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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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'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
I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
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
- start with this website https://www.xjavascript.com/blog/ block it everywhere
If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
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 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.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
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 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.
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.
I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough
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.
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**.
Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.
Kagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust
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.
Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.
So a slower search engine with fewer results?
Delivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.
[delayed]
Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.
LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
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.
You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
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'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.
Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.
I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
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.
How about Kagi using YANDEX?
On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.
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.
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.)
In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel
> but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel
Pardon?
I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
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.
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.
Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
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 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.
It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs
Using it in France: yes, it does.
html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript