[HN Gopher] I dumped Google for Kagi
___________________________________________________________________
I dumped Google for Kagi
Author : thimabi
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-08-05 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| thimabi wrote:
| There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the
| ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save
| images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs...
|
| Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is
| unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to
| remain a service for the tech-literate -- which is precisely the
| kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid
| Google's AI snippets and so forth.
| ufmace wrote:
| One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid
| service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be
| successful and continue operating indefinitely.
| thimabi wrote:
| Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are
| incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive
| tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations... probably
| won't have access to a better search experience.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber
| since right after the started) wondering if the partial
| defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly)
| improve search experiences even for non paying searchers,
| as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of
| online experiences.
| youniverse wrote:
| I believe they are developing their own browser and email to
| have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
| xigoi wrote:
| The browser actally came before the search engine.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like
| comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime
| Google around ~2008.
|
| I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to
| pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways.
| I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths
| and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller
| companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the
| privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you
| get very good parental control options, for college and
| gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated
| feature of "lensing" the AI assistant.
|
| The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my
| experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for
| translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap
| interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources.
| Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local
| restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on
| Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in
| a local magazine. Amazing stuff
| eugenekolo wrote:
| I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you
| look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs,
| which to many people are just search engines.
|
| There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my
| parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users,
| it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a
| better product.
| apparent wrote:
| It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of
| people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone
| who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it.
|
| The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if
| your use case is just replacing Google.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not
| enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough,
| because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is
| unlikely to change in the near future._
|
| Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search
| renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche
| that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is
| unlikely to change in the near future.
|
| OTOH, the existence of Kagi Assistant made Kagi Teams a very
| easy sell to my employer.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's not paying for search, it's pricing for techbros.
|
| I happen to be an Ars subscriber and that's about as much as
| I'd be willing to pay for Kagi too.
| jmull wrote:
| I'd rather just pay for good search than spend time to de-
| enshittify Google.
|
| I'm hoping enough people agree with me for Kagi to be viable.
| api wrote:
| Did that over a year ago.
| predkambrij wrote:
| you can set search?q=%s&udm=14& for google and default to "web"
| tab, where you actually get search results. Works fine for me.
| lee_ars wrote:
| For now.
| netsharc wrote:
| Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube)
| that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's
| software gets better as time goes backwards.
|
| TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the
| language of my location despite language being set to English
| ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
| franze wrote:
| soooo... he still uses search engines?
| lee_ars wrote:
| I'm not quite finding that AI search works reliably for my use
| cases yet.
| pyrale wrote:
| Some people are still looking for source material rather than,
| say, an imaginary friend summarizing info that may or may not
| have been made up.
| lief79 wrote:
| How do you look something up?
| x187463 wrote:
| Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed
| LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search
| engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for
| people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the
| result is not actually important. We may be discovering many
| people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear
| and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of
| garbage Quora posts.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| There's no viable alternative, so yes of course people use
| search engines.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Not everyone trusts AI to filter their internet queries.
| andrewla wrote:
| tl;dr: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
|
| If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-
| only by default, by entering
| "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default
| search engine.
|
| This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox
| cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit
| conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have
| to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it
| because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has
| grown to the point of absurdity.
|
| The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google
| has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is
| nice and snappy and mostly works.
| mxmlnkn wrote:
| AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me
| recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long
| time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark
| but the smaller search results background as white, and the
| search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not
| readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is
| untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to
| Startpage.com, though.
| glenstein wrote:
| I don't mind it necessarily, as I use it all the time in place
| of Googling, so you would _think_ that folding it into search
| would work well.
|
| But it doesn't, at least not for me. But I think that's tied to
| poor implementation, design, and being a solution looking for a
| problem rather than a philosophical issue with using AI to
| improve search experience.
| mjlee wrote:
| When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by
| adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as
| the difference between searching for something, or just asking
| the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to
| move the conversation to a new LLM session.
| flenserboy wrote:
| the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked.
| from that point on search results on Google have been what they
| want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be
| argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail
| disappeared from results -- that is where the real gold could be
| found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact
| searches -- & giving useful results could not be tolerated,
| whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or
| because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)
| glenstein wrote:
| >it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when
| the long tail disappeared from results -- that is where the
| real gold could be found
|
| Wholeheartedly agree. Millionshort was based on this idea, of
| effectively skipping the "first 10k" sites that most commonly
| come up in results, skipping to the good stuff. But they've
| implemented forced logins and made other design choices I
| haven't loved.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But
| somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too
| guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support
| the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently.
|
| If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to
| configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure
| if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would
| sign back up immediately.
| xyse53 wrote:
| I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to
| Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and
| Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I would also really like it if Kagi didn't fund state-sponsored
| terrorism. On the other hand, the search is better, so...
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| wait till you see what USA funds
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Ok... Are we just naming random countries that _also_ do
| terrorism now? Inserting _butwhaddaboudda YEWW ESS_ into
| literally every conversation is tiring. Yes, the US does
| bad stuff. It doesn 't make funding terrorism by Kagi _less
| bad_.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Enlighten us.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Israel.
| hiprob wrote:
| The CEO has expressed his stance in a forum post:
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
|
| "Kagi has been using yandex search api since 2019, long before
| current geopolitical tensions"
|
| The war in Ukraine has been ongoing since 2014.
|
| "We understand these are deeply personal issues for many. As
| someone who was a refugee of two wars, I'm not indifferent to
| human suffering."
|
| He is Serbian.
|
| Regardless, the option to exclude Yandex (and other search
| engines) results has been suggested here:
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
| mjlee wrote:
| The founder has responded to similar comments -
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
| dmitrygr wrote:
| God damn, that is some good reply!
|
| > The job of a search engine is to produce the most relevant
| search results, period. Kagi excels at this precisely because
| we remain unimpressed by world politics. The moment
| 'politics' becomes a factor in search results is the moment I
| stop working on a search engine.
|
| > We set out to fix search, not the world.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| The consequences of this attitude of indifference (at best)
| will scale if Kagi becomes popular
| hcurtiss wrote:
| This has always struck me as pretty weak. Yes, paying Yandex
| indirectly results in paying taxes to the Russian government.
| But people are rarely so dogmatic about these matters. There
| are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the world, under
| which companies must operate because people live there who must
| try to make a living. Punishing the people at those companies
| because they're obligated ot pay taxes to their rulers strikes
| me as rather ridiculous.
|
| Kagi is awesome. I appreciate the Yandex results. I'm not a big
| fan of Russia.
| addaon wrote:
| > There are lots of despotic and tyrannical regimes in the
| world, under which companies must operate because people live
| there who must try to make a living.
|
| Right, but there's lots of companies in the world. Lots more
| than there are tyrannical regimes. Lots more than there are
| total regimes! We're not individually obligated to support
| each of them, when they financially support things we find
| abhorrent.
| graemep wrote:
| Yes, people buy oil from middle eastern tyrannies, everything
| from China, things made from dubiously sourced raw materials
| etc. - but they somehow draw the line at one particular
| conflict or nation (not always Russia).
| arp242 wrote:
| China isn't invading Ukraine, assassinating people in
| Europe, and things like that.
|
| But no, I don't like the Chinese government either.
| graemep wrote:
| On the other hand there is the little matter of the Uygur
| genocide, and the suppression of other minority cultures.
| codethief wrote:
| Well, you have to start drawing lines somewhere, and focus
| on an issue or two that are important to you. You will only
| end up spreading yourself thin (and not making an impact
| _at all_ with _anything_ ) if you try to draw every line
| "correctly".
| Dr4kn wrote:
| With that logic you could do and buy everything. If you
| don't start somewhere you don't start at all.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Yandex isn't just an honest business trying to survive in
| Putin's Russia, it actively manipulates results to push
| Kremlin propaganda. It only returned negative coverage about
| Navalny and called it an "experiment" when it was caught. It
| actively blocks images of Putin when you search for "bunker
| grandpa", a common nickname for him. It replaces links to the
| anti-Putin Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer
| Corps with links to FSB-controlled honeypots. Its largest
| shareholders are Russian oligarchs, state-owned banks and oil
| companies.
|
| Maybe they have to do it to survive, who knows, but you don't
| have to use their services or products that resell their
| services.
| laacz wrote:
| No it's not, since it's been acquired by essentially
| government.
| mongol wrote:
| I don't think it is weak. It is a principled stand. Maybe
| those principles are not shared by you, but that does not
| make them weak
| throitallaway wrote:
| > This has always struck me as pretty weak
|
| Holding and adhering to personal principles is the opposite
| of weak. You might disagree with that person's decision, but
| that does not make them (or their decision) weak.
| dataflow wrote:
| Do you feel that Kagi going down completely could have any
| meaningful impact on the war? What leads you to believe that?
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| Does there exist another source for a good, broad web index
| that can provide results like mid-'00s Google?
|
| I use DDG mostly but if I need to _actually search the web_ I
| go to Yandex (I don 't have Kagi... at least not yet). I don't
| know of another place that can do that.
|
| Like, is there a viable alternative for Kagi?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Google has a 1.2Bn cloud contract with the Israeli
| gov/military.
|
| There isn't really an escape from helping despotic, genocidal
| regimes.
| int_19h wrote:
| If you want to support the people of Ukraine, the best thing
| you can do right now is give them money to buy more drones.
| This will have much more of an effect than Kagi's Yandex
| integration.
|
| I recommend https://dzygaspaw.com personally, but there are
| many good crowdfunding organizers.
| specproc wrote:
| Would you consider boycotting Google or Amazon because of their
| relationship with the Israeli military? I avoid Amazon, but
| it's pretty tough to avoid Google.
| mft_ wrote:
| I recently dumped Google on my phone because of the awful dark
| pattern they'd put in with a popup trying to generate an
| installation of the Google search app.
|
| While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow
| worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong
| button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page,
| go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again.
| (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.)
|
| Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic
| Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that
| asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach
| despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi
| a go...
| xdavidliu wrote:
| I changed my default search engine on iOS from Google to
| DuckDuckGo for this exact reason.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Many dark patterns at work there. The popup uses misleading
| words: "continue" which is what you want to do, actually means
| continue in app and it takes you to App Store. The popup
| helpfully colors "continue" a nice shade of blue and the "stay
| on webpage" button is a less visible outline instead of a
| colored button. When I'm in an hurry, even though I've dodged
| the App Store redirect hundreds of times in the past, it
| somehow still manages to trick me. And then the whole redirect
| loop which is rage inducing.
|
| Hopefully ublock origin lite can keep the popups away for a
| while.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _The popup uses misleading words: "continue" which is what
| you want to do, actually means continue in app and it takes
| you to App Store._
|
| Ah yes, they do exactly the same thing with Maps.
| x187463 wrote:
| This one, specifically, drives me crazy. The boldly colored
| 'Continue' does NOT, in fact, continue the results. Instead, it
| continues to the app store. Just awful.
| mapipolo wrote:
| This was precisely the last straw for me as well. The dark
| pattern is so outrageous and abhorrent that it felt right to
| dump Google _on principle_ even if Kagi were not better. That
| it is better is a welcome bonus.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's because the "install app" option is styled to look like
| the "go away" option. I fell for the same trick many times; now
| I use Perplexity.
| gonesurfing wrote:
| Just as an FYI for anyone on iOS that is still tolerating this
| egregious dark pattern example, I successfully used Distraction
| Control in Safari to block this popup. Details here
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/120682
| busymom0 wrote:
| Is there a way to use it to hide the "microphone" button on
| Google? That's what keeps redirecting me to App Store if I
| accidentally click it once.
|
| I tried selecting it in the distraction picker but it seems
| to hide the entire page.
| edgineer wrote:
| This has bothered me about kagi:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844665
|
| The founder started that he was not interested in serving users
| who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using
| VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches
| from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and
| don't require an account.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| That position seems to have changed, I think? They are
| supposedly allowing people to buy Privacy Pass tokens without a
| Kagi account in-the-future(tm):
|
| "Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically
| the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It
| just needs to be 'loaded' with valid tokens. And you can
| imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase
| them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at
| Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it
| will help prioritize it." https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-
| pass
|
| They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with
| Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on
| Tor Browser for it to work)
| bsimpson wrote:
| People always joked that Incognito Mode is for porn, but I use
| it for search.
|
| I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to
| look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about
| that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's
| a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming
| aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and
| trying to groom that list.
|
| In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged
| in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech
| laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from
| Gemini either. I really don't like that.
|
| I should be allowed to be curious about something without
| having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have
| the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I
| might want to go to a map.
|
| I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing
| good maps is a _hard_ problem, and I dont think its one that is
| solvable on Kagi 's scale.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| As a paying user it's frustrating how bad Kagi maps are given
| they're (presumably) paying Mapbox $ for it. Most of the time
| the search function doesn't work and I've been disappointed
| enough that I default to Google Maps for anything maps related.
| Marsymars wrote:
| In my experience it's the POI data that's really tough. (As
| opposed to roads/addresses.) Locally, Google Maps has enough
| market share that every business ensures that their info on
| Google Maps is correct. Even Apple Maps hasn't been able to
| scale to compete.
| damian_at_kagi wrote:
| Maps dev here. Would appreciate a bit more feedback at
| https://kagifeedback.org/t/maps
|
| We have new maps UI and working on improving search API
| accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently
| falling short to guide our roadmap.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The problems that need solving are not problems you can
| develop your way out of, unfortunately. Just about every
| single little restaurant, shop, museum, etc _wants_ to
| populate their information into google maps and keep it
| current. Kagi doesn 't have that. They need to somehow get
| all the same data that is in google maps and put it into Kagi
| maps. It's impossible.
| CalChris wrote:
| Search (Google) is dead.
|
| Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still
| exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics
| have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave
| even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so
| dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec
| execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board.
| Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy
| instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is
| orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were.
|
| The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for
| Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I
| asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now.
|
| So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in
| me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate
| distraction.
|
| The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google
| has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to
| exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.
| mingus88 wrote:
| I pay for Kagi and Claude. I feel that the core of this decline
| in services is simply because nobody want to pay for what is of
| value.
|
| Search is still useful. Claude is not good at citing sources.
| Search is great for doing my own research.
|
| I'm hearing a lot of people just copy and paste LLM output as
| truth. From students to law clerks. LLMs are designed to output
| convincing text (not correct text) and for lazy people that's
| good enough.
|
| There will always be a need for searching raw data and making
| conclusions without an LLM
| CalChris wrote:
| If current LLMs were perfect AGI then your lazy students and
| law clerks, they might even have a point. But you are setting
| the bar too high; LLMs are not perfect AGI. They hallucinate
| and you write bad prompts. Think of an LLM as more like a
| Dremel. Yeah, it isn't a Yamazaki Mazak. OTOH, search is like
| a screwdriver.
| dpassens wrote:
| As opposed to LLMs, which aren't inaccurate or noisy?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| How can search(the utility, not the business model) possibly be
| dead?
|
| AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one
| might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training
| data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.
|
| I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to
| get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a
| tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because
| search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same
| questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up
| confident answers.
|
| AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very
| well documented and often discussed topics.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| "AI with search" needs to be differentiated from "AI not
| using search". Perplexity is designed around search, which
| has pros (when searching) and cons (when there are a lot of
| followup prompts, Perplexity is more likely to lose context)
| CalChris wrote:
| The business model, not the utility.
|
| _... it would simply make up confident answers._ Dunno if
| you 've used Google recently, but it will _very_ confidently
| provide simply useless search results, pages and pages and
| pages of useless search results.
|
| I look at using LLMs as like using another programming
| language. My C++ skills are not going to be directly useful
| in Rust or OCaml. I need to learn a new paradigm.
|
| _I 'd ask AI the same questions_. This is the crux. You
| really have to learn how to write (engineer) good prompts and
| you have to check what the LLM wrote. You use 'confidently'
| as a disparaging word. I think LLMs clear writing is quite
| useful in the reduction phase.
|
| LLMs are perfect? No, just way better than Google.
|
| _To organize the world 's information and make it
| universally accessible and useful_ has become _To serve an ad
| and call it a day._
| danudey wrote:
| > it will very confidently provide simply useless search
| results, pages and pages and pages of useless search
| results.
|
| I had assumed that this degredation of search with useless
| results was an attempt to drive more people towards its
| even more useless AI products/results.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you run any kind of business - online or offline - you will
| have ten times more customers coming from Google search than
| from social media. Especially if you make any effort on your
| website. And those are the organic results, not the ads.
| pclowes wrote:
| I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a
| potential long term cost.
|
| Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create
| more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They
| are great for answering questions about things that are very well
| documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns
| technical bloggers with search is being undermined.
|
| In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial
| search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of
| the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an
| individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly
| by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs
| fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects.
|
| I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research
| papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about
| their implementations/explorations.
|
| I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless
| of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I've wondered about that too. Feels like there's a risk to be
| stuck in some flavor of 2025 indefinitely, if the incentive to
| produce new content is eroded by the rise of LLMs.
| x187463 wrote:
| The web is going to need a different business model. There's no
| way around it from this point. Traffic + Ads = Money is dead
| for anybody with content that can be summarized by an LLM. Even
| Traffic + Subscription = Money is also vulnerable if your
| offering is not easily discoverable outside of a search engine.
| I don't know the solution.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I share the same concerns, hence built my own search engine
| that is human-curated. There is already a push back against "AI
| slop content" online, AI search will online make this worse as
| it ingests this slop.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in
| quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there
| are other viable free options.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I too have dumped Google for Kagi (within the same time frame,
| even). I encourage everyone to give it a shot and see if it
| clicks for you. For me, it was night and day. I used to be
| skeptical about the idea of paying for search, but I'm definitely
| sticking with Kagi after seeing how well it works.
| obamagate wrote:
| Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would
| not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same
| and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
| x187463 wrote:
| Per the post, DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index and lacks the
| customization offered by Kagi.
| dabbz wrote:
| My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a
| website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But
| it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all
| your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi
| having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others),
| was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from
| a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly
| google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and
| insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also
| claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's
| the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the
| results are straight from Bing.
|
| The only smaller search engine with its own real index is
| Brave.
| dabbz wrote:
| Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but
| they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But
| sure, I guess their marketing worked.
|
| The index was why I looked elsewhere.
|
| The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business
| model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are
| theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the
| company.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth
| either one of the ad-free experience and the better search
| results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay
| for an ad-free DDG.)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| For non-English results, DDG and such alternatives are of very
| low quality, even compared to Google.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Who else remembers buying your shareware licenses from Kagi.com ?
| anthonj wrote:
| Sounds interesting but I'm not ready to pay to use a search
| engine yet. Too many subscriptions for everything nowadays.
|
| Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now
| do their own indexing.
| dtkav wrote:
| Of all of tech subscriptions that I pay for, kagi is a close
| second after claude in terms of the QoL improvement per dollar.
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to
| make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good
| for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear
| business model.
| ac130kz wrote:
| I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's
| something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally
| better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has
| made itself unbearable.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would
| encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a
| try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of
| the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you
| can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that
| cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife
| and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts
| for our daughters.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I've tried Kagi Assistant several times... I haven't really
| found my usage to be sticky though, I'm not entirely clear what
| I'd use it for on a regular basis where it would be an
| improvement over my current (LLM-free) workflow.
| manchmalscott wrote:
| I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and
| therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not
| going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero
| LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my
| breath though, being able to actually find information on the
| internet is just probably dead forever.
| Marsymars wrote:
| That's kind of the nature of any subscription that isn't pay-
| per-use for every action... you're always going to be paying
| for various things that you don't use/consume.
| manchmalscott wrote:
| YouTube premium recently added a "lite" tier. I don't use
| YouTube music and I don't watch shorts or music videos on
| YouTube, so I'm able to have the channels I watch get
| compensated without paying for what I perceive as unnecessary
| and non-core features of the platform.
|
| Clearly such a thing is possible, and a company which insists
| it isn't is fundamentally either uncreative or user hostile.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Maybe I perceive monetized videos on YouTube as an
| unnecessary and non-core feature - I'd like a tier where I
| only have access to non-monetized videos, but get the other
| perks of membership (background playback, etc.)
| Hikikomori wrote:
| You mean added it back, though not available in my country.
| Stopped paying for youtube when they removed it years ago.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I'm building my own search engine that is human-curated, as I
| am also uncomfortable relying on AI to filter my search
| results. It's free, feedback welcomed: https://greppr.org/
| Citizen_Lame wrote:
| While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why
| privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use
| it. Especially for non-ai tasks.
| int_19h wrote:
| Because it's a paid service?
| Marsymars wrote:
| Well a) it was required because it's not free and it's
| difficult to collect payment from people without accounts and
| b) see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| Kagi is not a privacy orientated search engine.
| damascus_kei wrote:
| Kagi has given me the most value per dollar out of any
| subscription I have ever had. I find the things I want much
| faster. I use the AI summarize; for example, to summarize YouTube
| video when looking for specific info or to summarize reddit web
| results. I also use Kagi Assistant everyday; usually several
| different models. Most importantly, my wife likes it. I find
| google almost unusable now. I can't go back. I will never go
| back.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Seeing how Perplexity (my preference) or Kagi is much better
| than Google for 98% of queries, Google has indeed killed
| itself, at least for the time being. Xfinity has a one year
| free on Perplexity Pro, which is how I tested the switchover.
|
| Early attempts at search-emabled AIs (e.g. ChatGPT) were
| nowhere near as good at first, so I stopped testing them
| against Perplexity/Kagi
| ignoramous wrote:
| For years I used pplx.ai extensively, but of late, chat.com
| (code, q&a) and gemini.google (youtube & web search) feel
| unmatched.
| drewbitt wrote:
| You really were heavily using it in late 2022/early 2023?
| It seemed... rough.
| ignoramous wrote:
| pplx.ai did RAG (with attachments) and web search
| (immediately after they pivoted from Twitter search aka
| "Bird SQL") way before other chat interfaces caught on.
| Their features were free & the product was sticky.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Just a note: pplx.ai redirects to perplexity.com; chat.com
| redirects to chatgpt.com
| codethief wrote:
| I'm really quite... perplexed by how so many people seem to
| be happy with Perplexity. I have tried it a number of times
| and it always hallucinated a ton (especially the stuff where
| it provided "sources").
| VHRanger wrote:
| It uses only google as a backend, and the answer engine is
| based on the ancient llama 3.3 70B.
|
| It's well behind Kagi (which uses a bunch of sources for
| results and new models for quick answer or assistant).
| Perplexity is even well behind other competitors like
| chatgpt
| unixhero wrote:
| Ok ok, I'm signing up for Kagi now
| bfeynman wrote:
| same, so much so that I almost think they have a bot army
| for astroturfing, because I cannot believe anyone gets
| value from it over just one of the main providers and
| google. They dont index data nearly as much or as often as
| google, they basically are at a pareto frontier of just
| serving the most amount of people with lean indexing based
| on fact that people look up a lot of the same things. It
| reminds me of looking at google earth where you can see
| cities have 3d models but a random neighborhood where you
| grew up would be images years old. So yeah, its useful but
| definitely not a replacement for google, so idk why anyone
| would pay for it.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Society is screwed once AI companies reach the 'using our
| product as our personal bot army' phase.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| We only pump here sir.
| Luuucas wrote:
| Google and Adblock
|
| + I love Youtube Summaries
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-summarize/c...
| (should be open source tough)
|
| What's the difference compared to that setup?
| damascus_kei wrote:
| TLDR: I find the information I want much faster and much more
| frequently.
|
| Ad supported search is not incentivized to find you
| information as fast as possible; the goal is for you to click
| on ads.
|
| I hate paying for anything. I am cheap as hell, but it saves
| me enough time that I can justify it. I felt google search
| was getting worse while I feel Kagi search gets better. Plus
| I can customize Kagi to ban entire websites or show websites,
| such as this one, more often.
|
| I am not sure what the user experience of your setup is but
| with Kagi I can tell it to summarize like 8 sites and quickly
| read through all of them on the page.
|
| Also, I didn't know how to use AI well with search prior to
| Kagi; the ease of use really helped me maximize its use.
|
| My home is ad-blocked up the wazoo. I love signal and hate
| noise. Kagi gives me that.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Kagi Assistant's advantage of using their search engine,
| optionally fine-tuned to your preferences, instead of
| Google/Bing is so underrated, too. It's the killer feature for
| me
| outlore wrote:
| in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better
| than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping,
| sports... it is better at finding documentation and technical
| articles and deprioritizing SEO spam
| bananapub wrote:
| regular anecdata: it works great, at first I used to go back to
| Google a few times a month if Kagi didn't find something I was
| sure existed, but either Kagi got better or the web and/or Google
| got worse, because I don't go back to google anymore.
|
| easily worth 4 coffees a month just to not worry anymore about
| the direct consequences of my searches, and being able to shitcan
| garbage sites like pinboard.* while pranking wikipedia in my own
| search results is just gravy.
|
| they also have a search API now in beta which you can request
| access to; 2.5c/search.
| depingus wrote:
| I'm afraid this is a case of "too little, too late". I've been a
| happy DDG user for many, many years. Sure, there's a learning
| curve when venturing out of google's cozy bubble. But once I
| figured it out, its been fantastic.
|
| Except the last few months. And, I can't stress this enough, its
| not DDG's fault. The results are relevant to my search, and at
| first glance seem to be what I'm looking for. But take more than
| 2 seconds to read, and you'll notice the websites themselves are
| trash heaps of AI slop, serving errors and mistakes.
|
| The human web is quickly shrinking out of existence. The last
| content silos of human expression have walled themselves in and
| are striking deals with the evil megacorps; pushing their shitty,
| error prone, planet killing, word prediction engines down
| everyone's throats.
|
| Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index.
| Maybe they should pivot to web autopsy tools, not unlike Internet
| Archive. I wish the Kagi team well. I hope they succeed. And I
| really hope I'm wrong about the open web's grim future. But I'm
| probably not. And the AI arms race suggests the megacorps agree.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Soon, there will be nothing of value left for Kagi to index.
|
| 1. The Internet Archive
|
| 2. Anna's Archive
|
| 3. YouTube (if they're allowed to)
|
| That's more than enough knowledge and information.
| ckdot wrote:
| 4. Wikipedia
|
| Am I too optimistic?
| saltysalt wrote:
| Great comment and you are absolutely right: AI slop content
| will (ironically) kill AI search.
|
| In my opinion, we have gone full circle and arrived back to
| human curation to provide quality search results.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I don't think your post is without merit, but I _often_ search
| for things where there 's a single canonical source of truth,
| and no amount of AI slop or LLM results will be of interest.
| (e.g. this afternoon I've searched for a book title, for
| YouTube Premium pricing info, for git bisect documentation, for
| car collision stats, for speeding fine amounts, for some Linq
| documentation, and for some specific info on local parking).
| temp0826 wrote:
| I really like Kagi but am still holding out for a cheaper plan.
| If it were around the range of NextDNS (which I happily pay for)
| it would be a no-brainer. Wouldn't need or want any of the
| llm/other features.
| dbalatero wrote:
| I got work to pay for Kagi out of my education budget, in case
| anyone else has that option available.
| puff_pastry wrote:
| I tried Kagi and liked it for the most part. But I really wasn't
| seeing the big benefit everyone's claiming.
|
| Google is...fine? Maybe I just learned how to use it for what I
| do
| sjs382 wrote:
| One subtle (but important) way Kagi has improved my life is that
| I'm less "on guard" with search results.
|
| It's not perfect but I know that I'm more likely to find a result
| that serves me, rather than a result that's optimizing for an
| algorithm. And if I do come across something spammy, I know that
| telling Kagi to adjust a site lower (or remove a site from
| results) is just 2 clicks away.
|
| Even though it's a small thing, it's one I encountered with every
| Google search, manyamnymany times per day. Relieving that is
| worth more than $10/mo to me. I think that pricing is right,
| though--if it were more than $10/mo and I likely never would have
| tried it.
|
| The only thing I use Google Search for now is hyperlocal stuff,
| mostly I expect to interact with Maps result. Kagi Maps isn't
| even close.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Now that I think about it, this really summarises why I keep
| paying for Kagi.
