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...
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 also drifted away from it, largely because DuckDuckGo is generally good enough that I don't feel the need to pay for search. Kagi is absolutely better (especially the denylist and the granular...
I also drifted away from it, largely because DuckDuckGo is generally good enough that I don't feel the need to pay for search. Kagi is absolutely better (especially the denylist and the granular way you can (de)prioritize certain domains), but not so much so that I can justify the monthly cost.
It doesn't help that I don't care for chatbots, so it felt like a solid chunk of my subscription was paying for a service I don't want (and have ethical objections to). A bit like paying for all those sports channels in a cable subscription, honestly.
I also ended up not sticking with Kagi. It was less the cost than I really didn't feel there was much meaningful value or search result improvement versus DDG. Kagi does give you good options to...
I also ended up not sticking with Kagi. It was less the cost than I really didn't feel there was much meaningful value or search result improvement versus DDG. Kagi does give you good options to disable all their AI stuff, but the fact is that are very into AI and I don't like it at all. I don't particularly want to be paying to help further that stuff.
Also, sometimes having any cost is a bar to overcome, because that means this is one more company that I need to give my payment information to and trust. I am not specifically focusing this point at Kagi or saying they aren't trustworthy enough to pay online. I am just saying for me it requires that I want something enough to overcome that small, but meaningful (to me) hurdle and their free trial period didn't do it for me.
I never really got into Kagi as DDG has generally covered all my search engine needs. But when too much cruft manages to find its way in, or I am looking for something so specific and even DDG is...
I never really got into Kagi as DDG has generally covered all my search engine needs. But when too much cruft manages to find its way in, or I am looking for something so specific and even DDG is finding alternatives I don't want, I'll ask Kagi. I'd say 9 times out of 10 it finds it, when it exists. But I can't give up my bangs and other nuances I love about DDG.
Edit: I don't remember bangs being included, so that's a huge plus! Kagi always seems to lag a bit on loading up a search. I'd attribute it to my internet or system, but while DDG occasionally...
Edit: I don't remember bangs being included, so that's a huge plus!
Kagi always seems to lag a bit on loading up a search. I'd attribute it to my internet or system, but while DDG occasionally lags, Kagi is a regular thing.
DDG offers AI options, which I rarely use, but when I do it works. I appreciate its "Search Assist" which provides a brief synopsis of a possible solution, for when I'm not directly looking for a specific website. Often this "assist" also provides the website for what I'm looking for, which may not even be one of the top three sites that are shown. As I'm very skeptical of most AI, I appreciate that it works but is pretty non-intrusive and can be removed with a click. For Kagi, I haven't used the AI option too often (twice I believe), and it's nice and does the same thing as DDG but is more of the "long form" than the quick synopsis provided to determine if I want to pursue that route. (Possibly read: it's different and I don't like change ;)
And the kicker: DDG is free, but also (and actually more importantly) I can use it on other devices and get the same results without signing in. Yes, I have a DDG account I've logged into on my PC, but not my phone, personal laptop, or work laptop/tablet. Kagi wants to know who I am, and I make grandiose efforts to not bring any personal info to my work devices, courtesy of being infected with the necessary Windows/Microsoft/IT precautions. So I will not log in on work devices, and then why bother using two different options depending on which machine I'm on? I'd rather just be streamlined and have them all the same.
But as I mentioned, Kagi is my solid go-to for finding things without all the bloat. I just tend to not require that often enough to justify a full swap.
They do have a URL API key option which keeps your password and the like secret. That's how I can sign-in on work devices without giving up any usernames nor passwords.
So I will not log in on work devices
They do have a URL API key option which keeps your password and the like secret. That's how I can sign-in on work devices without giving up any usernames nor passwords.
I think they might be talking about the "Session link" in your user settings, just visit the link in your work browser or copy and paste it into Firefox/Chrome as a new search engine:...
I think they might be talking about the "Session link" in your user settings, just visit the link in your work browser or copy and paste it into Firefox/Chrome as a new search engine: https://kagi.com/settings/user_details
As I'm only signed in on my PC (so, not my phone which I would have while at work), it isn't really an option. I mean, I could do it, but as I've reiterated, why bother with all the hassle when...
As I'm only signed in on my PC (so, not my phone which I would have while at work), it isn't really an option. I mean, I could do it, but as I've reiterated, why bother with all the hassle when DDG works fine?
Yeah that's fair. Whatever works for you! I was referring to the session link. It's a unique URL you can easily use on any browser to access Kagi without a username or password.
Yeah that's fair. Whatever works for you!
I was referring to the session link. It's a unique URL you can easily use on any browser to access Kagi without a username or password.
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...
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 query searches 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.
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...
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.
I would advise against making a switch for this. I love Kagi and use Orion as my primary iOS browser, but the extension support is really terrible. It just doesn’t work well at all. It’s extremely...
I would advise against making a switch for this. I love Kagi and use Orion as my primary iOS browser, but the extension support is really terrible. It just doesn’t work well at all. It’s extremely glitchy for any extension I’ve ever installed.
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.
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.
While this is a cool feature, if you use firefox you can just make a bookmark like https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go and give it a keyword of mw and then...
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 query searches 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.
While this is a cool feature, if you use firefox you can just make a bookmark like https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go and give it a keyword of mw and then instead of doing your search with !mw you just type mw <search term> and then you're searching through that site's engine. And, better, since this is part of firefox instead of part of a search engine, youre likely to get an autocomplete of the actual page url youre looking for as a dropdown prompt
This being enforced on the search engine level means that as long as you have it set to be your default Omnibox engine, it will work exactly the same way. !w (query) will be passed to Kagi, which...
This being enforced on the search engine level means that as long as you have it set to be your default Omnibox engine, it will work exactly the same way. !w (query) will be passed to Kagi, which passes it directly to wikipedia. No need to set this up on a per browser basis.
I just think it's better UX to set it up in the browser, I don't want to type a ! before my search keyword every time (and you don't have to pay for any search engine to have this functionality)
I just think it's better UX to set it up in the browser, I don't want to type a ! before my search keyword every time (and you don't have to pay for any search engine to have this functionality)
If you use a lot of devices or browsers, it's nice for Kagi to have everything synced across platforms. They're also easier to share bangs between users.
If you use a lot of devices or browsers, it's nice for Kagi to have everything synced across platforms. They're also easier to share bangs between users.
I use like 12 browsers over 4 different devices regularly. I used to "just" set up stuff like that too, but bangs are just ... there. All I need to do is set Kagi (or DDG, which supports about the...
I use like 12 browsers over 4 different devices regularly.
I used to "just" set up stuff like that too, but bangs are just ... there. All I need to do is set Kagi (or DDG, which supports about the same bangs) as default and they'll Just Work.
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...
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
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.
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 not learning a language right now, but my husband is learning German. So, he's reading a book, and when he encounters a sentence he can't quite parse yet, he drops it into Kagi on the German...
I'm not learning a language right now, but my husband is learning German. So, he's reading a book, and when he encounters a sentence he can't quite parse yet, he drops it into Kagi on the German to German setting, with the output set to a more manageable level like A2 or B1, to get the gist. Then, individual words go into the dictionary translation mode.
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....
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 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...
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...
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?
And, just as an FYI to anyone reading this, as it was noted in one of the previous discussion threads on Kagi here: It’s not just default-off, you can actually fully disable even little things...
And, just as an FYI to anyone reading this, as it was noted in one of the previous discussion threads on Kagi here: It’s not just default-off, you can actually fully disable even little things with the “AI” features, such as the question mark at the end bringing up Quick Answer, outright.
(Side note, but I love their settings being both clearly labeled and sensibly categorized: kagi.com/settings/ai is both completely reasonable to expect as a settings category for any reasonable “tech” company, and nice to remember)
But does my request go through an LLM anyway, even if I don't use that 'quick answer' thing? Whether it's visible in the end result or not, I don't want one to be involved at all.
But does my request go through an LLM anyway, even if I don't use that 'quick answer' thing? Whether it's visible in the end result or not, I don't want one to be involved at all.
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...
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.
He's actively hostile on their feedback forums and doesn't respond well to criticism. A couple years back they decided to spend a bunch of investment money on shirts and the community made it...
He's actively hostile on their feedback forums and doesn't respond well to criticism. A couple years back they decided to spend a bunch of investment money on shirts and the community made it clear they didn't want that. They continued anyway.
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.
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 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...
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).
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI.
During those early days, we were passionate about AI's potential, particularly in question-answering and summarization. This was when the Transformer model, which paved the way for modern LLMs (large language models), was just invented in 2017. However, the initial models were small and pale compared to the immense LLMs today.
In those early days, it took a lot of creativity and innovation to extract the full potential of AI. Today, the power of LLMs such as GPT is so great that "the hottest new programming language is English," as Andrej Karpathy put it. This has democratized the ability to "create magic," allowing even small companies to compete with industry giants, as we demonstrated later in this text.
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.
Interesting, thanks for clarifying! Still, maybe I'm splitting hairs but "has always been an AI company" isn't really quite right - sounds like they started as an AI company, then pivoted to...
Interesting, thanks for clarifying! Still, maybe I'm splitting hairs but "has always been an AI company" isn't really quite right - sounds like they started as an AI company, then pivoted to search which is where they made a name for themselves, then around back to AI as the modern LLM era came about. But, I see now what you meant.
It sounds more like they saw potential in LLMs for doing search better than the traditional keyword-based approach. And they were right, Perplexity is way better for doing any kind of deep...
It sounds more like they saw potential in LLMs for doing search better than the traditional keyword-based approach. And they were right, Perplexity is way better for doing any kind of deep research on a topic than Google is. I’m guessing they had to scope their ambitions down because doing it at the level OpenAI and the like can would require more money than they have.
+1 for someone who tried a trial and didn't find myself using it that much. I'm honestly not searching for too difficult to find things these days, which is a bit sad. I wonder what would nudge me...
+1 for someone who tried a trial and didn't find myself using it that much. I'm honestly not searching for too difficult to find things these days, which is a bit sad. I wonder what would nudge me back towards needing to find specific answers...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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'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...
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.
Regarding ethics: you win some, you lose some, and nobody's perfect. Their transition into a Public Benefit Corporation two years ago was one of the more outstanding "winning" moments, however....
Regarding ethics: you win some, you lose some, and nobody's perfect.
Their transition into a Public Benefit Corporation two years ago was one of the more outstanding "winning" moments, however. Hearing that the almighty dollar (and by extension, company profits) isn't the be-all-end-all for a Palo Alto tech startup was so refreshing and reassuring, and them clearly demonstrating that such a style of company culture is very much possible, maybe even beneficial to growing likeminded customers, was a boon to the entire industry.
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...
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 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...
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.
For local business results, I still use the !g bang to get Google results. I'll also use !gm to go straight to Google maps when needed. That is Kagi's biggest weakness in my opinion.
For local business results, I still use the !g bang to get Google results. I'll also use !gm to go straight to Google maps when needed. That is Kagi's biggest weakness in my opinion.
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...
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...
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 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...
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.
Damn, that's an awesome feature. I'm sold. My current child internet access policy is "no" just because of the lack of controls. How fine-grained is it?
I can curate what sites my young kids have access to.
Damn, that's an awesome feature. I'm sold. My current child internet access policy is "no" just because of the lack of controls. How fine-grained is it?
The overview. You can create lenses where it's a literal whitelist of sites, and lock them to it. You can block up to 1,000 sites. You can lock on safe search, turn off AI (or if you leave on, it...
You can create lenses where it's a literal whitelist of sites, and lock them to it. You can block up to 1,000 sites. You can lock on safe search, turn off AI (or if you leave on, it prefixes with 'check with an adult').
A cool feature is that your kid can login just by typing their username and hitting enter (my kid got lucky and can just use their first name), and it'll prompt the parent via email.
+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,...
+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 use it and I love it. No ads Built in URL replacements (IE www.reddit.com -> old.reddit.com) Ability to prioritize and deprioritize certain sites in the results (IE I rank fandom.com "lower" in...
I use it and I love it.
No ads
Built in URL replacements (IE www.reddit.com -> old.reddit.com)
Ability to prioritize and deprioritize certain sites in the results (IE I rank fandom.com "lower" in the results.)
Ability to block certain sites in the results
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 the customer would find valuable, rather than what value they can extract from you.
Another vote for Kagi. I have their Ultimate grade with their AI assistant, which saved me recently. Not only do they provide a range of different providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemma, Deepseek,...
Another vote for Kagi. I have their Ultimate grade with their AI assistant, which saved me recently. Not only do they provide a range of different providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemma, Deepseek, Kimi, etc.), but all queries through their service are carried with the enterprise license that they have with providers. They also rate different providers according to the level of privacy that can be expected with that specific provider and tier of service. This allows token costs to be contained by sending less critical workloads to lower cost, lower tier services, but having higher criticality workloads sent to frontier models in the same chat thread.
Anyway, I was drafting a patent for work using Kagi Assistant and the fact that the queries were covered under the enterprise license meant that the data couldn't be used for training the model, so our IP was contractually protected. I keep pushing for my work place to get us all Kagi because I think it would help us a lot.
But also, getting the results that I searched for, rather than sponsored results or AI garbage, is wonderful. I get so angry when I have to search on Google on someone else's computer. I'd rather pay directly to get for what I've asked for, rather than getting for free something I never asked for and did not want.
This just reminded me that most people have never even experienced the sheer power of bangs, since somehow they're only a feature in DuckDuckGo (who originated them), Kagi, and maybe some other...
I get so angry when I have to search on Google on someone else's computer.
This just reminded me that most people have never even experienced the sheer power of bangs, since somehow they're only a feature in DuckDuckGo (who originated them), Kagi, and maybe some other search engines (Brave too, I believe?), but not available in Google search.
I used DDG for a while and I tried using bangs but did not see the point of them. It seemed much easier to just add the sites you used frequently to my browser's search engine list, after which it...
