harnesses work okay for this too. You just have to specify “web search”, very important.
I use pi and librechat and I am really limited by the lack of proper web connector. Testing Tavily right now, Kagi is next.
I wonder why I see so few comments about it on HN, does everybody have this figured out already? Am I a dummy? Am I severely overstating how important of a frature web access and search is for LLM use?
The one caveat is opus has an absolutely awful voice. The way it writes is annoying and verbose. Sonnet actually works better for this type of thing.
If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.
I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
It doesn’t change the fact that they literally impacted the trajectory of how the internet developed in a very obvious, concrete way.
Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.
I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).
I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
ChatGPT is trained on all of Reddit and internet forums where most of the useful info is. It just automates the drudgery.
There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
Edit: this is a one-time promotional credit. One must pay for credits thereafter, in addition to their subscription.
I tested on my local LLM chat via Open WebUI, 2 requests from that cost $0.02 (so $4.98 left), and after my monthly Kagi renewal an hour ago, it did not reset, I am still on $4.98.
You are probably better off using Kagi Assistant anyways, as you get $10 there on the $10 Professional plan.
For local LLM web searches, to save on cost I will stick with the Brave Search API which gives you $5 free every month.
which model?
So this has nothing to do with the Kagi AI assistant then... it's just the model that's perceived as "good". My point is, there are cheaper ways to get access to the model, without a Kagi subscription...
Kagi Assistant defaults to the last-used model unless you got there from a Quick Answer. Several times I forgot to change models, and interrupted K2.7 Code, but after a failing to notice the model a few times and getting usable results, I now usually just leave it alone. Unless I want a quicker answer and doubt a "Code" model will grok me.
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information.
You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.
The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes.
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
Edit: Typo
As a publisher, I'd want consistent subscription revenue. The goal is to convince users to pay after they hit the paywall several times.
If you are a publisher, something which gains widespread attention might happen in your region, or an article might become viral for other reasons. You know that a lot of people would like to read that article and not become subscribers. So if you can sell access to an article 50 000 times for 1 dollar, that's $50 000 in income you wouldn't otherwise have.
But unfortunately, very few people are willing to pay a dollar or 50c for an article which they are desperate to read.
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.
I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.
Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.
One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
> How do you price articles?
The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear.
> And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views?
Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example.
> but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half.
Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled.
That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers.
(As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.)
> On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
> They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.
In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher.
> This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).
We still have Monero. Here's some recent projects.
https://monero.forum/ notice zero posts on the first page about USD price besides one disparaging Bitcoiners for caring about USD price.
They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.
That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :)
You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed.
Where's that issue you can try out now?
Publishers would rather have the chance at $10 than give up the chance at $10 for 10c. And readers don’t want to be thinking about their credit balance every time they read an article.
It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance.
So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge.
A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once.
It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached.
You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
The reason a payment is too much friction today is because it's surrounded by a raft of cruft: is there an extra "processing fee", am I signing up for a recurring charge and didn't realize it, I have to enter my card details and address, or I have to log in to some system, I have to OTP with my bank, etc.
It hasn't been solved yet, but someone will solve it to the point that it's a single swipe to buy an article for 25c, and it'll work. I would argue the NYT is in the best position to do so, but they are addicted to their scummy business practices where it's hard to cancel, you pay "$2/mo introductory rate" that suddenly escalates to $40/mo, and so on.
I could see Substack taking a crack at it also.
And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.
So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.
Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.
I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good.
As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results.
I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page.
And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it.
My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for.
I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on.
There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."
- Out of the box, search result quality is comparable to Google
- Search is slow. Latency for most queries is about a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Google is shockingly fast in comparison.
- Personalized results is a killer feature (blocking, boosting and suppressing domains)
- There is no iOS app. Only one in beta that is seemingly abandoned.
- Their site/app design is just passable at best
- Their AI quick answers give solid answers and are pretty concise
The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.
You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.
So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.
So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.
Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful.
Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
I get a nice
> Log in to use old Reddit
> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
No more, since I installed the "always old reddit" plugin in firefox.
They are selling content to google et al for their LLMs and they don't want to give it away for free.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
Edit: Actually I think this was part of their documentation to explain the intended use of that feature. Too bad this will now no longer work!
(https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html, see example 1)
I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!
(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)
That'd be an important milestone in enshittification when it comes to other entities that were previously happy to outsource their fan-forums, support, announcement systems, etc. And I do mean "enshittification" in a formal quasi-academic sense, because it's not just about things getting worse, but about the middleman starting to exploit people on either end. Adding a login-wall means that content and communities built up with a kinder kind of collaboration will become hostages, to boost Reddit Corporation's user-stats and creepy data harvesting for investors.
Kind of like how various groups started using Twitter as a way to provide a scalable stream of announcements--sometimes time-critical ones--to an audience. The entire use-case goes down the toilet when users aren't being shown your stuff in chronological order anymore.
This is really it though isn't it
I know new reddit has its potential inspiration in stopping LLM scraping(?) but websites are made worse because of some stupid metric that has to be fulfilled
people were burned by the purges reddit has been doing, so they end up just lurking instead. i dont think reddit will hold back thier filtering.
Cool.
However tracking that is tricky at best.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
I need someone to be at the library board meeting, school board meeting, city counsel meeting... Some of these happen at the same time so I can't attend them all even if I didn't have other things not mentioned I'm doing then.
*binding arbitration agreement required
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.
Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.
If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.
Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?
> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good
Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.
In most cases, I am not particular about which site I read a syndicated government quote on, so "sites I want to get content from" isn't an accurate description of the use case.
The use case is more "If I search for information, and a site shows up in the results claiming to have it, but when I am baited in, the content switches to an advertisement which I cannot bypass without paying: then I do not want that site to show up in my search results anymore".
2. "read a syndicated government quote" - actually, maybe this is the more important thing - I would strongly recommend that you change your news sources so that you are not solely consuming just whatever the government says - instead, switch to news sites that actually employ (and pay) real journalists, editors, etc to not just report what the government is saying, but also to report on the majority of news that the government isn't talking about, and even if it's a topic that the government talks about, to also report what's happening on the ground, to compare government actions to historical precedents, etc etc etc. There are even sites out there that will evaluate a wide variety of news sources based on everything from right/left leaning, to reliability. If you need any help finding some, please let me know.
3.
> "sites I want to get content from" isn't an accurate description of the use case
If I can't convince you to switch your sources to sources that employee real journalists, editors, etc (instead of simply regurgitating government claims), then I guess the accurate description for your case in particular would "sites that you want to just hear government claims repeated from"? (Although I do hope that I can convince you to switch away from your current use case.)
Or work on the old way. Convince Mark “Philanthropist” Zuckerberg to start an Antiadblock Foundation:
uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.
What gives?
To be clear, I have no issue paying for what I find to be quality writing, especially when it brings a novel, well thought out perspective or context. The a large majority of stuff I see turning up in search results is not this, however, especially in recent years. That category is dominated by AI-written growth hacky low info drivel.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].
Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/venturecapital/comments/142ulk7/the...
There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.
Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.
(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).
Do you think every bit of literature that is old, has no copyright, and in the public realm is trash? I tend to think the opposite actually. Nothing that’s been written in the past 100 years is worth the paper it’s on in my opinion. Maybe you’re the one who’s PAYING to read trash?
You do not see ads for a new pressure washer on Google News because that is not a normal place for ads to go.
You are free to redefine whatever you want for yourself.
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
But I'm interested in maybe 3 articles a month. If I were to pay for them it's like paying for Netflix and watching a movie a month. Or subscribing to a dead-tree newspaper and only reading the comics.
I do get that micropayments are hard, but it's not a technical issue - it never has been. It's all about credit card costs and legalese.
They do! And I did test a subscription to Bloomberg, and subscriptions to various other sites, but I have never found it compelling enough to visit for the price on a regular basis. I get my news from a large variety of sources. I have never found it valuable to only subscribe to one source, and I simply do not have the capital to justify subscribing to all of the places that sometimes publish good articles.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
That’s ok I was already doing the whole “obliquely reference things that already exist in the abstract as if they were a novel idea” bit; you doubling down on it kind of makes it better.
it seems rarer, for sure. perhaps the quantity of good journalism is the same but there's a lot more trash to sift through?
but i wouldnt say it went out of business or anything. there's some fantastic journalists out there still.
So Daily Mail, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, FOX and many others all went out of business decades ago?
That is breaking news to me.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Could ask a friend to subscribe for you and read the PDF from Telegram.
Only download this ROM if you own the original cartridge!
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
But yes, something like Apple News with an ad-free tier that works with standard websites. E.g. the participating news sites should recognize whatever service token you have and serve unpaywalled content.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
I don't really understand your first paragraph.
Like posteo does it or Brave does it for Origin:
It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).
Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)
The results are quite good except images I like the results more then DDG or Startpage.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
That's a good idea and it could give you a checklist to select the projects you want to support.
Signal, Tor, and GrapheneOS(through github) have monthly recurring option so you can just set that up once.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex.
The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more:
Google
Yahoo
Bing
DuckDuckGo
EcosiaKagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites.
I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases.
Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
If it was 50-75% as good as Kagi, I’d pay a subscription.
I’d also really like a way to use it in safari/mobile safari.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.
Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.
The app isn't great, but the price is right.
Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.
If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
When will this be available into HN, too ?
hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
in other words, its not ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that do not have workarounds.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
Super clear now, thank you.
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
I was setting a up a new computer the other day and got confused that the first three links for a search were ads, then I remembered it was google and they hide the things you’re looking for.
Site priority, lenses and the slop filter are all icing on the cake.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
Maybe they can take a hint from Spotify?
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.