> With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout

Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason.

Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have to click to load more. Annoying but still usable.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

> no sudden UI changes

they did change https://kagi.com/summarizer recently and I was taken aback

> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality.

You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearrange the UI right before you tap the screen (after about half a second of lag), so that you accidentally click an ad. It sounds stupid but I suspect a non-trivial ratio of their revenue comes from this phenomenon.

And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.

I suspect they're taking a similar approach with Google, with the difference that you cannot pay for Google and therefore are forced to have the crap experience all of the time.

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.

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

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.

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.

What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.

Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.

I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.

$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.

I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.

I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough

There is also uruky. They’re functionally unlimited on $5 but less developed feature wise

That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.

Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.

This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.

> 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.

> 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.

“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.

Also, Google isn't scraping your data....

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.

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.

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

They are much better than DDG or Google in financing russian invasion into Ukraine

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

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.

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.

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

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 browsing

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

You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.

Correct URL is https://staan.ai/

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.

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.

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.

Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html

Why not use another browser?

Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.

I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!

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, ...)

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.

I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.

> Search quality worsened over time

They just rehash the SERPs from actual engines. So if quality declines in whatever SERPs they scrape (or they lose access to a quality one), so too it will on kagi.

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.

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

Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.

Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.

I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.

Yes, for me.

Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”

Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.

Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”

Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.

And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.

Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.

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.

Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).

LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.

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.

FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.

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.

I find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's

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

For things to buy yes, though I’ll usually stick “Canada” into the search term.

Unfortunately Google Maps still dominates info/reviews for any real-world locations.

Using it in France: yes, it does.

Finland: no

Author here (I didn't submit the post though)

Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.

Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)

Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.

[flagged]

Uruky allows JSON formatted output and basically started to use them as API for my private SearXNG instance. Basically using them as paid search API that is much more reliable than scraping DuckDuckGO and Brave, with the benefit of blocking common AI slop sites and manual ranking of domains. Having EUSP first and Mojeek second somehow gives very satisfying results, both small nearby European businesses and big sites are searched up well, even without depending on American index.

AI slop is actively down-ranked based on community feedback: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

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.

Kagi has Assistant that is exactly AI search.