If anyone from Kagi is reading this: Now that you have search without an account, is there any chance we can finally get a DNS-based enforced safesearch option like every other major search engine has? It's been in the feedback requests since May 2022[1].
Anyone on an enforced-safesearch network can now go to kagi.com, turn SafeSearch off, and search for porn or anything else, which is just going to get kagi blocked completely on all those networks. If you add a SafeSearch-enforced alternative IP address, then Kagi can still be used.
What legitimate reason is there for stuff like that? Workspaces should not be enforcing policies like that - trust your workers - and parental nonsense shouldn't be a goal of an ethical business.
It can be useful at home for parents with kids as well. A decent number of people use Pi-hole, NextDNS, or some other DNS blocker service.
Either way, ultimately the result of not offering the option will more likely be getting blocked entirely, than workers being freed from the shackles of SafeSearch.
It can be used to keep bad content away from kids. DNS over TLS can be blocked on the network router / firewall and DNS safe search enforced by forwarding lookups to something like Adguard
Yeah people are dumb if they can get an Amazon gift card or a job offer, see what happened to Binance.
But blocking alternative search engines and AI engines goes a bit far IMO especially if they dont use training. Especially if you're just afraid they will see a nipple on a search engine. That's ridiculous.
The reason is that copilot resells other people's models (they're just a middle man) and there's an easy way to cut them out. So they blow up the dangers of other people's AI. Whereas if your data is in M365 they have it all anyway whether you use copilot or not. So they're trying to build a moat so they don't easily get cut out.
> s there any chance we can finally get a DNS-based enforced safesearch option like every other major search engine has? It's been in the feedback requests since May 2022[1].
Not working with Kagi, but while they have RU contracts this will not be possible, can guarantee.
Haven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.
A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!
> I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google
I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
Very rare for me to use Google nowadays for something niche. For those cases, I would assume it requires multiple sources to get a definitive answer, so it goes to ChatGPT.
Ok but there’s still a high error rate, so why would you trust it with general queries? Especially if it’s something you aren’t already knowledgeable about
That is fair. I always ask for sources whenever it is something I am unfamiliar with instead of just trusting the response, that way I can go and double check and it ensures the agent at least read something on the topic
I've found the value of this approach has diminished over time - now I need to go and read the source and try to identify if it was generated by an LLM itself.
Yeah fair. I guess I have a very different experience, as I mentioned above, I basically never use it for any niche/hard queries that depend on multiple sources or research. For all my common queries, it's reliable.
For me, it took 30-60 seconds to notice dark mode preferences on my browser, but popped up an ad saying that search is garbage without the app, and that I should install their malware on my phone.
When I dismissed the popup, it produced much better results than screenshots I’ve seen from logged in browsers.
I use it much less than I did prior to LLM becoming useful. However, when I need to search, it just works. Their AI integration with their search is also great, but I couldn't justify it and ChatGPT subscription. I can't bring myself to cancel Kagi entirely, though. I still did 600 searches this month.
As I mentioned above, if you’re making a niche query, maybe. If you’re making a very generic query “average temperature in Hong Kong in January”, it’s fine. You’re overestimating average complexity of a query.
"Fine" may be "right 95% of the time" but I'll look like a jackass 5% of the time that I trust the Google AI Overview.
And I won't know which ones are the wrong ones, so I may as well trust it 0% of the time.
Most people I know use AI Overview now as their primary way of doing any sort of research or question-answering... and I urge them: If getting an LLM take is suitable for your purpose, at least ask free-tier ChatGPT, which is at least an order of magnitude less likely to vomit up false or confused information. Also, asking actual Gemini is another sane option that is far superior to AI Overview.
Does it really matter that much? Did it matter that everyone's parents pre-internet were wrong half of the time?
Most people are not asking google to build them a train signaling system but to look up some question on Wikipedia for which the answer does not matter that much
> And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.
You forgot to mention all the well-documented ad auction fraud that came out during the anti-trust trial (they defraud advertisers and sites and do some shady stuff to users —- on every impression).
I never said that? But when i’n searching for a certain answer, I don’t really care about paragraphs, posts, etc. A good chunk of time it might be data auto-generated from big databases too.
Time and place for every tech/use case. When I’m in the mood for reading long pieces, i do that deliberately.
It’s been statistically indistinguishable or better than Google for at least a decade.
Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.
Tried them all. When looking for obscure sites, I still find Google to be the best above all. DDG will often miss results, Kagi and Brave will be better but still not have the vast amount of sites indexed like Google does. Also, I'm still surprised to this day that searching "duckdns" on DuckDuckGo doesn't bring up the DuckDNS site -- maybe they have something against other ducks?
As for Google, I typically only use its "Web" search so I skip all the junk Google adds to the `All` tab. With Firefox or Chrome, you can make a custom search engine with `&udm=14` appended, like `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` if you want it to be your default search engine.
I think Kagi more aggressively blocks garbage, which is probably the tradeoff you are seeing.
The last time kagi failed me, I flipped on claude research mode. It found a microfiche archive, OCR’ed it, then started retro-stalking obscure 90’s celebrities (read old interviews, found coworkers, etc).
It took 15 minutes, but it produced an accurate 20-30 page report, then converted it to machine readable form for downstream use. I tried doing the same research myself a few years ago and failed to find anything at all.
I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".
Kagi is awesome, it's what Google used to be. I tried to switch to DDG, but I found that I had to use the !g option more often than not to get good results. With Kagi, I've never had to do that.
As far as data goes, Kagi often lags behind Google. It will return outdated or irrelevant articles quite often.
However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.
So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.
The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.
Yes Firefox does, you just need to visit it once and it's in the list. You can also add it manually if you want. I used it that way both on desktop and android.
Very happy Kagi user for a few years.
I extra appreciate the ability for me to set custom rankings for certain sites. For example, I have downranked Reddit so it only shows up if there's almost nothing else. They're also a whole bunch of AI garbage sites or listicle sites that have outright removed from all my search results.
I also love that it doesn't try to AI summarize everything I search, it only does it when I put a question mark on there so I can turn it on and easily.
And I pay for my account and use it on all my devices without having to buy four licenses.
Did not expect Pinterest to dominate the “Blocked” dropdown. What does this forgotten site even spam you with? I barely ever hear about them, surprised they even show up in search results.
I love Kagi and have been a very happy subscriber for like a couple years now.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
gitmemory is (was?) just a proxy by and for asians, it used to appear in google results too around 2020 and would sometimes have removed content. not the best result but better than none
I used Kagi for a few years and was completely satisfied.
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
Ecosia is just greenwashing, "we'll plant some trees for you if you use us so you can feel good about yourself". Just like the 5€ "carbon offset" you can pay for your flight. And search is powered by bing so you're not really sponsoring anything in the EU other than just lining some smart marketers' pockets.
I'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use, and programatic api use/agents can easily 100x that, performing dozens of searches for one user query. So either Kagi plan price increases and API calls then get included in the price (but then this impacts all users even those not using agents) or there is a pay what you use mechanism for API (which there is).
Any API use given away for free eats into Kagi's (already slim) margins, and unlike VC funded businesses, for Kagi money has to come from users or Kagi doesnt exist. It is a reality of running a user-funded business. If the user doesn't pay for something, Kagi has to.
I think the point is that it would be nice if people who are already paying for human-driven searches could also get an API key included in that plan.
Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.
It would be nice indeed, but it's a bit like wanting to share a gym subscription when you're not using it. The economics would fall apart if everyone used 100% of their subscription, unless sharing was priced in from the beginning.
What if the usage were shared between the two and a single API search used more of your quota than a UI search? There's no reason the economics can't line up.
e.g. if you expect the average user to use 50% of the search quota / month through the UI, but 100% through the API, then you make the quota shared between the two but double the effect of usage from the API.
That would work if the average user with Search + API used the same "amount" (Costs to Kagi) as the average account using Search only. If it nets out to a higher cost, Kagi is making less out of the same subscription amount.
Especially if the API induces demand.
(Don't shoot the messenger, just trying to explain why it makes sense that they're not doing this)
I think the only way to make it not harmful to their finances would be if they lowered the cap (even for human use) to where heavy users and API users alike ended up paying 'overages' constantly. Everybody who has studied consumer behavior generally finds that people hate overage charges to an irrational extent[1] so that would be a terrible move compared to just saying "API users, you've got to pay extra, sorry."
[1] Meaning, they are more satisfied with an 'unlimited' or just way-more-than-you'll-ever-need option, even when it costs them more when averaged over even a few months. I'm not saying this makes you an irrational person -- I have the same illogical feelings myself.
That's not really illogical, it's just because many companies use the fine print to fleece customers that are slightly above the limit. Think Ryanair. Or mobile roaming.
This is why unlimited or at least a service stop instead of overage is highly preferable. It's the reason I only use prepaid mobile plans too so they can never overcharge me (and it's cheaper than a contract too)
No, and it's a real problem for free and trial tiers for services like this.
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
> Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
The people on AI company plans don't need these services because they're included in the plans.
It's the people downloading open weight models and running OpenClaw (or this month's trend) who don't care how many tokens it takes because it only costs them electricity.
> That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.
It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.
Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
>These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
50 searches from the web feel way more generous to a user than using the agent (most wont even hit them), hitting the 50 cap in like 10 minutes, and being negative about the whole experience.
>... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Which is exactly why it wouldn't work well for API use with such cap.
It’s about repackaging. With free/bundled API pricing, resellers could provide agents that min/maxed Kago API tokens in the background, eating Kagi’s compute abd effectively repackaging a competitor that deterred new human subscriptions.
That’s a bad business decision in the same way it would be a bad business decision for Netflix to re-enable infinite account sharing.
A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.
I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.
I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.
I think most of us might be surprised too. Searching 'The Whole Internet' used to be so useful. Now, I know most of the names of the sites that might hold the answer to my question, since many sites are either gone or pivoted to intrusive ads and paywalls. So now, often I could just go to the right site directly. e.g. genius dot com, some specific vendor's website, justwatch dot com, etc. And on top of that, I know what questions AI will nail much better ("What's the episode of Friends where Joey is scared by a spider?"). And adding to all of that, the sheer degree of degradation the search engines' indexes have suffered. Google can tell you the right website for, say, the city government of Philadelphia. So it has some use. But if you search for most open-ended topics, you're just going to get 1000 AI-written content farm sites with nonsense domains.
Others have argued the point at depth, but its somewhat more simple than that.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
I mentioned this in another thread. There's clearly a market for an agentic search engine for home/on-premise LLMs. I can download whatever frontier model, but I still have to crawl the web if I want it to have the latest information.
Yeah the agent API access part is kind of lame. I do think i will start paying for Kagi search API at some point though. The search quality and ability to surface small blogs and sources which other search engines miss is probably well worth the cost.
It’s not free, I’m paying ten buck a month for it.
I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.
I'm paying ten bucks a month and I don't want to be paying for an API I don't use. If the options are raise everyone's prices to cover the cost of the searches that an extreme minority of people want to use or ask those people to pay a little bit more for that extra functionality I think the second option makes the most sense.
You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.
You could argue that it also includes the assistant that I’m barely using at all…
Why is this included in the sub while the main reason I use Kagi is the search, and the search itself is not included if performed via an agent?
Because they made a calculation that the assistant product has broader appeal. Including either product has the potential to acquire users, and retain other users, but they think their target market has a lot more people who might enjoy using the assistant, than they do people who want a search API as a free addon. Or that someone who starts using the assistant is more valuable (due to stronger retention) than someone who uses the search API because the latter is more of a commodity that you can replace in 5 minutes if a new startup offers a cheaper option.
I mean, presumably at some level you are using the search API - it's just a programmatic interface into the same underlying database calls. I don't know if Kagi web search uses the public API directly or if they share an underlying internal API, but I imagine there's not a lot of difference on Kagi's end.
The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.
That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, the only non-Kagi workflow I end up using frequently is !gm instead of using the Kagi maps. Hopefully that gap closes up in the future.
Anything specific we can do? Feel free to reach out here publically or to dylan@kagi.com. Latency is a weak link rn for sure (from aggrigating so many 3rd party data providers) but we have a solution we're working through for that... along with many tweaks to continue to close that gap.
As a happy 2.5-year Kagi subscriber, my biggest missing pieces on Kagi Maps are:
1. Transit. I'm in NYC, and Google Maps does a great job of showing the MTA, trains and busses. Every route, all the stations, which trains stop there and when, even where the entrances are. Kagi Maps has no train routes or layers. There's stations, most of them at least, but it's basically the Wikipedia entry for that station. No up-to-date info or routes.
2. Mobile apps. At least half of the time, my maps use is an Android intent for address or directions, which only an app can answer. And the only really good way to get your location and see what's around you.
I don't really notice latency at all personally, but fixing those things might bring my Kagi Maps usage from 0% to like 50%+.
I know, it's probably a pain in the butt to integrate with the transit systems of hundreds of cities for up-to-date info, but OSM does at least have the stations and routes. Not much point trying to beat the official MTA app in functionality, but something is better than nothing.
It's also weirdly hard to get to. Why isn't it an option in the main list of Kagi things? To get there from the Kagi homepage, I have to click on search options, then maps.
I'm in the same boat, but honestly it's mostly out of habit.
But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...
I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.
- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.
- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.
- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)
- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)
2. The "rotate the map back to north-up" button doesn't work.
3. "You're looking at Barcelona and asked for restaurants? I know a few, in Tokyo"
4. Half of navigation window is useless UI elements I cannot hide.
I've been trying mapy.cz for a while because they were fantastic for tourism purposes, but they're locking more and more features behind a paywall and I'm not sure I want to pay for that. The killer features of Google Maps are the POIs, reviews, photos, Street View, and public transport planning. I cannot really switch to another map app without having those.
If I am searching a map, it is for one of three things:
1) navigation
2) give me more info about this business that I tapped on
3) reviews; find related businesses, yelp style
I cannot figure out how to do any of those things with your UI.
Ideally, for (1), it’d let me choose to open in organic maps (reliably works at all) or apple maps (better when it works, which is rare offline, even with offline maps turned on) on my phone.
This might he fantasy land, but if it could send the location to BMW’s app, then that’d be awesome too. (The bmw app can send the location on to my car.)
One other thing: Lot’s of people are asking for an app. “Add to homescreen” works well on first glance, at least in iOS. The big thing is integration with the other apps. (Something like avenza would be cool for parks.)
90% of my maps usage happens on my phone, so an iOS app is my top need to give it a proper try.
I guess the biggest problem is and will always be the quality of data. The reason I can't use CoMaps much is because OSM just doesn't have the same accuracy and recency of data on businesses and POIs in my area as compared to Google/Apple.
Not the OP but one thing I've noticed in my own town is locations that have moved still showing up at their old (and new) location, and sometimes the places that moved into the old locations not showing up at all. I tend to be fine with it for general geography but not for searching for places in an unfamiliar location.
would love the ability to give kagi a general location to use rather than whatever it is they use now. results for things like restaurants or events can be anywhere from a few towns over to halfway across the country so I often have to search again with !g or my specific location
They have. Look in your account, it's in usage. If your usage exceeds what you have paid you will get told.
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic's flagship model with always-on adaptive
thinking ($$$$$). Best for deep reasoning, agentic
coding, and long-horizon work.
Cost $$$$$
Quality ●●●●●
Speed ●●
I have quite the opposite experience here where I almost never use the assistant. I much prefer the frontier labs alternative (I’m lucky enough to have my work pay for the subs).
I've been kinda disappointed with the $10 plan tier of the AI assistant. It looks good at first glance - shows you that it's doing a bunch of research, you can see which sources it's looking at etc. But then when it goes to report results on anything data heavy it makes a lot of mistakes with putting figures under the wrong headers, using incorrect values etc.
The last time I used it heavily was a few months ago so it might have gotten better, and I assume the more expensive tier where you can choose which models it uses might be a bit better depending on which model you choose. I much prefer just pointing my own local agent harness at a search api at this point though.
They do, it’s capped at whatever your subscription cost is. But if you don’t have Ultimate the models are cheap and it’s hard to spend it all on assistant use.
if I'm using Kagi it's because I don't want AI replies. If I wanted AI, I'd use Google/Gemini (which is arguably better at this particular type of task than the open models).
