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>Is this a thing now?

Here's a thread where it's being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747

I've had a redirect to old.reddit.com configured within Kagi for a while, but recently they announced that they would begin forcing logins on old.reddit too, using the flimsy excuse of security. The rollout hit me this week, can't even view the site without an account anymore.

> And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.

In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.

What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.

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

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.

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.

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

$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.

I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.

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

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.

There is also uruky. They’re functionally unlimited on $5 but less developed feature wise

This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.

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.

The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.

kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.

of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content

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

> 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.

“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’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.

You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.

I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.

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

I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:

- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...

Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.

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.

What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen people claim about its actual usage, esp. the ones who are not from NA, that it is either below or just average wrt Google (because, well, there's no other mainstream search service to compare against). Few of them literally just say something very closely on the lines of ".. been using for X years... happy to pay". I suspect it might as well be literally just a satisfaction thing :D

They are much better than DDG or Google in financing russian invasion into Ukraine

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

I was a happy user of Kagi and I switched to Qwant a year ago because they are based in Europe (Ecosia seems to have US servers?).

But I have to say:

1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though.

2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why.

I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years.

Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.

Same. I have been using Brave Search since its launch and it has been great in my experience. I also love that it has its own index. I have tried the free Kagi trial and it seems to work well, but I can't justify the cost for little to no benefit and it still depends on bigger search engines for indexing.

Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html

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

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, ...)

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

Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.

Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.

I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.

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.

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

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.

Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).

LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.

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.

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

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

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

For things to buy yes, though I’ll usually stick “Canada” into the search term.

Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.

Using it in France: yes, it does.

Finland: no

Kagi has Assistant that is exactly AI search.

I think that ship has sailed [0].

If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)

I guess you can't make such ecosystem before growing sufficiently large. And for that you need to rely on something for some time first.

It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.

If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).

Yes, Kagi is building its own index, and try to mix it more and more if it finds results from it.

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

Also, for every query, it shows a short infoline telling the index distribution.

you guys are getting ripped the fuck off

These people either don't understand what living in a "world" means or are just too stuck into "but rest of you don't pay" that it will be hard for them grasp anything beyond what's written in stone on those grey surfaces for them. What they also don't understand that a small fraction of paying customers in some of such countries might or will outspend entire country's regular spending in the "paying world". They also don't understand that to achieve that unlike physical goods these companies don't have to open agencies, distributors, warehouses, retail chains etc to "sell".

PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.

Yeah but you make up a small percentage of sales for US tech companies comparatively.

Have you met those people? A lot of them have ten dollars.

Discussed on HN back in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806

Do they review false positives? Do site owners have an avenue to challenge being falsely blocked?

They started marking a lot of my reports as not slop when it’s very obviously ai garbage. Stopslop is nice in theory if they actually handle reports correctly. It’s exhausting to spend time trying to help clean up their results only to be told no.

You remain skeptical of something proven through leaked emails?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...

I don't see why it can't be both. The web has less good content AND Google has altered their search results such that results are worse generally for us, but better for them and their bottom line.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.

i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere

My challenge for anyone who still thinks like this is pay for Claude or Chatgpt and use the thinking version of the latest model for every web search you would do. See how long it takes for it to make a mistake. I can't remember the last time and I use chatgpt quite a bit every day.

The model reads the webpage before it gives it to you so the odds of a stale link are effectively nil these days. And the odds of it being exactly what you were looking for are quite high.

The models are so much better than they were even a year ago, and it seems many people have an outdated view of their capabilities.

Your idea about web devs picking a package before thinking about the problem is legitimate. What would be cool is if you could have something help you break down both the problem and the packages to choose from (or if it's worth rolling your own). AI is fantastic at this.

As said banging your head against arcane documentation or the infuriating Internet [1] isn't using your brain. And skipping the mundane parts let's you use your higher functioning brain so much it's exhausting. Thinking on the harder problems all day is exactly where I want to be.

[1]https://xkcd.com/979/