It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.

I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).

I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.

On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.

On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].

I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.

I use it all the time.

I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.

With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works.

If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.

I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.

I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.

Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.

For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.

I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.

I made (vibed) an extension for pi that wraps their search and extract APIs.

The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes.

https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi

Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.

This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.

Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.

I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.

It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.

Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.

https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...

I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.

> They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data.

I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information.

You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.

Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.

Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?

I do like that it tends to reword your search query into the way you meant but couldn’t find the right words in your head.

> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. "

which model?

I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?

The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.

So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.

One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article.

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!"

Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.

You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.

Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.

A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.

> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.

If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify.

The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.

You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.

So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.

So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.

The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!

Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)

Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.

The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."

And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.

So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.

> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!

We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.

>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).

Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.

> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.

Longstanding user and it is great!

It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.

I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.

Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects

  ^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com

NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds.

I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!

(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)

I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.

Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.

> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account

I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.

I can still access old.reddit.com from my country/region

> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account

Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.

If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).

However tracking that is tricky at best.

but a Bloomberg.com subscription is ONLY $39.99/month.......

Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.

There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.

There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).

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.

Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?

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.

Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.

If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.

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.

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.

Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

This was my first thought. You're essentially removing the good stuff and leaving the slop.

Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)

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.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html

Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

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).

Do you imply that you never order anything online?

Do you use Google instead?

[flagged]

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online. You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.

They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.

Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.

Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.

It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.

Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.

Any chance I could try it.

If it was 50-75% as good as Kagi, I’d pay a subscription.

I’d also really like a way to use it in safari/mobile safari.

Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.

If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.

Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.

The app isn't great, but the price is right.

Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.

If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.

Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.

>When will this be available into HN, too ?

hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).

Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).

The browser already handles this: Activate reader mode.

I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.

An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie

The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.

Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.

> So what business models are even left?

Maybe they can take a hint from Spotify?

Making a throwaway account to post something utterly thoughtless is certainty a choice.

(Kagi founder here)

I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.

edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE

I similarly stopped subscribing when I realised they were paying money to Musk for grok, and I refuse to fund that man in any way. I hadn't seen the Russian data usage. The Kagi founder above states that using these services doesn't imply support of the governments or owners behind them, but that's a crock of shit. Using their services is, at best, an indicator of a complete lack of principles to a degree that I can now never use their service. He asks for respect for his moral line above, but no-one owes him that - not every viewpoint deserves respect.

Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.

which search engines have no ties to the three countries currently waging illegal wars of aggression? :)

ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard

Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.

It's not that they have anything against them, it's giving their customers who don't want to see them the choice not to.