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sspeckx about 1 hour ago 88 commentsRead Article on blog.melashri.net

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Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 2298 words in the discussion.

Discussion (88 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

o_m•about 1 hour ago

I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.

sanderjd•19 minutes ago

But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.

Arkhaine_kupo•3 minutes ago

> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures.

But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.

The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.

A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.

It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)

calessian•3 minutes ago

Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.

optionalsquid•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use

dmrivers•35 minutes ago

I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere

OneDeuxTriSeiGo•11 minutes ago

Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it.

Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.

optionalsquid•24 minutes ago

I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies.

However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

vivzkestrel•32 minutes ago

- start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere

eloisius•33 minutes ago

If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it

vivzkestrel•33 minutes ago

imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing

Larrikin•5 minutes ago

What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?

menno-sh•31 minutes ago

I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.

poetril•about 1 hour ago

I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.

rpdillon•about 1 hour ago

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

CharlesW•34 minutes ago

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

thinkingtoilet•27 minutes ago

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

Shadowmist•about 1 hour ago

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

dexterdog•23 minutes ago

I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.

recursive•5 minutes ago

I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.

LoganDark•about 1 hour ago

I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.

I might try it again sometime.

coldpie•12 minutes ago

I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.

moebrowne•10 minutes ago

> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same

For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.

taude•11 minutes ago

Also, Google isn't scraping your data....

Forgeties79•11 minutes ago

Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?

Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.

You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.

coldpie•7 minutes ago

I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.

SadTrombone•32 minutes ago

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

JohnFen•17 minutes ago

I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.

tombert•18 minutes ago

$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.

haburka•27 minutes ago

I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough

Novosell•10 minutes ago

I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.

Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O

But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.

neysofu•13 minutes ago

Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:

Jul 2026 939

Jun 2026 1,317

May 2026 1,924

Apr 2026 2,537

Mar 2026 2,183

Feb 2026 2,038

Jan 2026 2,392

freehorse•12 minutes ago

It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.

mihaaly•17 minutes ago

That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.

Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.

temp0826•4 minutes ago

If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.

shibaprasadb•10 minutes ago

I was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!

Cider9986•about 1 hour ago

Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.

samuell•4 minutes ago

I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.

everfrustrated•about 1 hour ago

I feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search.

But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.

I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.

I wish them the best but timing is a b**.

rsolva•6 minutes ago

I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!

cavoirom•38 minutes ago

Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.

moebrowne•22 minutes ago

Kagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust

mihaaly•20 minutes ago

I think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)

hyperionultra•about 1 hour ago

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

imzadi•about 1 hour ago

LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

fassssst•about 1 hour ago

Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.

threetonesun•about 1 hour ago

So a slower search engine with fewer results?

kstrauser•14 minutes ago

Yes, for me.

Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”

Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.

Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”

Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.

And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.

cavoirom•7 minutes ago

FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.

mathw•35 minutes ago

Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.

liotier•about 1 hour ago

They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.

I think the market segmentation is:

- Seeking documents: search engine

- Seeking answers: LLM

circularfoyers•about 1 hour ago

Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.

root_axis•27 minutes ago

LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.

JohnFen•about 1 hour ago

With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.

joshstrange•about 1 hour ago

I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".

I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.

dschroer•44 minutes ago

I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.

https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp

joshstrange•37 minutes ago

Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).

The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.

mathw•36 minutes ago

You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.

cavoirom•43 minutes ago

On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.

eloisius•28 minutes ago

I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.

1970-01-01•25 minutes ago

I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.

athenot•about 1 hour ago

Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.

imzadi•about 1 hour ago

I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.

browningstreet•15 minutes ago

Kagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results

johen8•about 1 hour ago

What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those

Varelion•about 1 hour ago

I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.

Gualdrapo•about 1 hour ago

Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.

The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.

selfawareMammal•33 minutes ago

How about Kagi using YANDEX?

levkk•about 1 hour ago

Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.

For a price of two cups of coffee.

moebrowne•13 minutes ago

AI slop is actively down-ranked based on community feedback: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

nemomarx•about 1 hour ago

How'd you solve the Arabic issue?

(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)

Leptonmaniac•about 1 hour ago

In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel

throw-qqqqq•27 minutes ago

> but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel

Pardon?

amazingamazing•about 1 hour ago

I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.

brodo•about 1 hour ago

It’s enough to add a `?` to any Kagi query to get an AI answer. I like that I can choose for which queries I use AI and for which traditional web search.

HelloUsername•about 1 hour ago

html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript

theusus•about 1 hour ago

Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes

drcongo•16 minutes ago

Kagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.

starvar2•about 1 hour ago

Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?

brodo•about 1 hour ago

It works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.

menno-sh•28 minutes ago

I find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's

optionalsquid•about 1 hour ago

It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs

Schnouki•about 1 hour ago

Using it in France: yes, it does.