|
| I can just search something, glance at the results and pick the
| one that seems the closest one to whatever I'm looking for.
|
| With Google, I have to first go "is this an ad pretending to be
| a search result?", then I need to spend more time looking that
| the domain and preview to see if it's some listicle crap or AI
| slop. Only then I can click the result.
| ezst wrote:
| It's probably a good time to bump
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for those
| who haven't read it yet.
| captain_coffee wrote:
| All the articles on that website are pure gold - I highly
| reccommend it! Recently launched a paid subscription with
| multiple extremely dense (1h+ reading time) posts per month.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| For a dash of irony, I asked Google Gemini to summarize:
|
| The article "The Men Who Killed Google" by Ed Zitron argues
| that Google's search engine has declined due to a shift from a
| user-centric approach to a revenue-focused one. The author
| pinpoints Prabhakar Raghavan, with the support of CEO Sundar
| Pichai, as the key individuals behind this change.
|
| The article details a "code yellow" in February 2019, declared
| by the ads team, due to underperforming search revenue. This
| led to a conflict between the ads and finance teams, who wanted
| to boost revenue at any cost, and the search team, which
| prioritized user experience.
|
| Following this, Google implemented several changes, including a
| March 2019 update that rolled back quality improvements and a
| May 2019 ad redesign that made ads look like organic search
| results. In May 2020, Raghavan replaced Ben Gomes as the head
| of Google Search. The author notes Raghavan's history at Yahoo,
| where he was head of search from 2005 to 2012, a period during
| which Yahoo's search market share significantly dropped.
|
| Zitron concludes that Raghavan and other "managerial types" are
| damaging technology by prioritizing shareholder value and
| growth over product quality.
| asdff wrote:
| At this point I feel like I know where all the content must lie
| that I am looking for domain wise. There is so much crap content
| out there on crap websites that discoverability is long dead
| anyhow. So, I basically just use google to search within domains
| I already know.
|
| Not sure how long this scales because like I said, my discovery
| rate has pretty much been zero for years now of new domains worth
| visiting. I'm sure they are out there but modern internet doesn't
| really let you find them short of finding a reference to them in
| some forum comment someplace, thanks to SEO arms race.
| jiehong wrote:
| I like Kagi, but it feels a bit slow to display results.
|
| Like, the page loads very fast, but only with the search bar, and
| only then you get the results appearing after some loading. But
| it's acceptable.
|
| Image search is rather slow, though.
| nikanj wrote:
| Google is much faster, because it's slower to show you results
| related to your search terms. It's much faster to just show you
| whatever slop their AI happened to cook up
| ckdot wrote:
| I can confirm, and for me - even if I want like Kagi - I can't
| tolerate it. I've read it depends on the Country you're in. In
| Germany, where I'm from, loading time is up to 3 seconds -
| while on Google it's almost instant.
| freedomben wrote:
| Kagi sucks, this is a bad call.
|
| Just kidding, I love Kagi and I get a ton of value from it! I
| always like the saying that "the best ideas are obvious in
| hindsight", and that is _absolutely_ how I feel about Kagi. Being
| able to uprank, downrank, and /or pinning, blacklisting domains
| is a killer feature, and something that would have been so easy
| for Google to have done at any time. Their approach to AI has
| also been perfect IMHO. From the beginning they didn't have the
| models provide answers, but (basically, as far as I can tell)
| RAGged the results and summarized (and included sources). I find
| myself using that feature all the time. Also the ! support and
| generally clean interface make for a great UX. I also very much
| appreciate their pro-rating and transparent billing, and the
| prices being pretty reasonable.
|
| The search results themselves are also better than Google (in no
| small part to my own fine-tuning of domains, i.e.
| downranking/upranking/blacklisting, but even just the vanilla
| results are better most of the time). It has been so long since
| I've had to !g something that I don't even remember the last
| time. I do routinely use !gm to open something in google maps
| though because Apple maps has not been a good experience for me,
| but I don't fault Kagi for that.
|
| If you haven't tried Kagi, you should. Also play around with the
| lenses feature while you're at it, cause you can find some cool
| stuff that way that otherwise doesn't surface in the results.
|
| Initial set up to make Kagi the default search engine is a little
| involved because you have to put your token in the query string,
| but the instructions are solid and once it's done, it's done.
| Very happy customer.
| flkiwi wrote:
| As noted above, Kagi is the quietest but most useful
| subscription I have. The Kagi Assistant AI tool, with its
| access to pretty much any major model, is an enormous bonus.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I really like the new Assistant update which guides you on
| the strengths and weaknesses of the selectable models and
| recommends a shortlist.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > It has been so long since I've had to !g something that I
| don't even remember the last time.