I assume this is Apple’s issue moreso than Kagi’s. If anyone is reading this from the Safari team, setting Kagi as default search is far too difficult and the app workaround is unreliable.
I continue to pay for Kagi despite barely using it (Kagi doesn’t charge you if you don’t search in a given month! Fantastically consumer friendly feature) but this issue makes it useless on my mobile devices where I use search most.
i tried Kagi against Duckduckgo, Google, Bing, Yandex. It turned out more complete, old-web results whereas all the rest merely returned duds (same search, something difficult to find).
Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.
Splendid news! I definitely think getting Kagi in front of people to try will be easier than requiring a sign up... Obviously it won't be for everyone, not everyone values the benefits of good search, but plenty would if only they saw it.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
My own workflow (for all search engines) is to add a keyword search in Firefox. This is way better than the built-in "search engine" feature because it supports pretty much any website.
I have a bookmark for `https://kagi.com/search?token=...&q=%s` (you can get the token from somewhere in the settings) and a keyword `k`. When I want to search, I type `k giant isopod` and hit enter -- that takes me to the search results. Note that that also works in private browsing windows, whether you want it to or not. :-P So you never have to worry about whether you're signed in.
Keyword searches are cool because you can use them for any site that exposes a query through any part of the URL.
I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem and so I have my passwords almost everywhere that way. But like, I have a lot of devices and a whole family. Sometimes it turns out one is not set up properly and I logged in with a QR code.
I had similar problems for a while. Especially Safari tabs that were dumped from memory on iOS. Logging in again was annoying. A quite over-engineered solution that slowly evolved in my Kagi usage uses Tailscale Golink [0].
Case 1: Kagi extension for Safari redirects from Ecosia to Kagi when on the good path. I rely on this mostly because it’s first-party so there’s a bit more trust with my queries.
Case 2: Safari Redirect Extension [1] redirects unauthenticated Kagi pages to Golink. Golink redirects back to the original page with a Kagi Token appended. Instantly authenticated.
Also, I highly recommend setting custom DNS records on Ecosia/DDG/whoever-you-redirect-from to prevent query leakage.
I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.
Same here, I like Kagi but I'm not paying that much for search. I tried it for a while but it was not worth the money over DDG for me.
I'm very cost conscious for services though. I wouldn't pay more than €3 a month or so. Being in a medium wage eu country I just don't want money flying or left right and center.
For comparison i pay €2 a month for my email, online storage and web office, EU based also.
You're saying you'd love to use Kagi at $7/month, but flatly refuse to do so at $10/month, which is what their unlimited Professional option costs? Really?
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
We can haggle over the ideal price but I do see sense in a cheaper version without the AI to appeal to more cost conscious people - I am a Kagi subscriber I never use the AI part (but I'm not so bothered that I'd demand a discount, maybe others are)
Same here. It's not a big difference but that's what you get when you're right at the cut-off point. At $10/month, I find it hard to justify switching from duckduckgo when the results are not noticeably better (I've tried). And as someone who's online a lot, I'd be out of queries in a not-so-extraordinary month on the smaller plan (I've tried). Adding 20% to the smaller plan (in queries and in price) would make more sense for me than going for "unlimited" at twice the price (just quote me a price per query please, it's not as if each additional query costs you nothing)
There are also real downsides, like needing to be logged in all the time. I can visit ddg.gg on a customer's laptop in 0.2s, but won't be logging into my Kagi to do a quick web search
I also don't need anything but search and image search: for maps I use OSM, for LLM inference there are various free and paid providers, for videos one sadly doesn't find much outside of youtube anyhow (save for specific genres like conference talks at media.ccc.de, in which case I already know where to go). All this stuff included in the ultra fancy plus version incurs costs for them so it makes sense that it's not in the base product, but I won't use it so I feel silly paying for it
If you can find at least one other person you care about a little, then they do in fact offer unlimited for $7 or even $3.33
I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.
There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.
I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.
I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.
But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.
For some reason after latest MacOS update (27.2) Kagi extension for Safari started failing frequently. I have Kagi configured to redirect Google, but now I just see Google search show up and stay there. It only redirects if I click the Kagi extension button myself. Seems like a bug, but happens so often that it really ruins the experience.
The extension is open source and macOS changes do interfere with it working. Apple is not making it easy. It is one of the reasons we created Orion - same lightweight, native Safari experience but integrated with Kagi.
Is there a search widget available for iOS? I tried installing the kagi for safari app, but apple’s intentionally scary warnings did it’s job and convinced me not to enable it. I'd rather just have a widget on my homescreen which opens results in a safari tab. I built one with shortcuts, but it’s ugly.
I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.
It's sad that we have to pay a different company to do it, but it seems they mostly just remove junk or re-priorize Google results. Google is showing us results in a way that maximizes ad/click revenue for Google. Kagi is showing results in a way that maximizes the likelihood that you will pay Kagi for that search service itself.
This makes it sound nefarious but isn’t Kagi maximizing for subscriptions synonymous with them maximizing a great product that returns the desired results for users?
I knew Kagi was essentially a meta-search provider (they use lots of indexes to try and produce a more accurate search result), but wasn't aware they use a SERP provider with Google results. Uruky does and it seems to be offered upfront for users that want a more Google-like experience. I'm wondering where you found that out?
If you take them at their word, they would love to be able to pay Google directly for such an API. But I think it would take a government requiring it for Google to do it.
Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription
I was a subscriber for 2 years but as of late, I've had less and less need for Kagi's awesome search experience. Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.
But what happens when search gets so optimized for delivering ads through AI, that your AI starts giving you crappy ad-driven results (which is already happening).
We'll need a way to hook up the agent to a subscriber search service.
> Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.
This is more work up front, but I have a bot I communicate with via Telegram, and I've hooked up Kagi API Search and Extract, and now achieve something similar. I just ask it to do a web search to try to find the answer to my question.
In terms of Diataxis [0], this is like optimizing for application over acquisition. I've been needing more acquisition lately, or honestly for my whole life, so I don't necessarily want something optimized only for application. Yet here we are, in a world that increasingly seems to be forgetting acquisition entirely.
Kagi is playing a smart game. They will catch the search traffic that Google is abandoning. Similar to what happened to RSS when Google Reader was shut down - a few other players caught a good amount users.
Pessimistically, I get the strong impression that AI is cannibalizing search traffic, not competing search engines. The delivery format overall is changing, even if power users prefer the traditional approach.
For my use of Kagi, probably more three quarters of "my" searches are made by Kagi's assistant or a custom assistant I've made via their interface, as a result of the assistant formulating a response to one of my queries to it. Kagi search is so much better than Google, so the assistant ingests much better context (i.e. the results) before it answers. In that sense, Kagi is still picking up the search traffic Google and others are leaving on the table, but the relationship is healthier. I'm paying to use a search because of the quality and there are no ads to show, so the assistant doing the searches is just as beneficial for both parties (I get a more powerful tool and they get a happy subscriber) as human initiated searches.
Reading down the page, I didn't realize they had apps for AI and news and stuff. Pretty cool! It feels so much better to be using a service that is NOT supported by ads
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
> I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. I digress. It’s not as if showing ads has somehow funded a better search experience, if anything ads go up and quality goes down is what I see. I pay for YT Premium. I would also pay for ad-free, more controllable, Google Search.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids on Kagi and they don’t want to go back to Google now.
I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.
I've found the assistant, particularly the android app, to be buggy as all hell. Perhaps it's fine in the browser but as a heavy phone user I couldn't make it work anymore.
I'd be happy for Kagi to have ads at the top of their search results but results to pages with no ads. A Google killer. but I'm never going to pay for search. Ever, there are to many alternatives.
I love Kagi. I especially appreciate how it pushes back against AI slop and makes the web feel more human again. I haven't looked back at Google since switching. The search results are consistently better.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
How is it at searching the less savory side of the web? Like if I want to find an open directory full of paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories am I going to get any results? If I want to find a site that streams bootleg 80s eastern european cartoons will I find it faster than if I search on yandex? If there's some news article about how a serial killer was leaking information to some obscure forum, will I be able to find his posts instead of dozens of copies of the same news story?
Sadly, Kagi uses a Cloudflare turnstile that's set to paranodial mode, so my Firefox on Linux is rejected. I suspect it's because the turnstile wants to use some WebGPU APIs to fingerprint my browser, and those APIs don't exist.
I tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
Counterpoint: I use Kagi Assistant on the $10/mo plan for literally everything I would have used Google for before and have never burned my monthly credits.
hey quick question, what part of Hermes were you using for search? Do they have a similar web portal to Kagi's Assistant or is it more like the AI overview below the search bar?
I am running it locally at home with tailscale for access outside of my home network. I added a tavily key for search and pageloads. There are various FE projects that can connect to Hermes, they also have a frontend, but it's not a "search" interface.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
I'm not at all a supporter of Putin and his wars. A question for you though: does DDG show ads for any evil companies? Where does DDG get it's search results?
I think you’re objections are fair and real so I won’t dismiss them
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
Wait til you realize the search engines you use now are funding directly AND indirectly even more pointless wars than that one...
Can we get a summary of each? I'd like to see various metrics on the scale and brutality of the war compared to state ownership of the company, direct monetary contributions, and indirect monetary contributions to the war effort.
Yes, right, I'd also like to see that information, i.e., how much of the money Yandex gets from a Kagi search from a random guy is going to the Russian MoD. Specially, a summary made by the people that thinks that switching to a search engine headquartered in Pennsylvania is a better option to "not contributing to pointless wars".
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
They are separate entities. In fact you buying gas rises the global price of oil which in turn gives money to Russia to fund the war. Better leave those keys at home and walk if you actual care about not funding Russia. I doubt you care enough.
It being useful is entirely orthogonal to the original commenter’s (and my) issue with it: money going to them is money being used to bomb my family’s home.
Exactly! I too prefer only FSB approved information.
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.
Huh? I assume you're being sarcastic but I don't go on Yandex looking for news. I said it's a useful tool for circumventing western censorship. For example copyrighted info, info from outlawed political groups (western designated terrorists), or rich people info censored under various defamation or "right to be forgotten" court orders.
Still no option to pay on a per search basis? Still not remotely interested then. I don't search nearly enough to justify paying for a search engine subscription.
Surely I am not the only one that has basically stopped using web search almost completely? Wikipedia, YouTube search I still use sure, but almost anything I'd have searched Google for 5 years ago I just...plop into ChatGPT now. No outdated StackOverflow links, no Pinterest spam, no generic SEO slop. It seems Kagi has some AI stuff...but...why?
Note sure what plan your on, but ChatGPT is going to use Codex credits starting sometime in December. The $20 all you can eat dinner plan has come to an end...
