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- Hacker News
- With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.by shevy-java
- I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
by kenanfyi - This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.by sssilver
- Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
by gilfaethwy - There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.by dspillett
- I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
by wccrawford - Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
by magguzu - I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.by cormorant
- I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.by pkilgore
- I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
by Cider9986 - Do you use Google instead?
- Do you imply that you never order anything online?by ymolodtsov
- I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
- Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.htmlby moebrowne
- Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.by robin_reala
- Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?by SamBam
- Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.htmlby robin_reala
- I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
by OptionOfT - The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
- If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.by Nextgrid
- Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.by magguzu
- There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.by troyvit
- Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?by demibabs
- That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.by sarjann
- Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.
- There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).by Gander5739
- There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.by bramhaag
- There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.by Nextgrid
- Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.by azan_
- This makes sense to me as a Kagi user. The chance that I'm going to subscribe to read an article I found via a search is zero.by getfacl