|
| I use !g once a week or so in Kagi, and 100% of the time,
| google's results are worse. It's usually something bogus I'm
| searching for, and there really isn't anything to be said about
| it, but when I search google for it, I get a _ton_ more junk
| that is totally unrelated to my query.
|
| Kagi's results are better than google's 100% of the time that I
| compare the two. It's no exaggeration.
| mhb wrote:
| What ever happened to that HN darling, Duck Duck Go?
| saltysalt wrote:
| I built my own, it's easier than you might think:
| https://greppr.org/
| uticus wrote:
| would be interested in directions on how to do this myself.
|
| like, take existing bookmarks, make a crawler.
|
| nice work, btw
| saltysalt wrote:
| Thanks! If I have time, I should write a how-to blog.
| commandersaki wrote:
| I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar.
| I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't
| seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does
| it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the
| source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or
| anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when
| integrating it into a backend project that needed that
| functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a
| bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in
| HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult.
| Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
| mbirth wrote:
| There's also Marginalia: https://marginalia-search.com/
| saltysalt wrote:
| Very nice!
| busymom0 wrote:
| What's the cost and architecture of running such a site and
| crawling all those pages?
| saltysalt wrote:
| A single bare-metal server!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a long time, ever since Google decided
| to censor the internet.
| rubslopes wrote:
| Kagi's bang game is so good. A few of my custom bangs:
|
| - !w: results from last week only
|
| - !y: results from yesterday and today only
|
| - !io: Assistant, but offline
|
| - !ig: Assistant, but for grammar correction
|
| - !itr: Assistant, but for correcting and organizing transcript
| text
|
| - !sh: Google shopping tab
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I dumped corporate search for my own index
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database.
|
| Screw you guys! I'm creating my own search with open source.
|
| ... but seriously it just augments my search.
| dsign wrote:
| I started using Kagi more than a year ago, but kept Google in
| some of my iOS devices because if I need to do some online
| shopping, Google has all the ads of the local shops :-) . I mean,
| I know that I can order cheaper in Amazon or Temu, but I want to
| support the local merchants as much as possible.
|
| Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to
| search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install
| something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong
| button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find
| yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet my
| rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the hoops and
| installed Kagi in iOS as well.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > Sadly, Google has this dark pattern where you are trying to
| search for something and they'll show you a pop-up to install
| something, and they change the popup until you click the wrong
| button and all of the sudden instead of buying plywood you find
| yourself in the app store to install God knows what (but I bet
| my rear that it tracks me). So I have gone now through the
| hoops and installed Kagi in iOS as well.
|
| I'm not a google user but - are you sure you don't have malware
| or something? I guess probably not as you said iOS, but I'm
| failing to imagine this being true in the way I'm reading it.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I face this issue too and can easily reproduce it. When
| typing in Google search, if I try to place the cursor, it
| will often register my click on the "microphone" icon due to
| a tiny delay of the search UI and that opens up the App Store
| page. When I switch back to Safari, it starts a never ending
| loop of sending me back to App Store page. I have to kill
| Safari to stop this.
| srhtftw wrote:
| Kagi makes me want to learn Crystal1
|
| 1 https://crystal-lang.org
| kawfey wrote:
| for me kagi started out as a few searches and compared between
| it, DDG and google.
|
| and then i ran out of free searches, so I gave them $5.
|
| and then i ran out of $5 worth of searches so i kept renewing, $5
| more. And again, and again.
|
| At this point I had all my defaults set to kagi because I loved
| it. Just the fact there are no ads or sponsored leads and I can
| more-or-less kill webpages completely generated and SEO'd with
| LLMs, I can actually do research again.
|
| and then I became a full subscriber, with orion, blacklists, I
| use the quick answer (LLM) and small web searching fruitfully,
| and joined their discord.
|
| It's been a long time since I fell head over heels for a
| technology product, and this being something so core to how I use
| the internet, it's a godsend.
|
| Enjoying it at least until they decide money is nice and growth
| is imperative, they go public, and enshittifies.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Capital causes big distortions: unreasonably cheap products from
| big companies and unreasonably cheap products from VC backed
| companies. Plus, habits and market power make it hard for people
| to switch en masse.
|
| Despite a tough market, Kagi succeeds the old way: with better
| products.
|
| Kagi proves plain old commerce - making a good thing and selling
| it - can win a fair fight against capital. Keep it up folks!
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| I dumped Kagi for Google
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i'll try it when i can pay $5 for unlimited search without AI
| results (not that it can't be useful; i'm just only interested in
| the search component).
| eskatonic wrote:
| I've been using it for a little over a year now, and I just
| upgraded to the unlimited search subscription. Totally worth it.
| cjk wrote:
| I made the same switch recently. Results from Kagi are night-and-
| day vs. Google.
|
| I do hope Kagi eventually has enough revenue to offer a more
| generous free tier, though (and without logging in). I fear it
| will remain a niche thing otherwise.
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