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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.
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
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.
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.
Can you elaborate?
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.