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62 points by speckx an hour ago | 38 comments
o_m 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.

optionalsquid 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use

poetril 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.

rpdillon 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

giancarlostoro 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.

Shadowmist 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

LoganDark 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.

I might try it again sometime.

everfrustrated 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search.

But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.

I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.

I wish them the best but timing is a b**.

cavoirom 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.

joshstrange 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".

I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.

dschroer 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.

https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp

joshstrange a minute ago | parent [-]

Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).

The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.

johen8 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those

hyperionultra 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

imzadi 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

fassssst 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.

threetonesun 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

So a slower search engine with fewer results?

hilariously 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

Delivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.

liotier 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.

I think the market segmentation is:

- Seeking documents: search engine

- Seeking answers: LLM

circularfoyers 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.

JohnFen 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.

cavoirom 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.

imzadi 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.

Cider9986 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.

Varelion 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.

Gualdrapo 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.

The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.

athenot 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.

amazingamazing 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.

brodo 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

It’s enough to add a `?` to any Kagi query to get an AI answer. I like that I can choose for which queries I use AI and for which traditional web search.

levkk 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.

For a price of two cups of coffee.

nemomarx 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How'd you solve the Arabic issue?

(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)

Leptonmaniac 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel

theusus 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes

starvar2 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?

brodo 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.

optionalsquid 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs

Schnouki 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Using it in France: yes, it does.

HelloUsername 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript