[HN Gopher] Kagi News
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi News
Author : grappler
Score : 707 points
Date : 2025-09-30 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
| medstrom wrote:
| > One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC,
| creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a
| deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit
| into a contained ritual.
|
| Could you guys maybe print it on paper and send it to my physical
| mailbox, so I can do this ritual with breakfast? :-)
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| I'd like mine shaped like a cylinder waiting on the door step.
| lxgr wrote:
| Make sure to make each page way too large to read it on
| public transit or a table in a cafe without having your seat
| neighbors join in on the fun :)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Potentially relevant:
|
| _Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42599599 - January 2025
| (106 comments)
|
| _Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41742210 - October 2024
| (253 comments)
| buster wrote:
| Kagi seems to be one of the few companies that put out services,
| genuinely trying to fix things with good intent. I hope it stays
| that way.
|
| (I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy
| Kagi Ultimate subscriber).
| jjice wrote:
| I like assistant, but I use Claude directly mostly. It's handy
| for really quick stuff though.
|
| I like that Kagi charges for their service, so their motive is
| to provide services for that cost, and not with ads on top of
| it.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| It feels much less slimy to pay a nominal fee for a service
| than it does to use a "free" service and wonder about how /
| to what extent your data is being exploited.
| jjice wrote:
| 100% agree. Free services have their place, but I'd love to
| have more paid service alternatives for derives that only
| exist as "free".
|
| That said, all my friends think I'm insane and poke fun at
| me for paying for search, so I imagine we're a small
| minority.
|
| People just hate paying for software in general in my
| experience, especially a subscription.
|
| I have multiple good friends who refuse to pay 99 cents a
| month to get 50gb of iCloud storage so they can backup
| their phones, and instead of all their precious memories on
| a single device that is out and about.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product"
| nugget of information has not been broadly understood by
| folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about
| their data.
|
| I do live these days with the understanding that pretty
| much all of my personal info is out there one way or
| another, a social security number is about as private as
| a phone number these days.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's pretty well established that people are just
| generally irrational about free things. Because of this,
| I think any business model involving giving something
| away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad
| supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-
| competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor
| charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If
| you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If
| you're a business, you should have to charge.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I used Kagi search for awhile but eventually switched back to
| google because Kagi location aware search sucks. It might be
| better nowadays. I've been living on their browser Orion for a
| few weeks now though and it's great. It works about 90% of the
| time which is impressive for a browser that isn't tested
| alongside the big 4
| viraptor wrote:
| What do you mean 90%? Orion is WebKit under the hood, so any
| failures would be surprising.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Clearly there is divergence. Examples that I run into on a
| daily basis:
|
| My credit union login does an infinite redirect on login.
| Works fine on Chrome (and all other major browsers)
|
| Perplexity on the mobile version web search entirely
| broken. Works fine on safari.
|
| Many other random stuff breaks at least a few times per day
| usually from login redirects and authentication. Extensions
| like 1Password have autofill only working some of the time.
| The list goes on
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I'm curious, aside from pricing, what utility do you get from
| Assistant that you wouldn't from just subscribing directly to a
| single LLM?
| buster wrote:
| Actually, i get the news search with a quick answer and a
| link to the assistent and not a single LLM but practically
| all LLMs in one interface and can link and share the chats.
| The Interface is nice, simple and Kagi is very up to date
| regarding new LLMs (it already contains Sonnet 4.5, for
| example).
|
| It's just a nice interface for all LLMs which i often use on
| mobile or laptop for various work and also private tasks.
|
| The last months have shown that there is no single LLM worth
| investing in (todays "top" LLM is tomorrows second-in-class).
| Spivak wrote:
| The Kagi implementation can use Kagi search and can use
| advanced features of search like lenses. This isn't a unique
| feature but if you believe Kagi search is better than whoever
| Anthropic/OpenAI are using it's a nice plus.
|
| Kagi's contracts with LLM providers are the ones businesses
| get with actual privacy protections which is also nice.
| flyer23 wrote:
| KI multi-step asisstant. Being able to try out all the llms
| in one subscription. Search integration with Kagi which means
| AI can really search only pages I want. And my settings for
| search as well.
| wiether wrote:
| > subscribing directly to a single LLM
|
| You get multiple LLM in a single interface, with a single
| login and a single subscription to maintain, all your threads
| stored at the same place, the ability to switch between
| models in a thread, custom models...
| charcircuit wrote:
| RSS is a strange choice in 2025. As a search engine they are in
| the position to extract things from web pages themselves. They
| already need this capability in order to properly rank the page.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Why? I do use it and can't imagine following anything without
| it... And I keep hoping that it will come back and replace
| absolutely terrible schizophrenic feeds from meta/x/etc
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Why?
|
| Because not every site has a RSS feed. For example when
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 released it would make sense to have that,
| but there is no RSS feed for Anthropic. Being compatible with
| the entire web instead of just a subset of it is useful.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I don't know of any major publisher that doesn't maintain
| RSS feeds, and this is mostly syndicating major publishers,
| so I'm not sure it makes any difference
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Well... thanks to walled-garden policy from google whole
| web decided to erect walls instead of providing neat RSS.
| Though all websites I care about have RSS and if some
| doesn't I contact the admin and they add it...
| treetalker wrote:
| For one, I welcome RSS (back) and say the more, the better. I
| much prefer to pull specific types of information at my own set
| intervals when I need them, instead of either having
| undifferentiated information pushed on me continuously like a
| blast from a fire hose, or having to reach out to manually
| check and filter many individual sources. The idea is to
| schedule my receipt and processing of the information, and then
| refine the stream itself as well as the intervals I use to view
| it and the total amount of time I spend on it.
|
| I'm currently on the hunt for an RSS reader that has good
| filtering and sorting functionality, so I can (for instance)
| pull several feeds from only certain sources, but not see any
| posts/articles about terms A or B, yet see and sort any posts
| with term C by time, followed by either posts from source 1
| with terms C and D, or posts from source 2 with terms E or F
| but not G, which would be sorted by relevance.
|
| I know that's a complicated and probably poorly written
| explanation; but I'm imagining something like Apple Mail Rules
| for RSS.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I think Kagi's target audience is people who want to see
| news, and not people who want a RSS reader for news. The
| average person does not care how news gets to them. The fact
| that it uses RSS is a technical detail they should not have
| to worry about. Kagi should not be artificially restricting
| themselves to RSS feed when there is news that exists outside
| the RSS ecosystem which they should consider including.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Kagi's eventual target audience might be the average
| person, but right now its customers are almost certainly
| the type of people who mourned the shuttering of Google
| Reader.
| anonymousd3vil wrote:
| I use RSS to get my information and I've built my own reader
| https://rahuldshetty.github.io/reader-project/ for it. It helps
| me stay upto date with my various news feed and sites at one
| place. I don't have to search for things in search engine all
| the time for a piece of news.
| charv wrote:
| I love everything that Kagi has put out. The Orion browser rocks
| (recently replaced Brave, good riddance) and my go-to chatbot
| today is the Kagi Assistant with Kimi K2 connected to the
| internet.
|
| I tended towards Axios but lately it's gotten a bit paywalled and
| less informative. Can't wait to incorporate Kagi News into my
| daily workflow.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC,
| creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a
| deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit
| into a contained ritual.
|
| I might not agree with all decisions Kagi makes, but this is
| gold. Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer
| not a customer.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you 're a consumer
| not a customer._
|
| Someone recently highlighted the shift from social networks to
| social media in a way I'd never thought about:
|
| >> _The shift from social networks to social media was subtle,
| and insidious. Social networks, systems where you talk to your
| friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume
| content selected by an algorithm, is not._ (immibis
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403867)
|
| Specifically, in the same way that insufficient supply of
| mortgage securities (there's a finite number of mortgages) led
| to synthetic CDOs [0] in order to artificially boost supply of
| something there was a market for.
|
| Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from
| strangers into your eyeballs) are the synthetic CDOs of
| content, with about the same underlying utility.
|
| There is in fact a finite amount of individually useful content
| per unit of time.
|
| [0] If you want the Michael Lewis-esque primer on CDOs
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws
| captainkrtek wrote:
| > Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from
| strangers into your eyeballs) is the synthetic CDO of
| content, with about the same underlying utility.
|
| This is a great way to put it. Much of the social media
| content is a derivative/synthetic representation of actual
| engagement. Content creators and influencers can make us
| "feel" like we have a connection to them (eg: "get ready with
| me!" type videos), but it's not the same as genuine
| connection or communication with people.
| oezi wrote:
| I agree but I also would like to see yesterday's news. 12
| articles is a little to few for me. I would like to come back
| every couple of days and review what happened.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| This is one of the big reasons I've gravitated towards a
| reverse-chronological feed that takes you from the past to the
| present -- at some point you hit a natural end, which is a
| natural prompt to go do something else. I've picked up
| Reeder[0] as a feed reader, since it can aggregate a bunch of
| sources (chiefly RSS, but also Mastodon, BlueSky, reddit, etc)
| and presents it in such a timeline without pressure to read
| everything.
|
| [0] https://reederapp.com
| atonse wrote:
| I LOVE this. The app feels very clean, the data's presented
| beautifully, and it hasn't been enshittified yet. And hopefully
| never will, because I pay Kagi in hopes that they don't.
|
| I feel this is what Apple News should've been. Instead it's just
| god-awful ad-filled mess of news articles. And the only reason I
| have it is because of Apple One. But it is a clearly neglected
| product.
|
| I also pay for ground news but it hasn't met my expectations,
| mostly because there's a lot of redundancy with wire stories.
| Like it'll show 50 sources but they're all just regurgitating the
| same AP or Reuters article. So it skews the "bias"
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| sites like these make me realize that i'm not all that interested
| in "news", which might be a personal fault, but also makes you
| wonder what all the other ""news"" sites have been doing to
| capture my attention...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is this an annoucement or just a promotion?
|
| Bunch of discussion here 3 months ago?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44518473
| graynk wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519356
|
| It was in beta then.
| smoothbenny wrote:
| Judging by the newly available categories it looks like they
| may have paid attention to some early feedback :)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Happy paying Kagi subscriber here. Rock on, Kagi.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| The World section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from
| the USA.
|
| The UK section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from
| Scotland.
|
| It looks too simplistic for me to actually use.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Several sections have Trump in the headline. I wish there was a
| way to block that word like I do in Lemmy. That guy monopolizes
| the headlines which only makes him more powerful, and annoys
| me. I'll see whether I can take this when I use this new app,
| which I otherwise think is great.
| lblume wrote:
| Surely it isn't that simple. Even a person who thoroughly
| condemns Trump's hijacking of media systems and attentions
| must acknowledge that if international politics are at all
| relevant for you, some actions of the US president should be
| seen by you, if only in exceptional circumstances.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| The problem is the continual stream of bullshit emitted
| from Trump's mouth gets clicks, and as such even little
| things that don't have any bearing on an international
| audience are reported heavily.
|
| When Biden was president I barely heard anything about US
| politics, but with Trump in power it's hard to avoid.
| dstroot wrote:
| This is the issue. I feel bombarded by trump's firehouse of
| bullshit, but some of it has to be important, right? So how
| can Kagi create a "smart" trump filter that focuses on the
| most important stuff and reduces the firehose. I tried Kagi
| news and created a "trump" filter and *every story in the
| US section was gone*.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| This comment[0] suggests that they have some kind of a filter
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45427513
| baggachipz wrote:
| Strange, I couldn't find anything in the settings (iOS
| version). So maybe there's a divergent feature set and
| updates are forthcoming.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I can't speak to any of the apps, but after making my
| original comment, I checked out the website version, and
| the settings there do indeed have filters for category as
| well as specific terms.
| lblume wrote:
| Can verify. Settings > Content Filter > Custom Keywords.
| You can choose whether to hide the stories completely or
| blur them instead.
| khaleel-kagi wrote:
| We have Content Filter on the web version. And it's coming
| to the mobile app very soon. We're working towards having
| complete feature parity with the web app.
| freediver wrote:
| It is possible to block news by keywords, see settings (I
| believe in the web app currently only)
| baggachipz wrote:
| Awesome, looking forward to it being in the mobile apps if
| possible. I like to think of it as blocking spammy domains
| ;)
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Haha if you block Politics, Sports, Celebrity News and
| Crypto there are no news in the USA section for me
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| The Belgian section has no french language articles, they still
| need to work some things out but I welcome the idea.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Mini feedback - it appears to report google news results as if
| from google and not the website in question (Wired in my case,
| the snapdragon x2 elite article).
|
| Apart from that, it's really nice! Good job, kagi team!
| msravi wrote:
| Very skeptical that this would work for me. None of the topics
| that Kagi chooses to "cover" in their seven or so stories for the
| day resonates with what I'd want to read. That's exactly why we
| have feeds that you can tune to your tastes and so on. Getting
| rid of endless scrolling and such might be a good thing though.
| __jonas wrote:
| Just to be clear I'm understanding correctly:
|
| This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news
| sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to
| summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
|
| I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are
| not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news
| are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, which
| seems to imply that is what they are doing.
|
| I'm a little skeptical towards the approach, when you ask an LLM
| to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I
| know there is no guarantee that those are correct - and it does
| seem like sometimes they just use pure LLM output, as no sources
| are cited, or it's quoted as 'common knowledge'.
| devmor wrote:
| The line "news stories will be generated" throws up red flags
| across the horizon for me.
|
| That's not news. That's news-adjacent random slop.
| input_sh wrote:
| It's also a workaround around copyright, news sites would be
| (rightfully) pissed if you publicly post their articles in
| full and would argue that you're stealing their viewership.
| But, if you're essentially doing an automatic mash-up of five
| stories on the same topic from different sources, all of a
| sudden you're not doing anything wrong!
|
| As an example from one of their sources, you can only re-
| publish a certain amount of words from an article in The
| Guardian (100 commercially, 500 non-comercially) without
| paying them.
| nemomarx wrote:
| tbh I would take the headline and first hundred words in a
| news aggregator. that seems fine?
| input_sh wrote:
| Yes, that is fine! That's how RSS feeds usually work when
| you follow more "mainstream" news sources. At the very
| least, you see the name of the author and you actually
| make a connection to their server that can be measured in
| the analytics.
|
| But instead, Kagi "helpfully" regurgitates the whole
| story, visits the article once, delivers it to presumably
| thousands, and it can't even be bothered to display all
| of the sources it regurgitates unless you click to expand
| the dropdown. And even then the headline itself is one
| additional click away, and they straight up don't even
| display the name of the journalist in the pop-up, just
| the headline.
|
| Incredibly shitty behaviour from them. And then they have
| the balls to start their about page with this:
|
| > Why Kagi News? Because news is broken.
| amarant wrote:
| And yet, after trying it, I have to admit it's more
| informative and less provocative than any other news source
| I've seen since at least 2005.
|
| I don't know how they do it, and I'm not sure I care, the
| result is they've eliminated both clickbait and ragebait, and
| the news are indeed better off for it!
| input_sh wrote:
| Soulless, uncreative, not fact-checked (or read by anyone
| before clicking publish), not contributing anything back to
| the original journalists, all of the editorial decisions
| are done by an undeterministic AI filter.
|
| Not gonna call it the worst insult to journalism I've ever
| seen because I've seen factually(.)so which does
| essentially the same thing but calls it an "AI fact check",
| but it's not much better.
|
| It's like instead of borrowing a book from the library,
| there's like a spokesperson at the entrance who you ask a
| question and then blindly believe whatever they say.
| amarant wrote:
| >soulless,uncreative
|
| This is exactly how I want my news to be. Nothing worse
| than a headline about a new vaccine breakthrough,
| followed by a first paragraph that starts with "it was a
| cold November morning as I arrived in..."
|
| I guess it's a matter of taste, but I prefer it short and
| to the point
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Yes, that's what it is. Kagi as a brand is LLM-optimist, so you
| may be fundamentally at odds with them here... If it lessens
| the issue for you, the sources of each item are cited properly
| in every example I tried, so maybe you could treat it as a
| fancy link aggregator
| meowface wrote:
| I consider myself a major LLM optimist in many ways, but if
| I'm receiving a once per day curated news aggregation feed I
| feel I'd want a human eye. I guess an LLM in theory might
| have less of the biases found in humans, but you're trading
| one kind of bias for another.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. The entire value/fact dichotomy that the
| announcement bases itself on is a pretty hot philosophical
| topic I lean against Kagi on. It's just impossible to
| summarize any text without imparting some sort of value
| judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
| xpe wrote:
| > It's just impossible to summarize any text without
| imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore
| "biasing" the text
|
| Unfortunately, the above is nearly a cliche at this
| point. The phrase "value judgment" is insufficient
| because it occludes some important differences. To name
| just two that matter; there is a key difference between
| (1) a moral value judgment; (2) selection & summarization
| (often intended to improve information density for the
| intended audience).
|
| For instance, imagine two non-partisan medical
| newsletters. Even if they have the same moral values
| (e.g. rooted in the Hippocratic Oath), they might have
| different assessments of what is more relevant for their
| audience. One could say both are "biased", but does doing
| so impart any _functional_ information? I would rather
| say something like "Newsletter A is compromised of
| Editorial Board X with such-and-such a track record and
| is known for careful, long-form articles" or "Newsletter
| B is a one-person operation known for a prolific stream
| of hourly coverage." In this example, saying the
| newsletters differ in framing and intended audience is
| useful, but calling each "biased in different ways" is a
| throwaway comment (having low informational content in
| the Shannonian sense).
|
| Personally, instead of saying "biased" I tend to ask
| questions like: (a) Who is their intended audience; (b)
| What attributes and qualities consistently shine
| through?; (c) How do they make money? (d) Is the
| publication/source transparent about their approach? (e)
| What is their track record about accuracy, separating
| commentary from factual claims, professional integrity,
| disclosure of conflicts of interest, level of
| intellectual honesty, epistemic standards, and
| corrections?
| xpe wrote:
| > The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement
| bases itself on
|
| Hmmm. Here I will quote some representative sections from
| the announcement [1]:
|
| >> News is broken. We all know it, but we've somehow
| accepted it as inevitable. The endless notifications. The
| clickbait headlines designed to trigger rather than
| inform, driven by relentless ad monetization. The
| exhausting cycle of checking multiple apps throughout the
| day, only to feel more anxious and less informed than
| when we started. This isn't what news was supposed to be.
| We can do better, and create what news should have been
| all along: pure, essential information that respects your
| intelligence and time.
|
| >> .. Kagi News operates on a simple principle:
| understanding the world requires hearing from the world.
| Every day, our system reads thousands of community
| curated RSS feeds from publications across different
| viewpoints and perspectives. We then distill this massive
| information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while
| clearly citing sources.
|
| >> .. We strive for diversity and transparency of
| resources and welcome your contributions to widen
| perspectives. This multi-source approach helps reveal the
| full picture beyond any single viewpoint.
|
| >> .. If you're tired of news that makes you feel worse
| about the world while teaching you less about it, we
| invite you to try a different approach with Kagi News, so
| download it today ...
|
| I don't see any evidence from these selections (nor the
| announcement as a whole) that their approach states,
| assumes, or requires a value/fact dichotomy.
| Additionally, I read various example articles to look for
| evidence that their information architecture group
| information along such a dichotomy.
|
| Lastly, to be transparent, I'll state a claim that I find
| to be true: for _many /most_ statements, it isn't that
| difficult nor contentious to separate out factual claims
| from value claims. We don't need to debate the exact
| percentages or get into the weeds on this unless you
| think it will be useful.
|
| I will grant this -- which is a different point that what
| the commenter above made -- when reading various articles
| from a particular source, it can take effort and analysis
| to suss out the source's level of intellectual honesty,
| ulterior motives, and other questions I mention in my
| sibling comment.
|
| [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-news
| bbarnett wrote:
| Don't worry, all those news articles are of course human
| curated.
|
| (I say this sarcastically and unhappily)
| rwl wrote:
| Indeed! A once per day human-curated news aggregation feed
| used to be called a "newspaper". You can still get them in
| some places, I believe.
| leephillips wrote:
| Hard pass then. I'm a happy Kagi search subscriber, but I
| certainly don't want more AI slop in my life.
|
| I use RSS with newsboat and I get mainstream news by visiting
| individual sites (nytimes.com, etc.) and using the Newshound
| aggregator. Also, of course, HN with https://hn-ai.org/
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > Also, of course, HN with https://hn-ai.org/
|
| Ironically, this submission is at the top of that website
| :)
| cyberax wrote:
| You can also convert regular newspapers into RSS feeds!
| NYTimes and Seattle Times have official RSS feeds, and with
| some scripting you can also get their article contents.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| I'm about as AI-pessimist as it gets, but Kagi's use of LLMs
| is the most tasteful and practical I've seen. It's always
| completely opt-in (e.g. "append a ? to your search query if
| you want an AI summary", as opposed to Google's "append a
| swear word to your search query if you don't want one"), it's
| not pushy, and it's focused on summarizing and aggregating
| content rather than trying to make it up.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| FYI, you can append &udm=14 to Google searches to remove AI
| results and a bunch of the other clutter they've added.
| paws wrote:
| Neat trick, any other params folks might want to know
| about?
| willguest wrote:
| I found this page that describes a variety of search
| parameter: https://susodigital.com/thoughts/the-mystery-
| of-the-google-u...
|
| then i got the machine to write a front-end that
| visualises them and builds a search query for you:
| https://pastebin.com/HNwytYr9
|
| enjoy
| bbarnett wrote:
| I did that, and started getting flagged as a bot. Had to
| search elsewhere(Kagi) full time, or else suffer endless
| "find a bike" nonsense.
|
| I think Google hates the loss of no/few ads or lame
| suggestions.
| pirates wrote:
| Google thinks the same of me and I don't even edit the
| URL. I can have a session working just fine one night and
| come back the next day, open a new tab to search for
| something, and get captcha'd to hell. I'm fairly sure
| they just mess with Firefox on purpose. I won't install
| Brave, Chrome, or Edge out of principle either. Safari
| works fine, but I don't like it.
| Jepacor wrote:
| Google will captcha me on the second or third search if I
| try to use the "site":" advanced keyword to narrow down
| search
|
| I'm sorry I know how to use your tool?? ? Didn't you put
| these keywords in to be used?
| freediver wrote:
| > Kagi as a brand is LLM-optimist
|
| Kagi founder here. I am personally not an LLM-optimist. The
| thing is that I do not think LLMs will bring us to "Star
| Trek" level of useful computers (which I see humans
| eventually getting to) due to LLM's fundamentally broken
| auto-regressive nature. A different approach will be needed.
| Slight nuance but an important one.
|
| Kagi as a brand is building tools in service of its users, no
| particular affinity towards any technologies.
| agiacalone wrote:
| Happy Kagi Ultimate user here, so thank you!
| sally_glance wrote:
| Another LLM-pragmatist here. I don't see why we should
| treat LLMs differently than any other tool in the box.
| Except maybe that it's currently the newest and most shiny,
| albeit still a bit clunky and overpriced.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's not binary - it's a continuum.
|
| When you go to Google News, the way they group together stories
| is AI (pre-LLM technology). Kagi is merely taking it one step
| further.
|
| I agree with your concern. I see this as a convenient grouping,
| and if any interests me I can skip reading the LLM summary and
| just click on the sources they provide (making it similar to
| Google News).
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Kagi is merely taking it one step further.
|
| I would argue creating your own summary is several steps
| beyond an ordering algorithm.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| It cannot be "one step further", because there's a clear
| break in reality between what Google News provides and Kagi
| provides. Google News links to an article that exists in our
| world, 100%, no chance involved. Kagi uses an LLM generate
| text and thus is entirely up to chance.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Devil's advocate here.
|
| Do you know that's what they're doing? They are a search
| engine after all. They do run their own indexer, as well as
| cache results from other sources.
|
| If they're feeding urls to an AI, why can't they validate
| AI output urls are real? Maybe they do.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I don't care.
| timeon wrote:
| > When you go to Google News
|
| You don't and you should not use this one either.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out that this is yet more AI slop. Very
| disappointing for Kagi to do this. I get my money's worth from
| searches, but if I was looking for more features I would want
| them to be not AI-based.
| atonse wrote:
| I'm genuinely asking, but have you tried it?
| https://kite.kagi.com
|
| It actually seems more like an aggregator (like ground.news) to
| me. And pretty much every single sentence cites the original
| article(s).
|
| There are nice summaries within an article. I think what they
| mean is that they generate a meta-article after combining the
| rest of them. There's nothing novel here.
|
| But the presentation of the meta-article and publishing once a
| day feel like great features.
| __jonas wrote:
| I have yeah, to me it looks like what I described in my
| comment above, it's LLM generated text, is it not?
|
| > And pretty much every single sentence cites the original
| article(s).
|
| Yeah but again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think
| asking an LLM to provide a source / citation yields any
| guarantee that the text it generates alongside it is
| accurate.
|
| I also see a lot of text without any citations at all, here
| are three sections (Historical background, Technical details
| and Scientific significance) that don't cite any sources:
| https://kite.kagi.com/s/5e6qq2
| cogman10 wrote:
| Oof, that one is particularly bad because it cites 3
| sources which are all the same article.
|
| Google points to phys and phys is a republish of the MIT
| article.
| rdlw wrote:
| There's even a 'perspectives' section that tries to
| contrast two of the sources, but they're the same
| article.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I can envision the day where an LLM article generator
| starts consuming LLM generated articles which were
| sourced from single articles (co-written by an LLM).
| atonse wrote:
| They are LLM generated summaries, sure.
|
| I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there a
| distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM
| generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being
| transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs (as
| opposed to what? human editors?).
|
| Because at some point when I launched the app, it did say
| summaries might be inaccurate.
|
| Looks like you found an example where it isn't properly
| citing the summaries. My guess is that they will tighten
| this up, because I looked mostly at the first and second
| page and most of those articles seemed to have citations in
| the summaries.
|
| Like most people, I would want those everywhere to guard
| against potential hallucinations. No, the citations don't
| guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you
| read something that makes you go "huh" - the citations give
| you a low-friction opportunity to read more.
|
| But another sibling commenter talked about the phys.org and
| google both pointing to the same thing. I agree, and this
| is exactly an issue I have with other aggregators like
| Ground.news.
|
| They need to build some sort of graph that distills down
| duplicates. Like I don't need the article to say "30
| sources" when 26 of them are just reprints of an AP/Reuters
| wire story. That shouldn't count as 30 sources.
| __jonas wrote:
| > I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there
| a distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM
| generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being
| transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs
| (as opposed to what? human editors?).
|
| The main point of my original comment was that I wanted
| to understand what this is, how it works and whether I
| can trust the information on there, because it wasn't
| completely clear to me.
|
| I'm not super up to date with AI stuff, but my working
| knowledge is that I should never trust the output of an
| LLM and always verify it myself, so therefore I was
| wondering if this is just LLM output or if there is some
| human review process, or a mechanism related to the
| citation functions that makes it output of a different,
| more trusted category.
|
| I did catch the message on the loading screen as well
| now, I do still think it could be a little more clear on
| the individual articles about it being LLM generated
| text, apart from that I think I understand somewhat
| better what it is now.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't
| any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes
| you go "huh" - the citations give you a low-friction
| opportunity to read more.
|
| Either you mean every time you read something interesting
| ("huh") you should check it. But in that case, why bother
| with reading the AI summary in the first place...
|
| Or you mean that any time you read something that sounds
| wrong, you should check it. But in that case, everything
| false in the summaries that happens to _sound_ true to
| you will be confirmed in your mind without you ever
| checking it.
| rdlw wrote:
| > as opposed to what? human editors?
|
| ...yes? If I go to a website called "_ News" (present
| company included), I expect to see either news stories
| aggregated by humans or news stories written and fact
| checked by humans. That's why newspapers have fact
| checking departments, but they're being replaced by
| something with almost none of the utility and its
| proponents are framing the benefits of the old system as
| impossible or impractical.
| atonse wrote:
| I think you misunderstood my comment. I wasn't
| challenging the concept of human editors and fact
| checkers. I was asking a parent for a clarification of
| what the parent post meant by outlining that they were
| LLM generated summaries.
|
| Like, I was asking whether they were expecting the
| curation/summarization to be done by humans at Kagi News.
| hadlock wrote:
| Publishing once a day to remove the "slot machine dopamine
| hit" is worth it for that alone. I have forever been looking
| for a peer/replacement to Google News, I was about to pony up
| for a Ground News subscription but I'll probably hold off for
| a couple more months. Alternatives to google news have been
| sorely lacking for over a decade, especially since google
| news got their mobile-first redesign which significantly and
| permanently weakened the product to meet some product
| manager's bonus-linked KPI. One more product to wean off the
| google mothership. Gmail is gonna be real hard though.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Gmail is gonna be real hard though.
|
| Gmail seems like the easiest piece of the Google puzzle to
| replace. Different calendar systems have different quirks
| around repeating events, you sometimes need to try a
| variety of search engines to find what you're looking for,
| Docs aren't bug-for-bug equivalent to the Office or iCloud
| competitors, YouTube has audience, monetization, and
| hosting scale... Gmail is just "make an email account with
| a different provider and switch all of your accounts to use
| the new address." They don't even give you that much
| storage for free Gmail; it's 15GB, which lots of other
| email providers can match (especially paid ones). You can
| import your old emails to your new provider or just store
| them offline with a variety of email clients.
|
| Is updating all of your accounts (and telling your contacts
| about the new address) what you consider to be the hard
| part, or do you actually use any Gmail-specific features?
| Genuinely curious, as I tend to disregard almost all mail-
| provider-specific features that any of my mail providers
| try to get me excited about (Gmail occasionally adds some
| new trick, but Zoho Mail is especially bad about making me
| roll my eyes with their new feature notifications).
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I am sticking with this reprehensible company for email
| because their spam detection is awesome and I have found
| no clear measurements of detection to reasonably compare.
| I'd love to be proven wrong!
| gnud wrote:
| Switched from Gmail to Fastmail about 10 years ago.
|
| 2-3 spam emails slip through every week, and sometimes a
| false positive happens when I sign up for something new.
| I don't see this as a huge problem, and I doubt Gmail is
| significantly better.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm firmly on the side of "AI" skepticism, but even I have to
| admit that this is a very good use of the tech. LLMs generally
| do a great job at summarizing text, which is essentially what
| this is. The sources could be statically defined in advance,
| given that they know where they pull the information from, so I
| don't think the LLM generates that content.
|
| So if this automates the process of fetching the top news from
| a static list of news sites and summarizing the content in a
| specific structure, there's not much that can go wrong there.
| There's a very small chance that the LLM would hallucinate when
| asked to summarize a relatively short amount of text.
| threetonesun wrote:
| We used to do this with a human created meta tag but I guess
| this is better?
| input_sh wrote:
| It's useful for the users, but tragically bad for anyone
| involved with journalism. Not that they're not used to
| getting fucked by search engines at this point, be it via
| AMP, instant answers, or AI overviews.
|
| Not that the userbase of 50k is big enough to matter right
| now, but still...
| atonse wrote:
| All this is doing is aggregating RSS feeds and linking to
| the original articles.
|
| So this might result in lower traffic for "anyone involved
| in journalism" - but the constant doomscrolling is worse
| for society. So I think we can all agree that the industry
| needs to veer towards less quantity and more quality.
| input_sh wrote:
| RSS feeds are meant to be used by actual users, not
| regurgitated publicly. RSS readers at the very least have
| have author info visible and its users tend to be
| reported to website's analytics with a special user
| agent.
| imiric wrote:
| What journalism? Most of these sites copy their content
| from each other or social media, and give it their own
| spin. Nowadays most of them use AI anyway.
|
| Actual journalism doesn't rely on advertising, and is
| subscription based. Anyone interested in that is already
| subscribed to those sources, but that is not the audience
| this service is aiming for. Some people only want to spend
| a few minutes a day catching up with major events, and this
| service can do that for them. They're not the same people
| who would spend hours on news sites, so these sites are not
| missing any traffic.
| malnourish wrote:
| Broadly agreed, I don't consider the CBS (national) news
| website to be a source of hard hitting journalism;
| Reuters, however, is. Reuters and the AP are often the
| source of these news stations.
|
| I continue to subscribe to Reuters because of the quality
| of journalism and reporting. I have also started using
| Kagi News. They are not incompatible.
| __jonas wrote:
| I see! One thing I'm wondering: They say they are fetching
| the content from the RSS feeds of news outlets rather than
| scraping them, I haven't used RSS in a bit, but I recall most
| news outlets would usually not include the full article in
| their feed but just the headline or a small summary. I'd be
| worried that articles with misleading headlines (which are
| not uncommon) might cause this tool to generate incorrect
| news items, is that not a concern?
| imiric wrote:
| That's a fair concern, and I would prefer it if they
| scraped the sites instead. They could balance this out by
| favoring content from sites that do provide the entire
| article in their feeds, but that could lead to bias
| problems. Maybe this is why their own summaries are short.
| We can't know for sure unless they explain how it works.
| saghm wrote:
| If the parent commenter is correct, the concern I'd have
| would be about transparency. Even if it's good at what it
| does, I don't think we're anywhere close to a place as a
| society where it shouldn't be explicit when it's being used
| for something like this.
| zwnow wrote:
| This also is a really ignorant approach to data poisoning
| issues in the LLM space. LLMs can easily be misused as
| propaganda machines...
| doublerebel wrote:
| Disappointing. Non-LLM NLP summarization is actually rather
| good these days. It works by finding the key sentences in the
| text and extracting the relevant sections, no possibility for
| hallucination. No need to go full AI for this feature.
| tene80i wrote:
| That's interesting. Could you share an example or a resource
| about this?
| raincole wrote:
| Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN.
| Perhaps people's hatred towards Google outweighs that of LLM.
|
| Imagine if Google news use LLM to show summaries to the users
| without explicitly saying it's AI on the UI.
|
| Ironically, one of the first LLM-induced mistakes experienced
| by average people was a news summary:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o.amp
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN.
|
| Kagi made search useful again, and their genAI stuff can be
| easily ignored. Best of both worlds -- it remains useful for
| people like myself who don't want genAI involved, but there's
| genAI stuff for people who like that sort of thing.
|
| That said, if their genAI stuff gets to be too hard to
| ignore, then I'd stop using or praising Kagi.
|
| That this is about news also makes it less problematic for
| me. I just won't see it at all, since I don't go to Kagi for
| news in the first place.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm not against AI summaries if they are marked as so.
| Sneakily sliding LLM under the table is a dark pattern no
| matter how I interpret their intentions.
|
| Even Google calls the overview box AI Overview (not saying
| it doesn't hurt content hosting sites.)
| kiicia wrote:
| It also publishes normal unabridged rss feed that you can read
| with rss reader of your choice, it looks like great news source
| jama211 wrote:
| I am fine with it using AI but it makes me feel pretty icky
| that they didn't mention that this was ai/llm generated at any
| point in this article. That's a no-no IMO, and has turned me
| off this pretty strongly.
| stavros wrote:
| Why do you care what technology was used to generate the
| summaries? What if they had used their old NLP summarizer?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| They don't explicitly say they generate summaries at any
| point in the article. In fact I read it and though this was
| just some fancy RSS aggregator. The way they describe the
| "daily briefing" is extremely ambiguous.
| stavros wrote:
| OK, but I'd like to repeat my question here: Why do you
| care how the summary was generated?
| edaemon wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked, but it's useful to know if
| the summary was generated using a method prone to
| inaccuracy.
| stavros wrote:
| That's all methods, though. Have you seen humans?
| motoxpro wrote:
| In this situation, humans are more accurate, for now, so
| it's good information to have.
|
| Same as I would like to know if humans self assessed in a
| study about how well they drive vs the empirical
| evidence. Humans just aren't that good at that task so it
| would be good to know coming in.
|
| Just call it Kagi Vibes instead of Kagi News as news has
| a higher bar (at least for me)
| stavros wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree that humans are more accurate at
| summarizing, but I don't have data, so I'll take your
| word for it.
| motoxpro wrote:
| I'd point to Wikipedia. You can say the content is
| "wrong". But the links go to the right place.
| willguest wrote:
| different kinds of inaccuracy
| jama211 wrote:
| I find it more distasteful that they weren't transparent
| about their method than the method being AI.
| edaemon wrote:
| Sure, but it's useful to know what kind of inaccuracies
| to look for.
| jama211 wrote:
| Many reasons, if this news were summarised by humans I
| would prefer it, one example reason is with AI summaries I
| know to look out for hallucinations.
|
| To be honest though that's not the point. I'm more annoyed
| they weren't transparent about their methods than I am
| about them using AI.
| bhrlady wrote:
| Kagi team member here who helped author that blog post
| announcement. That's a fair point, and we've updated the
| post to now clearly mention that we use AI for the daily
| briefing. Thank you for your feedback!
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| > when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information
| it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those
| are correct
|
| A lot of times when I ask for a source, I get broken links. I'm
| not sure if the links existed at one point, or if the LLM is
| just hallucinating where it thinks a link should exist. CDN
| libraries, for example. Or sources to specific laws.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > A lot of times when I ask for a source,
|
| They'll do pretty much everything you ask of them, so unless
| the text actually come from some source (via tool calls,
| injecting content into the context or other way), they'll
| make up a source rather than doing nothing, unless prompted
| otherwise.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| They could make up source, but ChatGPT is an actual app
| with complicated backend, not dumb pipe between textedit
| and GPU. Surely they could verify on server side every link
| they output to user before including it in the answer. I'm
| sure Codex will implement it in no time!
| therein wrote:
| They surely can detect it, but what are they going to do
| after detecting it? Loop the last job with a different
| seed and hope that the model doesn't lie through its
| teeth? They won't be doing it because the model will
| gladly generate you a fake source on the next retry too.
| doikor wrote:
| This is actually harder then most think. The chances of
| your app doing this check being bot detected/blocked is
| very high.
|
| (unless you are Google etc which are specifically let in
| to get the article indexed into search)
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Maybe they should be trained on the understanding that
| making up a source is not "doing what you ask of them" when
| you ask for a source. It's actually the exact opposite of
| the "doing what you asked, not what you wanted" trope--
| it's providing something it thinks you want instead of
| providing what you asked for (or being honest/erroring out
| that it can't).
| ssivark wrote:
| Think for a second about what that means... this is a
| very easy thing to do IFF we already had a general
| purpose intelligence.
|
| How do you make an LLM _understand_ that it must only
| give factual sources? Just some naive RL with positive
| reward on the correct sources and negative reward on
| incorrect sources is not enough -- there are obscenely
| many more hallucinated sources possible, and the set of
| correct sources is a set of insanely tiny measure.
| fluoridation wrote:
| "Easy". You make the model distinguish between
| information and references to information. Information
| may be fabricated (for example, a fictional book is
| mostly composed of lies) but references are assumed to be
| factual (a link does point to something and is related to
| something). Factual information is true only to the
| degree that it is conveyed exactly, so the model needs to
| be able to store and reproduce references verbatim.
|
| Of course, "easy" is in quotes because none of this is
| easy. It's just easier than AGI.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Wrong, just ask it about some non existent famous
| historical person and it will most likely tell you it didnt
| exist.
| instagib wrote:
| On my llm, I have a prompt that condenses down to:
|
| For every line of text output, give me a full MLA annotated
| source. If you cannot then say your source does not exist
| or you are generating information based on multiple sources
| then give me those sources. If you cannot do that, print
| that you need more information to respond properly.
|
| Every new model I mess with needs a slightly different
| prompt due to safeguards or source protections. It is
| interesting when it lists a source that I physically own
| and their training data is deteriorated.
| nicbou wrote:
| I monitor 404 errors on my website. ChatGPT frequently sends
| traffic to pages that never existed. Sometimes the
| information they refer to has never existed on my website.
|
| For example: "/glossary/love-parade" - There is no mention of
| this on my website. "/guides/blue-card-germany" has always
| been at "/guides/blue-card". I don't know what "/guides/cost-
| of-beer-distribution" even refers to.
| cgsmith wrote:
| Definitely need an LLM to just generate it automatically on
| the fly! Welcome to the future! (Just kidding please don't
| (generate automatically))
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Not quite this, but still relevant: https://www.ty-
| penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/
| skysthelimitt wrote:
| i believe an llm output is fine for giving an overview if
| provided the articles, if you want a detailed overview you
| should be reading the articles anyways.
| j2kun wrote:
| This seems like the opposite of "privacy by design"
|
| > Privacy by design: Your reading habits belong to you. We
| don't track, profile, or monetize your attention. You remain
| the customer and not the product.
|
| But the person running the LLM surely does.
| m4r71n wrote:
| How would the LLM provider get any information about your
| reading habits from the app? The LLM is used _before_ the
| news content is served to you, the reader.
| ivape wrote:
| ML did not figure out every solution on planet earth. It
| figured out the LLM, and that is the giant's shoulder most apps
| will stand on.
| Harmon758 wrote:
| Just for concrete confirmation that LLM(s) are being used,
| there's an open issue on the GitHub repository, on
| hallucinations with made up information, where a Kagi employee
| specifically mentions "an LLM hallucination problem":
|
| https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
|
| There's also a line at the bottom of the about page at
| https://kite.kagi.com/about that says "Summaries may contain
| errors. Please verify important information."
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Love how it only took 8 years to go from "Fake News!" to
| "News May Be Fake"
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's too much demand for fake news, plenty of subsidy
| for it, and it's far easier to make.
|
| Non fake news is going to be restricted to pay services
| like Bloomberg terminals.
| byearthithatius wrote:
| It is getting easier and easier to fake stuff and there
| are becoming less and less fully trusted institutions. So
| sadly I think you are right. Its scary but we are likely
| heading towards a future where you need to pay to get
| verified information and that itself will likely be
| segmented to different subscriptions for what information
| you want.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| > It is getting easier and easier to fake stuff
|
| This is why the moon landing hoax was revolutionary in
| the 60's. The size of this project was enormous.
| fgalhwrg wrote:
| As an American, confirmation that the landing was a hoax
| would make me even prouder than my current belief that it
| was real.
| bbor wrote:
| To take a moment to be a hopeless Stan for one of my all-time
| favorite companies: I don't think the summary above yours is
| fair, and I see why they don't center the summary part of it.
|
| Unlike the disastrous Apple feature from earlier this year
| (which is still available, somehow!), this isn't trying to
| transform individual articles. Rather, it's focused on
| capturing broader trends and giving just enough info to
| decide whether to click into any of the source articles. That
| seems like a much smaller, more achievable scope than Apple's
| feature, and as always, open-source helps work like this a
| _ton_.
|
| I, for one, like it! I'll try it out. Seems better than my
| current sources for a quick list of daily links, that's for
| sure (namely Reddit News, Apple News, Bluesky in general, and
| a few industry newsletters).
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Man am I tired of this stuff.
| malfist wrote:
| My LLM Investor Agent says we must keep investing in AI,
| tulips will always be worth more at a later date
| viraptor wrote:
| > when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information
| it outputs,
|
| Services listing sources, like Kagi news, perplexity and others
| don't do that. They start with known links and run LLMs on that
| content. They don't ask LLMs to come up with links based on the
| question.
| __jonas wrote:
| That is what I mean yeah, I'm not saying it's fabricating
| sources from training data, that would obviously be
| impossible for news articles, I'm saying if you give it a
| list of articles A, B and C including their content in the
| context and ask 'what is the foo of bar?' and it responds
| 'the foo of bar is baz, source: article B paragraph 2', that
| does not tell you whether the output is actually correct, or
| contained in the cited source at all, unless you manually
| verify it.
| Onavo wrote:
| Yes, they are not the only player here. Quite a few companies
| are doing this, if you use Perplexity, they also have a news
| tab with the exact feature set.
| xpe wrote:
| > if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the
| exact feature set
|
| "Exact" is far from accurate. I just did a side-by-side
| comparison. To name only two obvious differences:
|
| A. At the top level, Perplexity has a "Discover" tab [1] --
| not titled "News". That leads to a AAF page with the endless-
| scroll anti-pattern (see [2] [3] for other examples). Kagi
| News [4] presents a short list of ~7ish items without images.
|
| B. At the detail-page level, Kagi organizes their content
| differently (with more detail, including "sources",
| "highlights", "perspectives", "historical background", and
| "quick questions"). Perplexity only has content with sources
| and "discover more". You can verify for yourself.
|
| [1]: https://www.perplexity.ai/discover
|
| [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/e0a99k/cnn_app_is
| _ann...
|
| [3]: https://www.tumblr.com/make-me-
| imagine/614701109842444288/an...
|
| [4]: https://kite.kagi.com
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yeah. I really like Kagi. This is a terrible idea.
|
| 1. It seems to omit key facts from most stories.
|
| 2. No economic value is returned to the sources doing the
| original reporting. This is not okay.
|
| 3. If your summary device makes a mistake, and it will, you are
| absolutely on the hook for libel.
|
| There seem to be some misunderstandings about what news is and
| what's makes it well-executed. It's not the average, it's the
| deepest and most accurate reporting. If anyone from the Kagi
| team wants to discuss, I'm a paying member and I know this
| field really, really well.
| hendersoon wrote:
| I would love to replace google/apple news, but publishing once
| daily doesn't work for me.
| lblume wrote:
| Why not? Is it really that important for you to know of events
| a few hours earlier?
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Nextcloud News works just fine, is free, is as biased as the
| feeds you configure and no more, does not (yet...)
| introduce/intrude LLM slop, is free software (beer/freedom) and
| has been around for a long long time. You can configure it any
| way you want, the default update interval is 5 minutes which
| should be enough for even the most FOMO-affected 'news' junkie.
| Of course the actual updates depend on the RSS sources but if
| you configure a number of active feeds you'll get updates every
| few minutes.
|
| https://github.com/nextcloud/news
| hootguy wrote:
| Ground offers a paid service that summarizes a broad range of
| sources and intentionally helps you escape your filter bubble,
| https://ground.news/.
| xetera wrote:
| I'm just waiting for whatever shady practice or controversy
| behind this infinite YouTube sponsorship is to finally come out
| like all the others have.
| smlacy wrote:
| This looks awesome, but there's absolutely no way I'm installing
| an app for this, sorry.
| treetalker wrote:
| So don't! kite.kagi.com.
| mac-attack wrote:
| Big news junkie but I don't feel the need to buy into Kagi's
| ecosphere personally as a SearXNG user. The article touches on
| signal over noise and I have found two solutions that work for me
| as a news junkie:
|
| News Minimalist [1] and Boring Report [2]. Both aggregate news
| and (IMO) most importantly provide links from multiple outlets
| for the same stories. Really made me notice the clickbait and
| allows me to be more selective in choosing reputable sources.
|
| Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance,
| while the latter summarizes articles. (That doesn't feel useful
| for supporting journalism as a whole so I typically click through
| and read the articles unless I don't like the outlet reporting)
|
| [1] https://www.newsminimalist.com/
|
| [2] https://www.boringreport.org/app
| leakycap wrote:
| News Minimalist with the cute turtle header has become my daily
| "newspaper"
|
| > _Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on
| importance_
|
| I like this! If I'm in a rush, I check for very high priority
| stories. Usually there are 3 or even none. Done!
|
| On days I want to sit back and read, it provides nice sources.
| not--felix wrote:
| I'm biased because I build my own RSS reader[0] and I feel that
| with this approach the thing I love the most about RSS, to follow
| small niche sources gets lost. That said, I think for big news it
| could be great.
|
| [0] https://ivyreader.com
| clcaev wrote:
| What is the business model / exit strategy for Kagi's founders
| and investors? What is the news curation process and its relation
| to the public interest?
|
| Are these articulated in a manner which gives stakeholders
| (investors, users, and staff) assurances and standing?
|
| ...
|
| What are competitors and collaborators in this space? Semafor
| seems to have a similar product, what are the differentiators
| and/or collaboration opportunities?
|
| ...
|
| Netflix was subscription only, till it was "pay to get rid of
| ads". Then there is the whole business of profiling customer
| interest, etc.
|
| We have product labeling for food, why not web services?
| cogman10 wrote:
| And just like Netflix, if kagi turns into paid Google I'll
| cancel my subscription.
|
| IDK what their future plans are, but there current plans work
| well for me as a consumer.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Read the "About" section of the page.
| guilamu wrote:
| Looks pretty good at first sight.
|
| However, I set my feed up on the web app, seeing that it should
| sync on "all my devices".
|
| Next, I installed the Android app, and mybe I missed something,
| but I don't see any way to connect to my Kagi account.
|
| So much for syncing...
| dani_kagi wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, it's on our list.
| e40 wrote:
| I'm not affiliated, but I've used https://www.memeorandum.com/
| for more than a decade.
|
| Gives me a good high-level view of the news. I'm a Kagi customer
| and I definitely don't want anything they do with the news.
| bdunks wrote:
| > I'm a Kagi customer and I definitely don't want anything they
| do with the news.
|
| Can you expand on why?
| corysama wrote:
| Can anyone in here explain why there are so many vague "I
| don't trust Kagi" comments in here? I don't know who they
| are. And, I haven't seen anyone expand on why.
| tolerance wrote:
| This is it. This the one. How have I never heard of this and
| its related services? It looks perfect. Your own blog is
| interesting too.
| rsingel wrote:
| Gabe Rivera has been doing that right for almost 20 years.
|
| If you haven't seen it there's also an amazing feature that you
| can go back and see the homepage as it was from any point in
| time in the last 20 years
| joshstrange wrote:
| I wish there was a way to look at a previous day's news. I can't
| seem to find any buttons/UI that lets you look at news from any
| day but today.
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's a good idea. If they implement it, I would however
| suggest putting a limit on to it - perhaps only let you see the
| news within the last week/month.
| luxurytent wrote:
| This seems to go against the principle of the product (see
| endless scroll)
|
| If you missed a day of news, whatever was really important will
| re-surface in today's news (major world incident)
|
| Otherwise, perhaps what was missed is noise!
| khaleel-kagi wrote:
| We've Time Travel feature coming soon to both the web and
| mobile apps. It'll allow you to browse the stories from any
| date since we started aggregating news ;)
| andhuman wrote:
| Nice idea, I've been toying around the idea of consuming news
| only once per day. But for me I think I want an actual newspaper
| with in depth articles rather than short news posts from online
| news.
| imiric wrote:
| I've been using this since the beta launch, and I really like it.
| They're spot on about news being broken.
|
| That said, I do think the service could be improved. Often the
| summary is a very short blurb that forces me to go to one of the
| original sites for the content, and hopefully land on one that is
| not obnoxious to use, which kind of defeats the purpose. The
| event timeline sounds interesting, but when it essentially shows
| 2 or 3 events that are obvious from the context, it's not so
| useful in practice. I always skip the "Quick questions" section,
| since it reads like an elementary school report, and the
| questions are really basic. How about letting me ask the
| questions I want?
|
| Also:
|
| > We don't scrape content from websites. Instead, we use publicly
| available RSS feeds that publishers choose to provide.
|
| I think this is a mistake. Most publishers are hostile to RSS and
| often don't offer it. Scraping is, unfortunately, a requirement
| if you want to consume public content on your own terms, which is
| the entire point of this service. Besides, scraping is how all
| search engines generate their index, so as long as the bot is
| well behaved and doesn't hammer the site, follows robots.txt or
| perhaps even bends the rules a bit, it should be fine. I would
| rather Kagi wasn't so respectful of publishers' wishes, if that
| would allow them to offer a better service. I understand if they
| want to avoid getting in trouble with publishers, but the
| alternative would be better for their users.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| lol I added 'trump', 'republican', and 'democrat' as custom
| filter keywords and now it's showing zero stories in the USA
| category. So apparently, that category is a stand in for
| politics? Although I have the Thai category enabled (since I live
| there) and that's all run of the mill national (non political)
| news.
|
| Nice release nonetheless!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's probably hard to find an article these days that doesn't
| mention one of those words (except maybe celebrity gossip). The
| world we live in.
| BeetleB wrote:
| In other words, this is exposing a long standing flaw in
| journalism. I know things are super polarized now, but even
| 20 years ago, when mentioning a Congressperson regarding a
| particular social problem, they would specify if he was a
| Democrat/Republican.
|
| I really don't need to know which party he is part of. If the
| article was about a party's stance, it makes sense - but the
| article is about one politician.
| 1_1xdev1 wrote:
| Sure you do, to understand actual patterns in actions of
| members of the party.
|
| And ignoring that, it's general context. Part of the job of
| a journalist.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > to understand actual patterns in actions of members of
| the party.
|
| Or to construct patterns that don't reflect reality.
|
| Should we also list their ages, ethnicity, religious
| affiliation(s) in each article mentioning a
| Congressperson and construct those patterns as well?
|
| Sorry, I'd like to think on my own.
| boxed wrote:
| I think a fundamental issue with news is that it doesn't try to
| push people to have a more correct mental model of the world.
|
| Some things that could change that:
|
| - Deep fact checking. Community Notes on twitter do a better job
| at this than any other system I've seen. The reason it doesn't
| really work in practice is that the stream of misinformation and
| confusion is orders of magnitude larger than the Community Notes
| community. A news app should not have that scalability issue.
|
| - Follow up. If I read something that later turns out to be false
| _I need to be notified of that_. This unfortunately requires that
| the app track what I have read.
|
| - Context. If you have a news article about a stabbing, it sounds
| like stabbings are up. The context that they are going up or down
| statistically is extremely relevant. The lack of context can turn
| a tiny truth into a bigger lie.
|
| - Deep confusion analysis. Figuring out where people are confused
| statistically and focusing on trying to manage that
| misinformation gap is not something that is dealt with at all. I
| would like to become LESS confused by information sources not
| more.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| That's just media literacy I think. I would add to that
| "Sourcing": if the article just parrots some press release or
| badly summarizes some paper, it should at least link to that
| but they rarely do. Then it is hard to find the primary source,
| because you'll only find articles about it, not the actual
| primary source that they bury in google search.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Feels good to be free from Google, even if it costs money.
| Sweepi wrote:
| "Indonesia school collapse leaves 38 missing, 77 hurt" is
| categorized as "Disaster". I cannot see where to disable this
| category.
| TanishqSingla wrote:
| The UI looks neat, can't wait to try this out
| sciencejerk wrote:
| Haters gonna hate, but I just downloaded Kagi News and LOVE it. I
| want to QUICKLY see all the news headlines and drill deeper in as
| needed, and Kagi News seems to do exactly this.
| embit wrote:
| Another one you can check out is one I have made for myself and
| used by friends [1], although only tech news. It also uses more
| than 100 RSS feeds to aggregate the top 10 news every few hours.
| Also has tags that can be used to read topic related news.
|
| [1] https://embit.ca
| acd wrote:
| Any payments to journalists and news sites?
| sidrag22 wrote:
| As much as i hate modern news sites and our ad riddled culture,
| its pretty hard to ignore that this tool couldn't exist without
| the articles that those same news sites are creating. 100 years
| ago, imagine a service that just took all newspapers and
| summarized them like this somehow, and everyone knew they had
| no actual writers but just an advanced printer that could merge
| articles or some goofy w/e.
|
| can't imagine it would go over well in the court system.
| d--b wrote:
| or you could read the new york times
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I really like the balance here. No "brand names" in the headline
| summaries, no imagery or videos on the homepage, summarize
| multiple sources. It's daily so no need to refresh.
|
| I've been really enjoying Semafor's emails too, but their 2x a
| day is tough for me to keep up with. I'll try to get a habit of
| looking at Kagi News to stay informed.
| patrakov wrote:
| Feedback (if someone reads it): offer an option to translate
| everything to English. For example, news from/about Russia are in
| Russian, and thus I can't meaningfully share them to non-
| Russians.
|
| That's despite the appropriate HTTP header:
|
| Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
| khaleel-kagi wrote:
| Hey, thanks patrakov for trying the app! Users can actually
| change the content language of the app from Settings. All
| stories will be automatically translated to their preferred
| language.
|
| When you share a Russian story with a non-russian speaker, they
| will still be able to read the story in their own set Content
| Language in the Settings. We're working on improving the UX of
| language, sharing a story, and more.
| jwitchel wrote:
| I've been using Kagi search for a while now and frankly it's
| fantastic. Google looks like AOL to me now.
|
| These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly
| what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As
| far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I never found the lowest most common denominator news "curation"
| to be at all interesting, let alone algorithmically driven ones.