Since work gives me a generous API token allowance only use the $20 sub for side projects but still going to hurt using Codex credits for regular ChatGPT questions. Has been my goto instead of Google also but.....
If you'd like to skip all those garbage results but not deal with an AI then kagi is great. Also, they don't track you and sell your data like AI companies surely do (or will do soon)
I know Kagi is supposed to be a curated experience but I really, really wish they'd have a setting I could toggle to see more than 200 search results per query. 200 is just 2 pages and for more obscure search topics (like, "pyroelectric partcile acceleration") I found that Kagi could never "curate" and actually deliver the links to the research paper PDFs that other search engines could find. Even google with it's 400 maximum search results and Bing with 900 are more useful because of this. But it not like search engines used to be where you could dive deep into many hundreds or thousands of results and find serendipitous things related to the intended search. I really miss and would pay for the ability to read and select search results myself instead of having them curated for me by some algorithm. Or at least give me a couple thousand "curated" results.
We're planning on adding support for more pages. We can't guarantee a specific number of results, but at least you should be able to get more than you do right now.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, snark, and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Isn't the whole point of this announcement that you don't need an account? The 50 searches they mention is just client side stored. if you don't store cookies for kagi.com you have unlimited searches.
Yes, sir(s)! Using a search engine without ads is such a life improvement that it’d be a steal at twice the price.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
I'm informing of psychological facts, in the hope that you realize that you are not a platonic unity always in absolute control of your perceptions, beliefs, and tendencies.
There is always the possibility where we have people that ads have not affected them in at least two cases, thereby obviating the call to "realize that you are not a platonic unity always in absolute control of your perceptions, beliefs, and tendencies".
regardless of whether the ads are "working" (what does that even mean?), they're additional cognitive load; things my eyes see and add to the overall din that the web has fallen to. I use adblock, but even then, the search results on supposed privacy respecting search engines might be influenced by sponsors for the simple reason that the incentives are not aligned.
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
Use a meta-search engine like SearXNG [1] and you're searching not only ad-free but also - if you choose your sources right - mostly bias-free as far as that is possible. You'll get the results Google filters out but others show, those which Kagi doesn't want you to see but others show, those which those others don't want you to see but Google or Kagi or fill_in_the_blanks show.
I believe very strongly that Russia started a completely unjustified war of agression against Ukraine, and that our moral, political, monetary, and military aid (through the sale of weapons, not direct involvement) should be firmly on the side of the Ukrainians.
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
No where in my comment says, or even implies that. Your interpretation says more about you than me.
-edit- And even if it did (again: doesn't), there is nothing contradictory in being willing to having my mind changed, even if I think one particular person is arguing in bad faith. Other people exist. I am always open to being wrong. Maybe someone else, who is arguing in good faith, could convince me. Taking potshots that add nothing to the conversation however, will not convince me.
Without any more qualifiers, that could be any large country on Earth. Except, maybe, for China. I don't remember them going around invading other places.
Okay do you want to add qualifiers or just accept my point because Russia's invasion happens to be the most bloody and pointless war currently and in the past 40 years?
You should be able to remember China invading other places historically. Recently, of course, China doesn't compare to Russia or the US in terms of direct conflict. On the other hand, they're the country that is the most vocal about an imminent occupation.
I don't know much about Russia and it's economics. Does giving money to Yandex really fund the war? If so, how much? I'm assuming they are a private company that pays some taxes to the Russian government and some of that tax money goes towards the war, but like I said, I really don't know
Kagi pays Yandex for search results. It's only one of many inputs but some of the money you pay to Kagi does go to Russia. Kagi's stance on this is that product quality is more important than "geopolitics". It's an extremely disappointing take to use "geopolitics" as a euphemism for "supporting genocide and wars of aggression", which is what doing business with any Russian entity is.
You slave to digital, influential colonialism of US, every social media, platform, algo feed you consume is owned and shaped by US. Poland is digital colony. Good luck.
Anyone on an enforced-safesearch network can now go to kagi.com, turn SafeSearch off, and search for porn or anything else, which is just going to get kagi blocked completely on all those networks. If you add a SafeSearch-enforced alternative IP address, then Kagi can still be used.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/3285-safe-search-dns-locking-for-...
Either way, ultimately the result of not offering the option will more likely be getting blocked entirely, than workers being freed from the shackles of SafeSearch.
Also blocking the search is pretty weird, what prevents me of typing the URL directly?
It's not just porn, it could be a way to prevent successful phishing through employees filling out a malicious form or whatever.
"Trust your workers" is bad infosec.
But blocking alternative search engines and AI engines goes a bit far IMO especially if they dont use training. Especially if you're just afraid they will see a nipple on a search engine. That's ridiculous.
Can you expand upon this? Why is there an AI block?
The reason is that copilot resells other people's models (they're just a middle man) and there's an easy way to cut them out. So they blow up the dangers of other people's AI. Whereas if your data is in M365 they have it all anyway whether you use copilot or not. So they're trying to build a moat so they don't easily get cut out.
Not working with Kagi, but while they have RU contracts this will not be possible, can guarantee.
Come to think of it, one of my boxes is not logged into kagi, and is mostly ai nonsense.
I guess I’ll keep paying them. :-)
I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
Is it though? How often are you spot checking sources?
When I dismissed the popup, it produced much better results than screenshots I’ve seen from logged in browsers.
I guess that’s an improvement?
And I won't know which ones are the wrong ones, so I may as well trust it 0% of the time.
Most people I know use AI Overview now as their primary way of doing any sort of research or question-answering... and I urge them: If getting an LLM take is suitable for your purpose, at least ask free-tier ChatGPT, which is at least an order of magnitude less likely to vomit up false or confused information. Also, asking actual Gemini is another sane option that is far superior to AI Overview.
Most people are not asking google to build them a train signaling system but to look up some question on Wikipedia for which the answer does not matter that much
Think of the incentives and the path of absolute least resistance/thinking/energy use and you will arrive at the product people want.
What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.
1. leverage the AI Overview model (with the IQ of a brain-damaged monkey),
2. run an ad auction and populate the first 6-10 items from that,
3. then do a perfunctory exercise of searching its spam-riddled index to round out a few results at the very bottom of the page.
Yeah, that guy asking ChatGPT is a monster.
Time and place for every tech/use case. When I’m in the mood for reading long pieces, i do that deliberately.
Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.
As for Google, I typically only use its "Web" search so I skip all the junk Google adds to the `All` tab. With Firefox or Chrome, you can make a custom search engine with `&udm=14` appended, like `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` if you want it to be your default search engine.
The last time kagi failed me, I flipped on claude research mode. It found a microfiche archive, OCR’ed it, then started retro-stalking obscure 90’s celebrities (read old interviews, found coworkers, etc).
It took 15 minutes, but it produced an accurate 20-30 page report, then converted it to machine readable form for downstream use. I tried doing the same research myself a few years ago and failed to find anything at all.
As the kids say: Google’s cooked.
1. DDG
2. Google
3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand
4. This is information the world was not meant to know
(Also Marginalia for deep search)
However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.
So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.
The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.
(Does Chrome on mobile allow it? I use Edge on iOS which also only has a hardcoded list, so while I don't know for sure, but I assume not)
[1] no doubt i will be waiting until i am dead
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
I suspect they are aware of their own leaderboards and use those in their ranking algorithm.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.
e.g. if you expect the average user to use 50% of the search quota / month through the UI, but 100% through the API, then you make the quota shared between the two but double the effect of usage from the API.
Especially if the API induces demand.
(Don't shoot the messenger, just trying to explain why it makes sense that they're not doing this)
[1] Meaning, they are more satisfied with an 'unlimited' or just way-more-than-you'll-ever-need option, even when it costs them more when averaged over even a few months. I'm not saying this makes you an irrational person -- I have the same illogical feelings myself.
This is why unlimited or at least a service stop instead of overage is highly preferable. It's the reason I only use prepaid mobile plans too so they can never overcharge me (and it's cheaper than a contract too)
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
Defeats the purpose of the free tier.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
It's the people downloading open weight models and running OpenClaw (or this month's trend) who don't care how many tokens it takes because it only costs them electricity.
Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.
It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.
Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.
But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users. Not to mention, as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Obvioulsy the TYPE and RETURNS of some cost.
>These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
50 searches from the web feel way more generous to a user than using the agent (most wont even hit them), hitting the 50 cap in like 10 minutes, and being negative about the whole experience.
>... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Which is exactly why it wouldn't work well for API use with such cap.
I refuse to believe there is a negligible margin decrease for agents using the regular search budget. Searching is cheap.
That’s a bad business decision in the same way it would be a bad business decision for Netflix to re-enable infinite account sharing.
A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.
I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.
I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.
I was just really surprised.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.
You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.
The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.
That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.
Hopefully we can win you over soon enough <3
- dylan (maps team)
1. Transit. I'm in NYC, and Google Maps does a great job of showing the MTA, trains and busses. Every route, all the stations, which trains stop there and when, even where the entrances are. Kagi Maps has no train routes or layers. There's stations, most of them at least, but it's basically the Wikipedia entry for that station. No up-to-date info or routes.
2. Mobile apps. At least half of the time, my maps use is an Android intent for address or directions, which only an app can answer. And the only really good way to get your location and see what's around you.
I don't really notice latency at all personally, but fixing those things might bring my Kagi Maps usage from 0% to like 50%+.
I know, it's probably a pain in the butt to integrate with the transit systems of hundreds of cities for up-to-date info, but OSM does at least have the stations and routes. Not much point trying to beat the official MTA app in functionality, but something is better than nothing.
It's also weirdly hard to get to. Why isn't it an option in the main list of Kagi things? To get there from the Kagi homepage, I have to click on search options, then maps.
But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...
I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.
- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.
- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.
- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)
- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)
1. Navigation makes pointless detours.
2. The "rotate the map back to north-up" button doesn't work.
3. "You're looking at Barcelona and asked for restaurants? I know a few, in Tokyo"
4. Half of navigation window is useless UI elements I cannot hide.
I've been trying mapy.cz for a while because they were fantastic for tourism purposes, but they're locking more and more features behind a paywall and I'm not sure I want to pay for that. The killer features of Google Maps are the POIs, reviews, photos, Street View, and public transport planning. I cannot really switch to another map app without having those.
1) navigation
2) give me more info about this business that I tapped on
3) reviews; find related businesses, yelp style
I cannot figure out how to do any of those things with your UI.
Ideally, for (1), it’d let me choose to open in organic maps (reliably works at all) or apple maps (better when it works, which is rare offline, even with offline maps turned on) on my phone.
This might he fantasy land, but if it could send the location to BMW’s app, then that’d be awesome too. (The bmw app can send the location on to my car.)
One other thing: Lot’s of people are asking for an app. “Add to homescreen” works well on first glance, at least in iOS. The big thing is integration with the other apps. (Something like avenza would be cool for parks.)