I used DDG for a while and I tried using bangs but did not see the point of them. It seemed much easier to just add the sites you used frequently to my browser's search engine list, after which it would autocomplete to the search I want instantly, as opposed to trying to remember the bang, waiting for the request to go through DDG and then maybe getting the right site.
Totally fair point, in the end much of it is going to come down to personal preference for sure. Two notes: Waiting on the request to go through DDG despite not actually needing their...
Totally fair point, in the end much of it is going to come down to personal preference for sure.
Two notes:
Waiting on the request to go through DDG despite not actually needing their servers/search engine for resolving the bang is a “known” issue, see https://unduck.link for an example that’s trying to alleviate that by caching the redirects logic.
As a practical example for bangs where it’s less effort than trying to configure all browsers, potentially on a device not my own; I land on more than just the English Wikipedia depending on device/browser locale setting, and !w.en <query> (or !w.de, etc.) guarantees I land where I intended to go.
I know I am posting late in this thread's lifetime. My honest answer is: I don't really think about kagi or web search anymore. Just like in the old days when Google was good enough, I didn't...
I know I am posting late in this thread's lifetime. My honest answer is: I don't really think about kagi or web search anymore. Just like in the old days when Google was good enough, I didn't think about web search. My browser just took me to Google whenever I wanted to search something. Now it's the same with kagi. I pay for a yearly plan, and when my subscription comes up again, I will pay for it happily. Whenever my browser fails to redirect to kagi (why on earth can't you set an arbitrary search provider in every browser?), and I have to dig through the cesspool of some other search engine results, I immediately go back to kagi. However long it takes to fix the extension and log back in is less effort than finding the needles in the haystacks of any other search engines.
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...
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.
I started paying for it after I first tried it a little over a year ago, and it's continued to offer me what I want to the extent that I continue to pay for it -- it's what I used to get from...
I started paying for it after I first tried it a little over a year ago, and it's continued to offer me what I want to the extent that I continue to pay for it -- it's what I used to get from Google without constantly seeing obvious ads and with the ability to control whether I get AI results rather than being forced into it the way Google tends to. It's also got a shockingly good Translate app now, but I wouldn't be paying just for that as I no longer need translations as often. But the current results are more than satisfactory enough for me to keep paying (as opposed to previous unsuccessful attempts to switch to Duck Duck Go). But similarly to some others, I would dump a lot of other subscriptions before I dumped Kagi.
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...
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 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...
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.
Thanks for this thread! I've had some doubt about starting to pay for a search engine, especially one incorporated in the US, but this discussion convinced me to try it out at least for a month....
Thanks for this thread! I've had some doubt about starting to pay for a search engine, especially one incorporated in the US, but this discussion convinced me to try it out at least for a month.
It seems to be a good search engine and the translation seems great, but I have no intent to pay for a search engine, especially not 10 bucks a month. I understand I'm the product when using free...
It seems to be a good search engine and the translation seems great, but I have no intent to pay for a search engine, especially not 10 bucks a month. I understand I'm the product when using free services, but searching is a basic thing that shoumd not be locked behind payment, so I do not see it as an improvement. I think unfavourably of it like I think of any paid software in general.
So long as my data isn't being collected, I'm okay with some sponsored links, so long as they're not obtrusive. Kagi also doesn't seem to solve the main problem I have with search these days: AI-generated SEO farming articles. Startpage does slighty better than the rest in that regard. Kagi is about the same. So, I prefer to stick with Startpage, since it treats me well.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html Note: I'm not posting this link for you specifically, you may very well understand the issues of...
but searching is a basic thing that shoumd not be locked behind payment.
I think unfavourably of it like I think of any paid software in general.
Note: I'm not posting this link for you specifically, you may very well understand the issues of free services, but I think it's a good resource for everyone to understand how a paid service can be better in more ways than you'd think. It's more than "I pay to not see ads".
Ideally search would be public utility. It is too central to everyday life and biased results have too large of an influence on everything. I really don't know if nonprofit could function well in...
Ideally search would be public utility. It is too central to everyday life and biased results have too large of an influence on everything.
I really don't know if nonprofit could function well in this role but at least theoretically neutral search would be extremely useful to anyone individually and society in general. In the meantime paid search seems the best available option on a personal level.
No such thing as neutral search even by a non profit. A non profit is still providing a service that costs money to run, so they are in the same scramble for funds. But in the case of a non...
No such thing as neutral search even by a non profit. A non profit is still providing a service that costs money to run, so they are in the same scramble for funds. But in the case of a non profit, they have to chase grants or do fundraising which is effectively the same as just charging for the service.
Probably the closest thing is just going to a municipal library and asking a librarian for resources in the catalog.
