I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality.
I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout, it's been nice knowing that I can just stop having reddit show up in search results.
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.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this was always the plan for Kagi. Google has been rather distracted and complacent in their, former, core business. If Kagi is bootstrapping their indexing to emerge on the other end of this as the next "good" search, then good on them.
I'll continue to support them because it's a great experience.
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.
Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.
So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
$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.
Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.
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.
Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't.
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
I had the same experience. I don't know why they haven't invested more in this feature. Heck, if they classified every site in their index as "AI/not AI" using machine learning, and had a large allowlist of "known-good" sites, that would take care of most of the problem (I am aware of the drawbacks of text-only AI classification, but they could use other indicators, like the site's publication date, domain name, domain registry date, etc.). I think for right now, the "state-of-the-art" for non-AI search is going to entail maintaining large whitelists/blacklists of websites that are crowd-sources by users (e.g. what you can find in some GitHub repositories). I was hoping that's what SlopStop was going to be, but it is not nearly as effective as it needs to be.
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.
I was extremely pleased to login to my Kagi account and see that SlopStop was enabled by default. Thanks for the heads-up on this, and thanks to Kagi of course for enabling it.
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
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 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)
This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.
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.
I'm not saying it isn't both, what I'm saying is that the thesis of the newer Google competitors is that the problem is mostly that Google has chosen to suck, so they can do a lot better just by choosing to not suck. But I think that thesis is wrong, that it is mostly that the web sucks now, and that these search engines are ultimately likely to be unsatisfying because they can't actually solve that underlying problem.
But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.
I think the counterargument would be that the web sucks in large part because of the way it’s been shaped by Google. Most of the hyperwordy blogspam is driven by sites trying to optimize their SEO for Google. So websites like Kagi could potentially push the underlying web in a positive direction
I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO.
And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.
And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.
IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.
(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
Even well-supported, well-documented projects. I'm in the middle of a Spring Boot upgrade, which includes a collection of Hibernate updates. These are well-supported projects with -- theoretically -- fantastic documentation. But when something goes wrong, trawling them for what's happened is tedious and doesn't teach me much; you end up chasing down uncommon threads. The death of StackOverflow doesn't help much either. Previously, web searches might have found a commiserator, but that's all gone now.
A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.
I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.
While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.
I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.
(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)
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.
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.
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
“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.
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.
If ARPU for Google Search is estimated to be around $50-$80 per internet user and potentially way more in certain geographies, there could be significant financial savings to be had by switching to Kagi depending on where you sit.
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.
This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).
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, ...)
There's little to add to that. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi. I can understand if people simply don't want to or can't shell out $5 a month, but if someone is able to, those are probably the best $5 anyone who does a lot of internet research and uses AI can possibly invest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.
Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Kagi has been a great and worthwhile subscription to me. It feels like browsing the Google of the 10s in some ways. Way more private blogs and whatnot in the results.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.
Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)
Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
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.
I extensively report obvious slop websites. Most of them get rejected/marked as “not AI”. That initiative is cute on paper, but they apparently do not trust the community.
I’m a paying Kagi subscriber but hardly use it because honestly much of the time I’m searching for an answer to a specific question not a website to visit and therefor want the AI response without clicking on another website. Unless it’s mission critical but that’s more rare.
I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout, it's been nice knowing that I can just stop having reddit show up in search results.
I'll continue to support them because it's a great experience.
I might try it again sometime.
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp
This is the broadband page.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...
1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.
2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.
3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.
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
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
Instead I just cancelled.
Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O
But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
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.
Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
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
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)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...
But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.
And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.
And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.
IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.
(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)
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
Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894.
Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
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.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
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.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.
I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.
While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.
I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.
(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
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.
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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**.
The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
I think the market segmentation is:
- Seeking documents: search engine
- Seeking answers: LLM
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.
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.
Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.
(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.
Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)
Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
Pardon?
For a price of two cups of coffee.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.