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What are people's experiences with using Kagi?
With Google search going AI-first, I'm really interested in trying it out. But I don't know anyone IRL who's used it.
Kagites of Tildes, what do you think of the search subscription product? Do you find the privacy satisfactory? And for bonus points, how do you find the anti-AI ("slop-stop") features?
I used to use Kagi but kind of drifted away from it. Something interesting happened though which startled me: after I stopped using it, they started emailing me saying that they noticed I stopped using it, and so they were refunding my monthly subscription fee and that they hoped I’d come back some day. So, A+ for pro-consumer behaviour.
I dig Kagi. It's not often that I really love a product, and it makes a testimonial sound very inauthentic, but it's absolutely true. Kagi fixed my problems with the web. It feels like classic Google back in 2010 did. It just works. It's incredibly good, and the family plan feeds me and five friends for 20 bucks a month. No-brainer. Kagi Translate is hands down the best machine translator. Better than DeepL, by leagues. You can set the damn desired output level! You get to choose if you want an A1 - C2 style translation! It's incredible for language learning, and has a dictionary!
You can search any site directly with customisable "bangs" and "lenses" and "snaps" - I have set it up so
!r (query)searches reddit thru Reddit's engine,@r querysearches Reddit using Kagi (like site:reddit.com), and the Forums lens will limit the search index to known good forums the list of which the Kagi team maintains, but you're welcome to make your own.Don't like listicles? Filter them out! Don't like AI? Filter it out! Don't like videos, news, documents in your search results? Filter! Them! Out! It's YOUR damn search query, this is how everything should work! And of course, this goes without saying, but you're paying for it, so there's no ads either!
I'm just gonna keep going. It's got so many good ideas. Ranking domains manually is amazing, I pin Wikipedia results to the top and block Pinterest from ever showing up, it doesn't collect any user data, so no search history either (a plus for me), it's not weirdly cagy about adult content like Google and Bing are, it just gets me the damn results. It's a joy to use, and it's deeply, deeply customisable. They let you bring your own CSS, for god's sake. Even their AI search is good, because by default, there's none! What an idea, Google! Will wonders ever cease? And if you do want it, just add a "?" to the end of your query, and that will trigger it, a delightful UX pattern that I hope everyone else copies.
That's not to say it's perfect. I don't really like how much they're focusing on the "Assistant", a sort of multi-model (not multi-modal) AI experience (which is to say, I never use it, and if it disappeared I wouldn't mind), Kagi News is a blatant and not very good rip off of Particle News, The image search is passable at best but usually subpar so I still use Google Images quite a lot.
But it genuinely gives me hope for a better web.
Don’t forget a Kagi Small Web!
And I use the Orion Browser on iOS and MacOS with no problems. In iOS in particular, it is WebKit based (all iPhone browsers are), but it allows extensions from both Firefox and Chrome stores. So I have uBlock Origin on my phone.
The user controlled ranking in Kagi is amazing because it would never work on Google with ad driven results. You know Kagi is committed to their mission with a feature like that.
What do you think of Particle news? I browsed the website and it looks decent, but I don’t see a search box.
I've been in the Beta since essentially day one, and it's been really, really good. They're a little AI brained, and I doubt they can keep up the momentum as that tech gets more expensive, but for now it's very good at collecting stories, extrapolating from different sources and showing biases and deeper information (although when it fails, it does fail hard, I've seen it consider the Onion a real source once). Crosswords are fun too and the design is just very modern and competent
Does it have search if you create an account and log in?
Yes, at least on the iOS app there is a search feature, although tapping one of the categories doesn't work now that I check it... regular full text search works fine though.
I’m a happy customer. I’ve been using the search for close to two years, I think? It’s only improved over time. I like it because I forget it’s there, it Just Works™️ and doesn’t get in the way.
As far as privacy, I believe in their business model of “we don’t want your data, just your money.” They’re privately held, no VC funding, profitable, and focus on sustainable revenue. Of course we shouldn’t just let our guard down, but right now I don’t see any financial incentive for them to violate user privacy.
Using it for about 2 years now. I love the ability to block/pin websites (and levels inbetween). I don’t think I can ever go back. The only downside is that I still have to tell people “I googled this and that” in order for them to understand what I’m saying.
Whether you googled it with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Dogpile, HotBot or Google, you still googled it!
"I looked it up" works for me
My 8 year old daughter rather adorably portmanteaus it to “searched it up”, and that’s now become our family standard.
Also Kagi users here for several years (family plan), and also very happy. As somebody else said, it Just Works. I feel the same way about using google that I do about browsing without adblock… “eww, is this what normal people see?!”.
I started using it about a year ago when Google cranked up their AI stuff and made it impossible to hide. I've been reasonably happy with it. Search results seem fine, and I only had to tell it to stop showing AI overviews once.