I guess the biggest problem is and will always be the quality of data. The reason I can't use CoMaps much is because OSM just doesn't have the same accuracy and recency of data on businesses and POIs in my area as compared to Google/Apple.
> For example, searching Kagi for !w Monty Python will search Wikipedia directly for "Monty Python" and take you to that Wikipedia search result. [1]
If you're on a plan with limited searches per month, it does not count against your quota.
DuckDuckGo has bangs as well.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
The last time I used it heavily was a few months ago so it might have gotten better, and I assume the more expensive tier where you can choose which models it uses might be a bit better depending on which model you choose. I much prefer just pointing my own local agent harness at a search api at this point though.
For those that are looking for it, you can track your current month's billing/ai-usage here: https://kagi.com/settings/billing
I assume this is Apple’s issue moreso than Kagi’s. If anyone is reading this from the Safari team, setting Kagi as default search is far too difficult and the app workaround is unreliable.
I continue to pay for Kagi despite barely using it (Kagi doesn’t charge you if you don’t search in a given month! Fantastically consumer friendly feature) but this issue makes it useless on my mobile devices where I use search most.
Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
I have a bookmark for `https://kagi.com/search?token=...&q=%s` (you can get the token from somewhere in the settings) and a keyword `k`. When I want to search, I type `k giant isopod` and hit enter -- that takes me to the search results. Note that that also works in private browsing windows, whether you want it to or not. :-P So you never have to worry about whether you're signed in.
Keyword searches are cool because you can use them for any site that exposes a query through any part of the URL.
May I recommend a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC[0], with a YubiKey[1] and some folder synchronization across machines?
[0]: https://keepassxc.org/
[1]: https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-yubikey-howto
Case 1: Kagi extension for Safari redirects from Ecosia to Kagi when on the good path. I rely on this mostly because it’s first-party so there’s a bit more trust with my queries.
Case 2: Safari Redirect Extension [1] redirects unauthenticated Kagi pages to Golink. Golink redirects back to the original page with a Kagi Token appended. Instantly authenticated.
Also, I highly recommend setting custom DNS records on Ecosia/DDG/whoever-you-redirect-from to prevent query leakage.
[0] https://github.com/tailscale/golink
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/i...
https://kagi.com/pricing
I'm very cost conscious for services though. I wouldn't pay more than €3 a month or so. Being in a medium wage eu country I just don't want money flying or left right and center.
For comparison i pay €2 a month for my email, online storage and web office, EU based also.
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
There are also real downsides, like needing to be logged in all the time. I can visit ddg.gg on a customer's laptop in 0.2s, but won't be logging into my Kagi to do a quick web search
I also don't need anything but search and image search: for maps I use OSM, for LLM inference there are various free and paid providers, for videos one sadly doesn't find much outside of youtube anyhow (save for specific genres like conference talks at media.ccc.de, in which case I already know where to go). All this stuff included in the ultra fancy plus version incurs costs for them so it makes sense that it's not in the base product, but I won't use it so I feel silly paying for it
I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.
There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.
I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.
I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.
But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.
https://orionbrowser.com
I wish they would. The extension works well for me most of the time, but every once in a while I end up on Ecosia and I’m confused for 2 seconds.
Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription
We'll need a way to hook up the agent to a subscriber search service.
This is more work up front, but I have a bot I communicate with via Telegram, and I've hooked up Kagi API Search and Extract, and now achieve something similar. I just ask it to do a web search to try to find the answer to my question.
It's pay-as-you-go. Not particularly expensive.
[0]: https://diataxis.fr/compass/
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Am I searching for the range of input voltages an Arduino can safely handle? Kagi.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
[0] https://kagi.com/smallweb/
How are they going to enforce the 50 search limit? IP address?
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
Afaik DDG sources from bing and their own indexing.
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
Remember their “early adopter” drama? Wasn’t their only drama.
Wait til you realize the search engines you use now are funding directly AND indirectly even more pointless wars than that one...
How is funding america any better?
And besides the small win this week things are still looking really bleak internationally.
I still use US services too much tbh but slowly things are improving.
EDIT: Also technically Russia is in Europe ;)
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.
difficult to buy with no trial
Since work gives me a generous API token allowance only use the $20 sub for side projects but still going to hurt using Codex credits for regular ChatGPT questions. Has been my goto instead of Google also but.....
And the UI is also cluttered with useless stuff I don't need.
I feel that we lost good search engines here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
No need to cast shade on others who aren't like you.
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
OP in the linked thread wanted to boycott Russia and Russian businesses. The “context” is that Kagi gives money to Yandex.
For me it's not a big factor though. Yes the war is terrible but that's a point I can't use anything American either.
The answer from them : we are unimpressed by world politics.
Man… they are on my short list now.
"The moment 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I stop working on a search engine."
I'm having a very hard time equating what's happening in Ukraine to "politics", as if we're talking about the next election or something...
"Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use."
So it should be easy to cut then. It's literally an argument for removing it, not for keeping it. God.
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
As always, I'm open to having my mind changed.
-edit- And even if it did (again: doesn't), there is nothing contradictory in being willing to having my mind changed, even if I think one particular person is arguing in bad faith. Other people exist. I am always open to being wrong. Maybe someone else, who is arguing in good faith, could convince me. Taking potshots that add nothing to the conversation however, will not convince me.
You should be able to remember China invading other places historically. Recently, of course, China doesn't compare to Russia or the US in terms of direct conflict. On the other hand, they're the country that is the most vocal about an imminent occupation.
(Not OP)