Being a non-profit doesn’t mean you’re donor funded. Non-profit just means 100% of your money goes back into the organization, either as capital spending or operations. You can be a non-profit...
Being a non-profit doesn’t mean you’re donor funded. Non-profit just means 100% of your money goes back into the organization, either as capital spending or operations. You can be a non-profit that just operates like a business with the only difference being that all the profits go back as salaries and benefits for the staff instead of equity value for owners/shareholders.
I would personally still consider that an improvement over the current default. As for an organization not being able to be neutral Wikipedia is doing an acceptably a-okay work.
I would personally still consider that an improvement over the current default.
As for an organization not being able to be neutral Wikipedia is doing an acceptably a-okay work.
Of course. Though I don't like that piece much. It points out the fact that abuse of SEO is detrimental and sometimes harmful to users, but Kagi doesn't actually seem to do much about that; it...
Of course. Though I don't like that piece much. It points out the fact that abuse of SEO is detrimental and sometimes harmful to users, but Kagi doesn't actually seem to do much about that; it still seems vulnerable to SEO abuse. I still see SEO farming sites on Kagi. AI-generated how-tos with 20 sections paraphrasing each other, sites meant to imitate others, frickin' Fandom. It's there. Less than Google, but not less than other search engines.
I recognize why paid services like these exist, and support their efforts to change things, but my ideal is not just an Internet that's not a privacy hellhole, but also one that is freely and fully accessible to all. That arguably matters more to me. I don't want a future where these services are the norm and we end up with a constantly paywalled Internet.
I'm not arrogant enough to claim I have a better solution (maybe federated search engines?), but I don't think I want to support this one.
You can easily remove those sites from your search on Kagi. I don’t know: do other search engines allow blacklisting by domain? And there exist premade lists of annoying sites, both provided by...
You can easily remove those sites from your search on Kagi. I don’t know: do other search engines allow blacklisting by domain? And there exist premade lists of annoying sites, both provided by Kagi and other users. I don’t see fandom links at all. No Pinterest. No Amazon store. None of the myriad stack overflow clones. All that was included in some list I popped into my settings.
I mean, yes those results will get turned up because they're doing that, but if you just downrank the site every time you see one, before long you'll be mostly free of them. Use the features...
I mean, yes those results will get turned up because they're doing that, but if you just downrank the site every time you see one, before long you'll be mostly free of them. Use the features you're given to make the search results you want.
In my experience, kagi does take care of SEO slop results quite well. "List" style articles can be combined together or hidden outright, which makes the results way cleaner. Kagi also allows you...
In my experience, kagi does take care of SEO slop results quite well. "List" style articles can be combined together or hidden outright, which makes the results way cleaner. Kagi also allows you to adjust the ranking of individual domains, including blocking them outright. It doesn't take that many blocks to keep your results very clean.
Kagi and Youtube Premium Family are in the list of "subscriptions I'll stop last if money is tight", both are so essential to my personal quality of life that I'd rather unsub from many many other...
Kagi and Youtube Premium Family are in the list of "subscriptions I'll stop last if money is tight", both are so essential to my personal quality of life that I'd rather unsub from many many other things before those.
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.
That is downright saintly by today's standards. Proactively giving back money is about as real as it gets.
I also drifted away from it, largely because DuckDuckGo is generally good enough that I don't feel the need to pay for search. Kagi is absolutely better (especially the denylist and the granular way you can (de)prioritize certain domains), but not so much so that I can justify the monthly cost.
It doesn't help that I don't care for chatbots, so it felt like a solid chunk of my subscription was paying for a service I don't want (and have ethical objections to). A bit like paying for all those sports channels in a cable subscription, honestly.
$5/month really isn't too bad if you're a light user though. The $25/month tier isn't necessary for the vast majority of people.
I also ended up not sticking with Kagi. It was less the cost than I really didn't feel there was much meaningful value or search result improvement versus DDG. Kagi does give you good options to disable all their AI stuff, but the fact is that are very into AI and I don't like it at all. I don't particularly want to be paying to help further that stuff.
Also, sometimes having any cost is a bar to overcome, because that means this is one more company that I need to give my payment information to and trust. I am not specifically focusing this point at Kagi or saying they aren't trustworthy enough to pay online. I am just saying for me it requires that I want something enough to overcome that small, but meaningful (to me) hurdle and their free trial period didn't do it for me.
If you never used custom rankings, I can understand that. For me, that's the killer feature.
I never really got into Kagi as DDG has generally covered all my search engine needs. But when too much cruft manages to find its way in, or I am looking for something so specific and even DDG is finding alternatives I don't want, I'll ask Kagi. I'd say 9 times out of 10 it finds it, when it exists. But I can't give up my bangs and other nuances I love about DDG.
Kagi has excellent support for bangs. I'm curious what features you miss from DDG?
Edit: I don't remember bangs being included, so that's a huge plus!
Kagi always seems to lag a bit on loading up a search. I'd attribute it to my internet or system, but while DDG occasionally lags, Kagi is a regular thing.
DDG offers AI options, which I rarely use, but when I do it works. I appreciate its "Search Assist" which provides a brief synopsis of a possible solution, for when I'm not directly looking for a specific website. Often this "assist" also provides the website for what I'm looking for, which may not even be one of the top three sites that are shown. As I'm very skeptical of most AI, I appreciate that it works but is pretty non-intrusive and can be removed with a click. For Kagi, I haven't used the AI option too often (twice I believe), and it's nice and does the same thing as DDG but is more of the "long form" than the quick synopsis provided to determine if I want to pursue that route. (Possibly read: it's different and I don't like change ;)
And the kicker: DDG is free, but also (and actually more importantly) I can use it on other devices and get the same results without signing in. Yes, I have a DDG account I've logged into on my PC, but not my phone, personal laptop, or work laptop/tablet. Kagi wants to know who I am, and I make grandiose efforts to not bring any personal info to my work devices, courtesy of being infected with the necessary Windows/Microsoft/IT precautions. So I will not log in on work devices, and then why bother using two different options depending on which machine I'm on? I'd rather just be streamlined and have them all the same.
But as I mentioned, Kagi is my solid go-to for finding things without all the bloat. I just tend to not require that often enough to justify a full swap.
They do have a URL API key option which keeps your password and the like secret. That's how I can sign-in on work devices without giving up any usernames nor passwords.
Yeah, that's beyond my paygrade lol
I think they might be talking about the "Session link" in your user settings, just visit the link in your work browser or copy and paste it into Firefox/Chrome as a new search engine: https://kagi.com/settings/user_details
The Kagi API is an entirely different thing.
As I'm only signed in on my PC (so, not my phone which I would have while at work), it isn't really an option. I mean, I could do it, but as I've reiterated, why bother with all the hassle when DDG works fine?
Yeah that's fair. Whatever works for you!
I was referring to the session link. It's a unique URL you can easily use on any browser to access Kagi without a username or password.
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.
I would advise against making a switch for this. I love Kagi and use Orion as my primary iOS browser, but the extension support is really terrible. It just doesn’t work well at all. It’s extremely glitchy for any extension I’ve ever installed.
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.
While this is a cool feature, if you use firefox you can just make a bookmark like
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Goand give it a keyword ofmwand then instead of doing your search with !mw you just typemw <search term>and then you're searching through that site's engine. And, better, since this is part of firefox instead of part of a search engine, youre likely to get an autocomplete of the actual page url youre looking for as a dropdown promptThis being enforced on the search engine level means that as long as you have it set to be your default Omnibox engine, it will work exactly the same way.
!w (query)will be passed to Kagi, which passes it directly to wikipedia. No need to set this up on a per browser basis.I just think it's better UX to set it up in the browser, I don't want to type a ! before my search keyword every time (and you don't have to pay for any search engine to have this functionality)
If you use a lot of devices or browsers, it's nice for Kagi to have everything synced across platforms. They're also easier to share bangs between users.
I use like 12 browsers over 4 different devices regularly.
I used to "just" set up stuff like that too, but bangs are just ... there. All I need to do is set Kagi (or DDG, which supports about the same bangs) as default and they'll Just Work.
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.
Could you explain your workflow for language learning? I’m a big fan of Kagi but this never occurred to me and seems potentially really cool.
I'm not learning a language right now, but my husband is learning German. So, he's reading a book, and when he encounters a sentence he can't quite parse yet, he drops it into Kagi on the German to German setting, with the output set to a more manageable level like A2 or B1, to get the gist. Then, individual words go into the dictionary translation mode.
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 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?
And, just as an FYI to anyone reading this, as it was noted in one of the previous discussion threads on Kagi here: It’s not just default-off, you can actually fully disable even little things with the “AI” features, such as the question mark at the end bringing up Quick Answer, outright.
(Side note, but I love their settings being both clearly labeled and sensibly categorized:
kagi.com/settings/aiis both completely reasonable to expect as a settings category for any reasonable “tech” company, and nice to remember)But does my request go through an LLM anyway, even if I don't use that 'quick answer' thing? Whether it's visible in the end result or not, I don't want one to be involved at all.
It shouldn't, since that'd be an additional running cost for Kagi, with no benefit for anyone.
It's not. They're extremely good about privacy.
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
He's actively hostile on their feedback forums and doesn't respond well to criticism. A couple years back they decided to spend a bunch of investment money on shirts and the community made it clear they didn't want that. They continued anyway.
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 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.