I haven't paid super close attention to the privacy settings and I wasn't actually aware that there was a "slop stop" feature. I am also aware that there are some questionable sides to Kagi's owner/primary developer, but nothing that struck me as more problematic than Google.
I tried Kagi for I think half a year. I switched back to DuckDuckGo and found it to be a better experience.
FWIW Kagi has always been an AI company and frequently rolls out new AI features. They just let you opt out, same as DDG. Also the guy who runs it is kind of a jackass.
For anyone considering Kagi, the AI stuff is mostly invisible, e.g. you only a get a "quick answer" (AI summary) if you end your query with a question mark. Otherwise it's just like old Google.
I think they want(ed?) to be an AI company, but at this point I don't know if that even means anything. Does piping a query string through Qwen or whatever make you an AI company?
Can you elaborate?
Not OP but I think it's some comments around the Brave/Brendan Eich partnership ("Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reasons we do not have innovation any more"), and some other strange reactions to individuals critical of Kagi.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave
https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611
https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/kagi-ceo-s-recent-controversy/8119
I feel like I remember when the AI stuff was added to Kagi, which would mean it hasn’t always been an AI company.
I mostly use Kagi from the browser address bar, not the front page. So my only exposure to the AI responses are when I end the query with a
?.I do occasionally (once a month or so) use the AI assistant for a conversational query. But I honestly had to add a bookmark in my browser bookmark bar to get to it because it’s sort of weird to navigate to (particularly on my phone).
Their own website disputes this
Search engines use AI, and always have done. Every company that wants to make a search engine needs to study and develop the AI technology for it first (or else license it from someone else).
Note that LLMs are only a subset of AI technology, and they're not the AI technology that search engines are built on.
That's besides the point. I am merely responding to the previous comment by pointing out that Kagi itself explicitly states that AI has been at the core of what they did as it is in the very first sentence on that page.
Not just that page as a matter of fact, this blog post is even more definitive on the matter. No matter how you look at it, various forms of AI including LLMs very much are at the core vision of the company.
Which is not a value or moral statement from me, just something that I consider a fact. How you view that is entirely up to you but I think it is a bit silly to argue over something they themselves are very clear about.
Kagi has more features for sure but in the six months I was using it I found I just didn't get enough use out of them to justify the subscription over DDG.
Where did you get this from? Kagi predates the modern AI boom. They've always been a web search company.
Their own website history page
As well as blog posts like this one
The utilization of it was early on aimed at searching, but very clearly starting from AI itself. It isn't as if they started out with search and slowly started adding AI features.
Ah I see. I guess I wasn’t aware. It’s this part of the timeline that I remember, with no prior LLM before it:
I used it for a while and it was good, but (that's just my experience) it fumbled pretty hard at anything semi-local in Canada, for me. Yeah I could look up programming things and it would get me those results, but local stuff was very hard for it. So I switched back to DDG for now. WIll reevaluate later.
I’ve been using Kagi since 2022 and as I have had no need to look elsewhere in that time, I don’t really know how it compares to other search products these days. But it also means that I haven’t felt the need to look elsewhere. For me personally, Kagi has been one of the best things to come out of the modern internet.
I primarily use two features: the search and the translator. The search is very good, although also their search results often contain AI written websites, but sadly that’s the internet these days. The translator is excellent, I think the best I have used, and comes with lots of settings to tweak not only the meaning but also the style of the output.
Their other offerings have been a bit less successful in my use. Their assistant, which gives access to various LLM models, just doesn’t work as well as when I use models like GPT and Gemini directly. Although I do use paid/pro versions of those while I don’t pay for the ultimate version of Kagi which includes the best models, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair.
Their news service is an interesting concept, but whenever I have checked it out, it’s just felt too AI driven. I still want my news to be filtered through a journalist and an editor, because then I sort of know what biases to expect. An entirely (?) AI written news digest from a company with no journalistic background just doesn’t feel like something I would like to have as my source of information about the world. No matter how much I like Kagi.
And I do love Kagi. I like their philosophy and approach to things. I trust their privacy promises. Their support is quick and friendly, and their public communication doesn’t feel like corporate PR talk. They sometimes stumble and they are open about it. They do an impressive amount of things for a small company but every now and then you are reminded of their smallness, such as when their service was once down for several hours for planned database migration, which I thought was charming. There are some things I don’t see eye to eye with them, like using (and paying for) the Russian government linked Yandex as part of their search arsenal, but I usually accept their reasons.
I have recommended Kagi to friends and coworkers. Some have stayed, while others haven’t found it useful enough to pay for the service. Whether it’s worth the money depends on the individual. For me personally, it’s one of my favourite subscriptions.
Ironically my favorite part of my Kagi subscription is the access it gives you to various llms. It's probably not enough credits if you're coding something day in and day out, but it's enough if you need to do research every so often.
Search wise it feels like old google for the most part. I don't really use image search so I can't comment there. For some queries you do still get the phenomenon where halfway through the page are sites that I suspect are SEO AI written articles. Overall, as someone who hates ads, I'm still happy with it.
Even though it bothered me to pay around 10$ a month for search, it doesn’t anymore and I wouldn’t go back.
The custom bangs, the ability to pin sites on top or block some from the results, and the higher quality of the results make it a must for me. I hadn’t used google in years but found the alternatives lacking.
I've been using it for a couple years, and I'm extremely satisfied with it. It's by far the best subscription service I use and the very last one I would cancel — and if I had to cancel it, I honestly don't know what I'd use in its place. I'd probably just use the internet a lot less altogether. Every time I find myself having to use Google (e.g., using someone else's computer), I get supremely frustrated and often give up altogether before I find what I'm looking for.
That being said, when I first tried Kagi, I was not nearly as impressed with it as I am now. It was still good enough to justify the price, in my opinion, but I didn't realize just how good it was going to get as time went on. The more I use it, the more I slowly customize it to my exact tastes: blacklisting some websites, boosting other websites, using different search modes and knowing when to employ them, etc. If you're picky and like to tinker, you can get a ton of mileage out of it (though it's still quite decent out of the box — certainly much better than any other search engine I've tried).
I've used it for around a year now and I do think it's my favourite search engine. However I won't lie that my usage has got lower and lower as I use ChatGPT and Claude for a lot more day to day searching now. Obviously I'm aware it's quite the opposite of privacy focused and supporting the exactly wrong people but I feel it's like amazon, it's become far too convenient to ignore.
However if you're looking for a good search engine I liked it too. It's not going to blow you're mind with it's capabilities or anything IMO but it's gives the results you expect with a good UI/UX and lots of tools to tweak them.
+1 for Kagi. I’ll echo the sentiment of others here that it feels bad to pay a monthly subscription for search; search doesn’t feel quite worth $10/month. (Though, for privacy-conscious folks, it’s worth noting that a brief search yields that Google values each user’s data between $30-$60/month.)
I still pay for Kagi’s product because I’m paying (a) to support a company I believe in, (b) to fund their expansion into other products like Translate and Maps, and most importantly, (c) for the peace of mind. I can’t trust Big Tech anymore.
Between enshittification and data privacy violations, I always feel uncomfortable touching products from companies like Google. I don’t know if their offering will change under my feet since they only care about me as a product to sell, and not a buying customer. I recently was notified that a jury found Google liable in a class-action lawsuit for still tracking users who opted out of personal tracking. Like Tildes, using Kagi brings a little bit of my trust in the web back. That’s what I pay for.
I'm an early adopter since 04/2022 (I even have the little ribbon in my settings 😅), and I've entirely stopped using other search engines since. I think that's a good enough endorsement. I don't consider myself a power user, and the feature I value the most is the possibility to up/downrank and block domains.
Their AI service is good enough for me. I don't use it much (the equivalent of $0.50/month), but you can make your own specialized assistants with specific models, instructions, and lenses. I also use their translator quite often.
On the flipside, yeah their owner is kind of a dick, their ethics are debatable, but there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. When all tech CEOs are assholes at best, you gotta decide what's the less bad option for you.
I use it and I love it.
They offer AI capabilities but you essentially have to deliberately use them and they can be disabled / ignored. IE kagi.com/assistant gives you some free requests to various models/providers monthly and is temporary by default and seems more privacy friendly. If you do a search that ends in a question mark it'll try to answer with AI, but otherwise it doesn't.
They really seem to be focusing on what you are the customer would find valuable, rather than what value they can extract from you.
I've been using Kagi since '22 or '23. For me it still doesn't feel as powerful as classic Google, but it does seem to give better results than pitiful modern Google or DDG. For the past year though I've been turning more and more to Gemini instead of web search - Google hooked me with the "free Gemini Pro for a year with Pixel purchase" promo. That's a whole other can of worms, I guess the main thing is that I don't ask Gemini about anything that I don't want Google to know about me. (Sidebar, it's fucking creepy the way Gemini drops passing references to things it knows about me in unrelated chats.) Anything medical, sex related, etc goes through Kagi, never Gemini.
I think the main drawback to using Kagi is that the normal web seems to be rapidly dying. Kagi tries to derank generated slop pages, and I'm not shy about flagging them in my results, but it's endless whack-a-mole. But that said, Kagi is the only way I want to be searching the actual web.
I've said it before, I've said it again: Kagi is the single best subscription I pay for. I have family plan. I can curate what sites my young kids have access to. That on top of everything else everybody else mentioned is huge.
The results are so much better, it's so pleasing to use.
It is firmly lumped under 'utility' at this point. I will ditch my landline internet before I ditch Kagi.