- I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. 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.
I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout, it's been nice knowing that I can just stop having reddit show up in search results.
- 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.
by SadTrombone
8 subcomments
- Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
- I switched to Kagi 2 years ago and I've enjoyed it ever since. In May I decided that I wanted to give some other options a try, also given that I'm now relying on LLMs for some tasks I used Kagi for. I'm running qwen3.6 on my server and I thought it + a mediocre free search engine would be enough. Well, was I wrong. Almost three months have passed and I can't say anymore that it's just getting used to a different flow. Kagi offers something that I can't find anywhere else at the moment. I resubscribed last Monday :)
by delis-thumbs-7e
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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 joshstrange
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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 Cider9986
3 subcomments
- 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.
- Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.
by everfrustrated
3 subcomments
- 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 really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
- 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.
- On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.
- Kagi, like DDG and a few others around the same/similar ideas, doesn't work as "fully" for certain geographies (I assume many) as fully and wholesomely (as I gather from such posts and comments) it works for certain other geographies (again, I assume not many; for obvious reasons). I gave it a shot, trial and then the Starter pack. In some cases, it turned out to be almost completely futile. Anyway, just like Google Maps, nothing even comes close, for coverage and usability of Internet search, to Google Search for my geography (yes, I asked others as well who tried), sadly.
Since then I've learnt to live with `udm=14` and some occasional/rare uBlock Origin tweaks (earlier I used an about:config setting, which might still work, for anyone looking) - in Firefox.
On Safari (which is kind of my secondary phone browser), I still keep it as it is, and I use it to actually use the quick AI feature when I might want it, which isn't often.
- I stopped paying for Kagi after ~2 years. Search quality worsened over time; my brother and I would trade screenshots/complaints of irrelevant results for basic keywords. International searches were even more fruitless.
Also, I felt Kagi had too many projects going on. Their whimsical engineer-daycare-esque blogposts did not inspire confidence.
- There's little to add to that. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi. I can understand if people simply don't want to or can't shell out $5 a month, but if someone is able to, those are probably the best $5 anyone who does a lot of internet research and uses AI can possibly invest.
by shibaprasadb
0 subcomment
- I was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!
by cantalopes
0 subcomment
- Could we stop funding russia's invasion of Ukraine?
- I started with Kagi in 2024, and sometimes across different/new browser setups I accidentally land on Google and want to immediately throw up.
Havent looked backed a single day.
- 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
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.
by HelloUsername
0 subcomment
- html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript
by cautiouscat
0 subcomment
- Kagi has been a great and worthwhile subscription to me. It feels like browsing the Google of the 10s in some ways. Way more private blogs and whatnot in the results.
by hyperionultra
11 subcomments
- 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…
- Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
- I've been with Kagi for about a year now and I have had zero complaints. I love their search to death.
- 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.)
- Any thoughts on Uruky? Just found it by searching for a Europe-based Kagi alternative. https://uruky.com
- 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.
by amazingamazing
2 subcomments
- I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
by browningstreet
0 subcomment
- Kagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results
- Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
- Switched to Kagi a few years ago and don't even consider other options anymore. It's miles ahead of others.
- What is the appeal that draws everyone to use Kagi?
- Kagi is awesome. Highly recommend it. And Orion as well.
The combo of NextDNS + Kagi + occasional VPN (currently on Windscribe since they had a deal through Kagi and seem to have the most real vs fake VPN endpoints) is super seamless and easy
by pedrosousa
0 subcomment
- how is Kagi for programming searches? I've exclusively used google for years for this.
- I have worked for Google on and off the last 6y. When I am not working there, I use kagi. When I am working there, I miss kagi a lot.
by mancerayder
0 subcomment
- I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
by BiteCode_dev
0 subcomment
- I don't know, I tried kagi but it doesn't seem to have superior results to even ddg. It's even worse for non english content.
ChatGPT is better than their agent at everything, firefox extensions can filter domains and ads out of the search results while preventing tracking nand I don't even have to create an account for any of those.
Not to mention I actually mostly use search engines to for stuff that are not fuzzy anymore (since discovery with them are now terrible anyway), so I don't get that much value.
I really want to like kagi, it ticks all the boxes, but it misses a killer feature that would make me use it instead of alternatives that just do what I need.
- Kagi is great, but it's twice as expensive as I think it would have to be for me to feel like I'm actually getting good value for it, unfortunately.
- Kagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.
by NamlchakKhandro
0 subcomment
- why does the kagi website keep trying to reload itself? SUPER ANNOYING
by selfawareMammal
0 subcomment
- How about Kagi using YANDEX?
by insane_dreamer
0 subcomment
- I’m a paying Kagi subscriber but hardly use it because honestly much of the time I’m searching for an answer to a specific question not a website to visit and therefor want the AI response without clicking on another website. Unless it’s mission critical but that’s more rare.
- [flagged]
by trippsydrippsy
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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