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- Hacker News
- 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**.
- I think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)by mihaaly
- I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!by rsolva
- Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.by cavoirom
- Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.by athenot
- Why not use another browser?by gaws
- I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
by maelito - I was a happy user of Kagi and I switched to Qwant a year ago because they are based in Europe (Ecosia seems to have US servers?).
But I have to say:
1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though.
2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why.
I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years.
Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.
by palata - Correct URL is https://staan.ai/by real_joschi
- 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.by Cider9986
- Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.htmlby prh8
- Same. I have been using Brave Search since its launch and it has been great in my experience. I also love that it has its own index. I have tried the free Kagi trial and it seems to work well, but I can't justify the cost for little to no benefit and it still depends on bigger search engines for indexing.
- I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.by samuell
- Kagi is great. The search gives you the actual thing you are looking for, but also their translate tool is very nifty, and their LLM assistants are actually better for my purposes than Anthropic or whatever. I have tried the same models via openrouter, but can’t get as good responses, so there’s something very clever they do with their harness. I use their Orion -browser and its summarise -function, which is very good. I am happy to pay for all this, it feels like they actually want to serve you good products, not just steal shit from you and scam you.
I have recently started using searXNG, which is ok, and somehow better than mpst for image searches, but not quite as good as Kagi.
- I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.by coldpie
- What people also might (eh, this is my guess, based on what I have seen around, so I may be completely wrong :|) like about Kagi is being associated with a "paid service". Might feel so very boutique. Makes people feel they are in control (even though they just use someone else's indexes and data behind the curtains.. anyway that doesn't matter apparently). It also gives a feeling of exclusivity. What I have seen people claim about its actual usage, esp. the ones who are not from NA, that it is either below or just average wrt Google (because, well, there's no other mainstream search service to compare against). Few of them literally just say something very closely on the lines of ".. been using for X years... happy to pay". I suspect it might as well be literally just a satisfaction thing :D
- Hey, here's one, search for "smbc comics".
Kagi top 5 results: smbc-comics.com, wikipedia, smbc author's patreon, gocomics, instagram
Google top 5 results: wikipedia, twitter, instagram, reddit, gocomic
DDG top 5 results: smbc-comics.com, a specific smbc-comics.com comic, gocomics, wikipedia, some listicle about smbc comics from a site I've never heard of
The Kagi results here seem pretty clearly better than the other two. smbc-comics.com doesn't seem to ever show up on Google. (I clicked through to page 10 of results.)
by Marsymars - Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?
Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.
You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
by Forgeties79 - I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:
- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...
Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.
by cavoirom - Also, Google isn't scraping your data....by taude
- “I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply.”
It’s going to be hard for people to give an answer to that because if you get an answer you like on Kagi, you’re not going to also search on Google.
You basically need someone with a Kagi sub to commit to using Google, and trying Kagi whenever Google fails.
I’ve got a specific instance of something a few days ago where I searched on my wife’s phone for <specific thing> and neither the canonical website or the wiki page were anywhere in the top results for Google, whereas they were IIRC top-2 results on Kagi. Apologies though, I can’t for the life of me remember what the search term was.
by Marsymars - > It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same
For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
by moebrowne - > It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
by the_lucifer - 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.by o_m
- imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsingby vivzkestrel
- kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.
of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
by cyanydeez - The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.by ndiddy
- But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.by sanderjd
- 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
- 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.
by joshstrange