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:
Interesting, thanks for clarifying! Still, maybe I'm splitting hairs but "has always been an AI company" isn't really quite right - sounds like they started as an AI company, then pivoted to search which is where they made a name for themselves, then around back to AI as the modern LLM era came about. But, I see now what you meant.
It sounds more like they saw potential in LLMs for doing search better than the traditional keyword-based approach. And they were right, Perplexity is way better for doing any kind of deep research on a topic than Google is. I’m guessing they had to scope their ambitions down because doing it at the level OpenAI and the like can would require more money than they have.
+1 for someone who tried a trial and didn't find myself using it that much. I'm honestly not searching for too difficult to find things these days, which is a bit sad. I wonder what would nudge me back towards needing to find specific answers...
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.
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.
"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?!”.
Whether you googled it with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Dogpile, HotBot or Google, you still googled it!
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 $0.50/month), but you can make your own specialized assistants with specific models, instructions, and lenses. I also use their translator quite often.
On the flipside, yeah their owner is kind of a dick, their ethics are debatable, but there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. When all tech CEOs are assholes at best, you gotta decide what's the less bad option for you.
Regarding ethics: you win some, you lose some, and nobody's perfect.
Their transition into a Public Benefit Corporation two years ago was one of the more outstanding "winning" moments, however. Hearing that the almighty dollar (and by extension, company profits) isn't the be-all-end-all for a Palo Alto tech startup was so refreshing and reassuring, and them clearly demonstrating that such a style of company culture is very much possible, maybe even beneficial to growing likeminded customers, was a boon to the entire industry.
I started using it about a year ago when Google cranked up their AI stuff and made it impossible to hide. I've been reasonably happy with it. Search results seem fine, and I only had to tell it to stop showing AI overviews once.
I haven't paid super close attention to the privacy settings and I wasn't actually aware that there was a "slop stop" feature. I am also aware that there are some questionable sides to Kagi's owner/primary developer, but nothing that struck me as more problematic than Google.
I used it for a while and it was good, but (that's just my experience) it fumbled pretty hard at anything semi-local in Canada, for me. Yeah I could look up programming things and it would get me those results, but local stuff was very hard for it. So I switched back to DDG for now. WIll reevaluate later.
For local business results, I still use the
!gbang to get Google results. I'll also use!gmto go straight to Google maps when needed. That is Kagi's biggest weakness in my opinion.Even though it bothered me to pay around 10$ 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 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.
Damn, that's an awesome feature. I'm sold. My current child internet access policy is "no" just because of the lack of controls. How fine-grained is it?
The overview.
You can create lenses where it's a literal whitelist of sites, and lock them to it. You can block up to 1,000 sites. You can lock on safe search, turn off AI (or if you leave on, it prefixes with 'check with an adult').
A cool feature is that your kid can login just by typing their username and hitting enter (my kid got lucky and can just use their first name), and it'll prompt the parent via email.
+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 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 the customer would find valuable, rather than what value they can extract from you.
Another vote for Kagi. I have their Ultimate grade with their AI assistant, which saved me recently. Not only do they provide a range of different providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemma, Deepseek, Kimi, etc.), but all queries through their service are carried with the enterprise license that they have with providers. They also rate different providers according to the level of privacy that can be expected with that specific provider and tier of service. This allows token costs to be contained by sending less critical workloads to lower cost, lower tier services, but having higher criticality workloads sent to frontier models in the same chat thread.
Anyway, I was drafting a patent for work using Kagi Assistant and the fact that the queries were covered under the enterprise license meant that the data couldn't be used for training the model, so our IP was contractually protected. I keep pushing for my work place to get us all Kagi because I think it would help us a lot.
But also, getting the results that I searched for, rather than sponsored results or AI garbage, is wonderful. I get so angry when I have to search on Google on someone else's computer. I'd rather pay directly to get for what I've asked for, rather than getting for free something I never asked for and did not want.
This just reminded me that most people have never even experienced the sheer power of bangs, since somehow they're only a feature in DuckDuckGo (who originated them), Kagi, and maybe some other search engines (Brave too, I believe?), but not available in Google search.
I used DDG for a while and I tried using bangs but did not see the point of them. It seemed much easier to just add the sites you used frequently to my browser's search engine list, after which it would autocomplete to the search I want instantly, as opposed to trying to remember the bang, waiting for the request to go through DDG and then maybe getting the right site.
Totally fair point, in the end much of it is going to come down to personal preference for sure.
Two notes:
!w.en <query>(or!w.de, etc.) guarantees I land where I intended to go.I know I am posting late in this thread's lifetime. My honest answer is: I don't really think about kagi or web search anymore. Just like in the old days when Google was good enough, I didn't think about web search. My browser just took me to Google whenever I wanted to search something. Now it's the same with kagi. I pay for a yearly plan, and when my subscription comes up again, I will pay for it happily. Whenever my browser fails to redirect to kagi (why on earth can't you set an arbitrary search provider in every browser?), and I have to dig through the cesspool of some other search engine results, I immediately go back to kagi. However long it takes to fix the extension and log back in is less effort than finding the needles in the haystacks of any other search engines.
FWIW I wouldn't consider a thread old on Tildes unless it's been more than a week.
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.
I started paying for it after I first tried it a little over a year ago, and it's continued to offer me what I want to the extent that I continue to pay for it -- it's what I used to get from Google without constantly seeing obvious ads and with the ability to control whether I get AI results rather than being forced into it the way Google tends to. It's also got a shockingly good Translate app now, but I wouldn't be paying just for that as I no longer need translations as often. But the current results are more than satisfactory enough for me to keep paying (as opposed to previous unsuccessful attempts to switch to Duck Duck Go). But similarly to some others, I would dump a lot of other subscriptions before I dumped Kagi.
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 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.
Thanks for this thread! I've had some doubt about starting to pay for a search engine, especially one incorporated in the US, but this discussion convinced me to try it out at least for a month.
The founder seems like a cool person at least by his own site: https://vladimir.prelovac.com/
It seems to be a good search engine and the translation seems great, but I have no intent to pay for a search engine, especially not 10 bucks a month. I understand I'm the product when using free services, but searching is a basic thing that shoumd not be locked behind payment, so I do not see it as an improvement. I think unfavourably of it like I think of any paid software in general.
So long as my data isn't being collected, I'm okay with some sponsored links, so long as they're not obtrusive. Kagi also doesn't seem to solve the main problem I have with search these days: AI-generated SEO farming articles. Startpage does slighty better than the rest in that regard. Kagi is about the same. So, I prefer to stick with Startpage, since it treats me well.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
Note: I'm not posting this link for you specifically, you may very well understand the issues of free services, but I think it's a good resource for everyone to understand how a paid service can be better in more ways than you'd think. It's more than "I pay to not see ads".
Ideally search would be public utility. It is too central to everyday life and biased results have too large of an influence on everything.
I really don't know if nonprofit could function well in this role but at least theoretically neutral search would be extremely useful to anyone individually and society in general. In the meantime paid search seems the best available option on a personal level.
No such thing as neutral search even by a non profit. A non profit is still providing a service that costs money to run, so they are in the same scramble for funds. But in the case of a non profit, they have to chase grants or do fundraising which is effectively the same as just charging for the service.
Probably the closest thing is just going to a municipal library and asking a librarian for resources in the catalog.
Being a non-profit doesn’t mean you’re donor funded. Non-profit just means 100% of your money goes back into the organization, either as capital spending or operations. You can be a non-profit that just operates like a business with the only difference being that all the profits go back as salaries and benefits for the staff instead of equity value for owners/shareholders.
I would personally still consider that an improvement over the current default.
As for an organization not being able to be neutral Wikipedia is doing an acceptably a-okay work.
Of course. Though I don't like that piece much. It points out the fact that abuse of SEO is detrimental and sometimes harmful to users, but Kagi doesn't actually seem to do much about that; it still seems vulnerable to SEO abuse. I still see SEO farming sites on Kagi. AI-generated how-tos with 20 sections paraphrasing each other, sites meant to imitate others, frickin' Fandom. It's there. Less than Google, but not less than other search engines.
I recognize why paid services like these exist, and support their efforts to change things, but my ideal is not just an Internet that's not a privacy hellhole, but also one that is freely and fully accessible to all. That arguably matters more to me. I don't want a future where these services are the norm and we end up with a constantly paywalled Internet.
I'm not arrogant enough to claim I have a better solution (maybe federated search engines?), but I don't think I want to support this one.
You can easily remove those sites from your search on Kagi. I don’t know: do other search engines allow blacklisting by domain? And there exist premade lists of annoying sites, both provided by Kagi and other users. I don’t see fandom links at all. No Pinterest. No Amazon store. None of the myriad stack overflow clones. All that was included in some list I popped into my settings.
Maybe other engines allow that too, I don’t know.
That, I did not know, that's cool! Props for that.
I mean, yes those results will get turned up because they're doing that, but if you just downrank the site every time you see one, before long you'll be mostly free of them. Use the features you're given to make the search results you want.
In my experience, kagi does take care of SEO slop results quite well. "List" style articles can be combined together or hidden outright, which makes the results way cleaner. Kagi also allows you to adjust the ranking of individual domains, including blocking them outright. It doesn't take that many blocks to keep your results very clean.
Kagi and Youtube Premium Family are in the list of "subscriptions I'll stop last if money is tight", both are so essential to my personal quality of life that I'd rather unsub from many many other things before those.