| The issue with news has nothing to do with curation of mainstream
| media. There is very little value in reading a state department
| or law enforcement press release summarized by some overworked
| stenographer/journalist. Or some NGO's push to drive some
| nondescript narrative uncritically parroted. Or some SEO driven
| click bait or tragedy porn.
|
| If you wanted to fix the news you'd begin by critically curating
| mainstream news and throwing 80% of it in the trash, then you'd
| add 80% of material and critical analysis back to the 20% that
| had none of that.
| tantalor wrote:
| The grounding is really strange.
|
| This example includes a Reddit post as a source:
|
| https://kite.kagi.com/s/hjgy55
|
| But that post is actually a link to reuters.com
|
| There is also a list of "citations" which are referenced from the
| generated text, and "sources" which are not referenced anywhere.
| It's not clear if they used reddit or reuters to generate any of
| the text.
|
| I also see lots of citations to "common knowledge"... which is
| um, weird.
|
| For example:
|
| > National Guard activation: Guard forces can serve under state
| control (Title 32) or be federalized (Title 10), which determines
| who directs missions and the scope of authority [*].
|
| Is this common knowledge?
| giorgio-kagi wrote:
| Hey - Reddit is included as a source because posts can contain
| firsthand accounts and independent analysis. The RSS feed we
| use from Reddit provides the post title and text. So to answer
| your question, when you see Reddit as a source we are using the
| aforementioned data, not what it links to.
|
| About "common knowledge" sources - we validate all content for
| accuracy. When the LLM needs to add context that's missing from
| sources (e.g. historical background), we mark these as "common
| knowledge" since this generated content can't be validated
| against the original sources. You're right that your example
| isn't common knowledge at all, we'll work on adding actual
| sources for these claims too.
|
| Thanks for trying it out!
| tantalor wrote:
| If the content can't be grounded then it should be dropped.
| drewbitt wrote:
| I'm probably online too much, but a lot of the news I see is from
| yesterday. Supposedly it just refreshed with today's news, but
| does that really clear out anything older if some outlets publish
| their stories later than others? I would not describe some of
| this as "today's headlines"
| eterm wrote:
| You might be online too much if you don't consider something
| that happened yesterday to be news.
|
| An attitude of "Hook me up to the novelty juice, this is old
| weak sauce", is a sign of internet / news addiction.
| drewbitt wrote:
| I don't _need_ the latest news. I would just like to know if
| something published happened yesterday or today at a glance.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I like this a lot, going to try it! One issue i have though is in
| the current world of LLMs scraping content, i'd prefer there to
| be more discussion about compensation of authors.
|
| I know the announcement page talks about not scraping, but to me
| personally the value i see in this product is that i don't have
| to go to those ad ridden, poorly organized and often terrible
| pages of the authors. Which then seems really unfair to the
| actual content providers.
|
| I'd like to see this type of service cost $3-5/m ontop of my
| normal Kagi sub to compensate the authors of the articles i read.
| A Streaming Music model for news, ish.
|
| This proposed value is quite small, but my assumption is only a
| very small amount of money would reach them from my ad views
| anyway so a $10/m addition feels extreme to me.
| flyer23 wrote:
| I AM using it for a long time, its brilliant but as any ai can
| hallucinate. Joining 4 separate technical topics about 4
| different companies and initiatives is funny but misleading. Wont
| go back though - HN+Kite is all I do.
| clueless wrote:
| Looks like a decentralize and locally hosted version of
| https://particle.news
| HelloUsername wrote:
| My thoughts too! Strange that got much less traction when the
| app was posted half a year ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698590
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Awesome, i like it a lot!
|
| Some UX friction i noticed: To get back to the homepage from an
| article, i have to click on the article headline. While this is
| elegant and you likely get used to it, once you know it, it's not
| exactly intuitive.
| skybrian wrote:
| Do the checkmarks do anything? I expected them to disappear after
| a reload (like hiding a post on Hacker News), but apparently
| that's not what they're for.
|
| "Mark as read" checks all the checkmarks, but since they're still
| there after a reload, I don't see the point.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| The really weird thing to me is that the check marks don't
| persist across categories. I.e. I marked the story about
| Youtube as "read" in the "World" tab, but it doesn't get a
| check in the "USA" tab. Seems like the feature is pretty half
| baked.
| 4dm1r4lg3n3r4l wrote:
| It automatically marks stuff you've seen - it's just a visual
| cue. Similar to how search engines (like Google) show visited
| links with a different color.
|
| I think keeping them on the page instead of automatically
| hiding them makes more sense for a product that's trying to
| update their news feed once per day. You feel more in control,
| as if it's not a stream of never-ending stories, but rather a
| fixed amount of stories that you can realistically power
| through. Seeing all items checked sort-of supports this
| philosophy.
| skybrian wrote:
| For me, this is fairly useless because it mostly displays
| stories I've already seen elsewhere.
|
| A news site has to display some uncommon stories to have any
| appeal.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >News is broken. We all know it, but we've somehow accepted it as
| inevitable.
|
| News is broken because journalism is no longer a viable career
| path. No amount of RSS aggregators will fix that.
| aleatorianator wrote:
| that "Kagi News" is at the top of "Hacker News" speaks volumes
| about the state of the "hacker"
| JohnFen wrote:
| HN has never really been for or about hackers.
| tower-shield wrote:
| I like Kagi and want them to succeed. But currently (according to
| LinkedIn) theres 26 employees. They are building search, LLM
| assistant wrappers, a browser and now news. Please don't
| overextend the same way Proton is currently doing.
| hn111 wrote:
| I used to love Proton, but they focus too much on feature
| development instead of stability and fixing long-standing bugs.
| E.g. zooming has been broken for years in ProtonMail on iOS.
| Some emails won't even render at all :(
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| FWIW, I have not had any issues with email rendering in the
| iOS app so YMMV. Have not noticed any zooming problems.
| DavideNL wrote:
| Yup, i quit Proton (Mail) for the same reason. I had been
| using it for a long time... There are so many little bugs and
| annoyances, it's frustrating to see new features being
| released all the time while obvious bugs and shortcomings are
| not fixed.
|
| It was a very big relief going back to a normal email client.
|
| I still support Proton (i pay for Proton VPN) and hope they
| will succeed in their mission.
| bl4ckneon wrote:
| How is Proton over extending? All of their services are pretty
| great imo. I'm happy with them. Doesn't mean I am ever going to
| use their bitcoin wallet app thing, but if they want to build
| it, great, they know their customer base so it's probably not
| out of left field.
| boxerab wrote:
| When I filter on Kirk, I get No Results Found - seems legit.
| hexator wrote:
| If you read the post, you would learn that it only reports on
| news from the same day.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Trump just said we should use the military on American
| cities...and it's not reported in Kagi news. That's a showstopper
| for me.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| When? It's updated once daily and afaik he's been doing that
| for months hasn't he?
| ctrlp wrote:
| There is almost no good reason to keep up with current events in
| a "news feed" style. I'd maybe like a feed that has a 1 month
| window summarizing any news cycle that survived 3 days. If it
| came and went in one cycle, then just don't bother about it. Most
| of the news is just propaganda anyway. I suppose it's wise to
| have a sense of the "current thing" so you don't put your foot in
| it with colleagues who are inhabiting a tighter timeline than you
| are, but other than that there doesn't seem to be many use cases
| for keeping tabs in a news feed. Maybe if you're in the business
| of disrupting/reinforcing people's OODA loops you might need to
| know some of this stuff, but otherwise it's just a self-own to
| keep up with the news.
| mr_machine wrote:
| I'd like to install and try this, but I don't use Google Play and
| it's not in F-Droid. Wish they'd just make an APK available.
| xnacly wrote:
| Same here, the website seems to be working fine on mobile tho
| dani_kagi wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, we are looking into providing the app
| without any Play services dependencies.
| tuckwat wrote:
| It actually seems nice. I realize Reddit is not a news source but
| it used to be a great way to see current events and get level-
| headed takes on those events. This approach could be a better
| non-biased* alternative.
|
| * for now
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Between this app (kagi) and the Harmony hacknernews client, I'm
| super happy if this is my only content consumption on the
| internet/smartphone. The kagi app just needs a black/oled theme
| please, and can we bump the aricles from 12 to 20 or 30? 12 is
| just a tiny bit shy.
| liquid_thyme wrote:
| Is the future where we pay a premium for human generated content?
| kubafu wrote:
| This but let me choose over what period I want news summarised.
| Daily is too often, even week is (at least to me).
|
| Let me open the app once a month and see a summary of what has
| happened over it.
| timeinput wrote:
| This defiantly doesn't do exactly what you want, but you might
| enjoy Delayed Gratification at https://www.slow-journalism.com/
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been using this for a few days now. I stumbled across it in
| the App Store last week.
|
| I hoping this can fill a gap for me currently. I want something
| that will give me broad awareness of big news I should probably
| know about, that's not a 24 hour firehose of news.
|
| I like the once-per-day update and the relatively short list of
| stories. The jury is still out on how sticky it will be, in terms
| of being my go-to place for a daily update.
| dingaling wrote:
| The Economist's 'World in Brief' might appeal:
|
| https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief
| fresh_broccoli wrote:
| I think this is the wrong direction. We need better journalism,
| not better summarizing aggregators.
|
| Summaries are no substitute for real articles, even if they're
| generated by hand (and these apparently are not). Summaries are
| bound to strip the information of context, important details and
| analysis. There's also no accountability for the contents.
|
| Sure, there are links to the actual articles, but let's not kid
| ourselves that most people are going to read them. Why would they
| need a summarizing service otherwise? Especially if there are 20
| sources of varying quality.
|
| There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed. I'll be harsh: this
| service strikes me as informationally illiterate person's idea of
| what getting informed is like.
| fresh_broccoli wrote:
| Also, they talk about "echo chambers" and "full spectrum of
| global perspectives". Representing all perspectives sounds
| great in theory, but how far should it go?
|
| Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with
| absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context?
| Should an article about an airplane crossing the Pacific
| include "some experts believe that this is impossible because
| Earth is flat?"
|
| Excessive bias in media is definitely a problem, but I don't
| think that completely unbiased media can exist while still
| being useful. In my expierence, people looking for it either
| haven't thought about it deeply enough, or they just want
| information that doesn't make their side look bad.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with
| absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context?
|
| Yes. That's an interview, and is much better than
| summarizations and short soundbites and one-sentence quotes.
| mac-attack wrote:
| This presupposes that you have an informed population that
| already knows the facts and context
| UberFly wrote:
| > Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory
|
| A bigger bias problem by far is bias by omission, so
| including all stories whether they meet the presenter's
| political agenda or not would be a great start.
| hatthew wrote:
| Who decides whether or not a given perspective is in the
| overton window?
| imiric wrote:
| > We need better journalism, not better summarizing
| aggregators.
|
| I agree, but how do you envision that happening? Journalism
| died a long time ago, arguably around the birth of the 24-hour
| news cycle, and it was further buried by social media. A niche
| tech company can only provide a better way to consume what's
| out there, not solve such large societal problems.
|
| > There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed.
|
| I don't think their intent is to change how people are
| informed. What this aims to do is replace endless doomscrolling
| on sites that are incentivized to rob us of our attention and
| data, with spending a few minutes a day to get a sense of
| general events around the world. If something piques your
| interest, you can visit the linked sources, or research the
| event elsewhere. But as a way of getting a quick general
| overview of what's going on, I think it's great.
| danielskogly wrote:
| We're seeing success with giving journalists better tools to
| create engaging journalism (which HN hates :). Many outlets
| are now seeing that they have to once more prove their value,
| and there exists some really great subscription-only media
| here in the Nordics and France.
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's precisely what Axios does, and they make money from this
| (and they don't list their sources). So I can see Kagi pursuing
| this.
|
| FWIW, I agree with you.
|
| I used to be a news junkie. I've always thought of writing the
| lessons I learned, but one of them was "If you're a casual news
| reader, you are likely more misinformed than the one who
| doesn't read any news." One either should abstain or go all in.
|
| I guess I'd amend it to put people who only glance at headlines
| to be even more misinformed. It was not at all unusual for me
| to read articles where the content just plain disagreed with
| the headline!
| numbers wrote:
| I really like the once-a-day updates, makes it so that I can drop
| in and check on the news but not constantly refreshing for
| updates.
| numbsafari wrote:
| This is awesome. Only thing that is missing is a place for me to
| ask a question from Kagi Assistant about the current story I am
| looking at, using the story as part of the context of my
| question.
| jscd wrote:
| This is honestly very disappointing. Not using LLMs, but the
| complete lack of transparency about their usage. You can already
| see in the repository issues related to hallucinations[^1]. This
| is _fine_, but not if you seem to obscure the fact that these can
| be very, very wrong. This seems to only be mentioned in the very
| brief loading screen and at the bottom of the about page[^2].
| Also, apparently many of the "core RSS feeds" are just...
| reddit[^3]???
|
| For me, this is only useful as a curated list of news feeds (and
| subreddits I guess), but nothing more.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-
| public/issues/97#issuecom...
|
| [2]: https://kite.kagi.com/about
|
| [3]: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-
| public/blob/main/core_fee...
| zkmon wrote:
| There is a more fundamental problem here. The news feeds are
| going in this direction for a reason. I don't think you addressed
| that reason.
|
| You have defined the desirable news as "pure, essential
| information". What's that again? How do you know what's pure and
| essential info for any user? The traditional news media had
| started there, with that pure news, and ended up here where they
| are today.
|
| Ultimately, you will realize that your content need to grab
| attention enough so that people consume your feed. People's
| attention goes to where things look weird, exciting, sensational,
| emotional, trivia, gossip etc. You can't do away with all that
| and just dish out the pure and essential info. It didn't work.
| People tried it.
| artursapek wrote:
| This rocks. I'm gonna start looking at it instead of NYTimes.
| thm wrote:
| If you don't need/like links there is https://rawdiary.com/
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| I'm just happy to be able to entirely remove topics like sports.
| Google News no longer lets you do this, and gleefully pushes
| topics on me even when I religiously press "Show fewer stories
| like this"; it is infuriating. No I do not care about celebrities
| or football; stop insisting that I do!
| cgriswald wrote:
| Given that this news is generated I have no idea why the default
| would be to be in the native language of the sources. And if that
| makes any sense I would need to be able to select multiple
| languages I want to read in because I can't read _all_ languages.
| systemstops wrote:
| Something similar that collects news from various sources, plus
| it adds social media context: https://truenorthnews.app/
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| How did this get so many upvotes? Did I wake up in 2004?
| rsingel wrote:
| Looks like yet another aggregator that will send almost no
| referral traffic to the folks who actually put labor into
| writing.
|
| Parasitic by definition.
|
| And embracing the news from nowhere perspective.
|
| So both a parasite and boring at the same time.
|
| I wish more tech folks who want to "fix the news" would learn
| from Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Mediagazer.
|
| He's done aggregation right for 20 years
| graynk wrote:
| It uses RSS from the folks who actually put labor into writing
| and links to the sources under every article.
| notsydonia wrote:
| Exactly. I also wonder what the end game is. If creating
| content becomes a loss-making exercise, people will logically
| stop and the LLMs will have less and less to content to 'train
| on.' And as even large news corps are increasingly deploying
| internal LLMs, the deadening banal style of LLMs, A.I. over-
| view etc will inevitably drive readers away. I use Perplexity
| for search in place of Google and it surfaces good links most
| of the time. But what do tech and media companies - even
| spotify - think they will do when the artists, reporters and
| creatives stop feeding them? Or readers don't want to read
| banal summaries of everything?
| maelito wrote:
| It's funny how awkward the French version is.
|
| - Parquet de Paris ouvre 24 enquetes pour menaces
|
| - Update: famille et experte ADN au proces Jubillar
|
| - Intersyndicale appelle a la greve du 2 octobre
|
| This won't be used by French speakers as is.
| msqinfo wrote:
| Just plugging my service, https://mosaique.info/. It only uses an
| LLM to generate a short summary, and other ML algorithms
| structure the information (comments from officials and experts,
| classification...).
|
| I'm currently working on a major overhaul to provide more
| holistic context around news by better surfacing less-discussed
| events.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| love love love how it doesn't infinite scroll!!!
| jrowen wrote:
| This doesn't really seem to touch on the problem I have with
| news, which is that it is all doom and gloom, FUD and outrage.
| The headlines I saw:
|
| Trump, Congress deadlock as shutdown deadline nears
|
| Taliban cuts internet nationwide, flights grounded in Afghanistan
|
| Indonesia school collapse leaves 38 missing, 77 hurt
|
| YouTube settles Trump suspension lawsuit for $24.5m
|
| German court jails AfD aide for China spying
|
| US deports 120 Iranians after deal
|
| Russian drone strike kills family of four
|
| Is this really what I need to know in the world? Am I saying
| "informed"? This is not helping the anxiety from reading news
| described in the article. This is not good for people.
| kevcampb wrote:
| > This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news
| sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to
| summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
|
| This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news
| agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist,
| Kagi wouldn't work.
| 4dm1r4lg3n3r4l wrote:
| > This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news
| agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't
| exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
|
| Why would Kagi stop working if news didn't exist? Kagi is a
| search engine first and foremost, Kagi News is not a money
| making product of theirs. Kagi would still be making money with
| their search engine.
|
| Also, this should entice news writers to write better news. The
| main reason people use products such as this is that they are
| sick and tired of going to news sites only to have to power
| through filler material to get the 10% that actually matters...
| Spivak wrote:
| This is true in a big picture sense but that's not the concern
| of someone who's making a tool meant to be useful to users. The
| consequences of this existing will be what they will be.
| hughes wrote:
| I don't understand how this is 100% free, no subscriptions, no
| purchase, apparently no ads or tracking and yet I'm also the
| "customer" and not the product. What's the catch?
| luxurytent wrote:
| It seems fairly low effort (from a cost perspective) to deploy
| and maintain this feature, so I think it's a great way to get
| the Kagi name out there, which may perhaps lead to a few new
| users!
|
| Sort of like a loss leader, eg the Costco hot dog :-)
| kkukshtel wrote:
| One of the best news sites (still running) that I use frequently
| is http://68k.news/ - it's sort of like this minus the AI summary
| and info part of the article.
|
| It's just plain text web 1.0 page that uses some ranking algo to
| figure out the top stores of a given day across categories, and
| shows that headline and under it similar headlines across
| different news sources.
|
| It used to pull in RSS from the sources so you could also read
| the articles in plaintext, but that broke a bit ago and the dev
| hasn't fixed it.
|
| Regardless, I still find it a great site to quickly get up to
| speed on top stories of the day!
|
| But also I really like (and pay for!) Kagi so happily support
| their own effort here.
| durakot wrote:
| It's good. And always happy to see SvelteKit in action.
| matcha-video wrote:
| Similar to ground.news or thenewpaper.co ?
| alphazard wrote:
| What everyone gets wrong about news curation is thinking people
| want the same news as everyone else, or "both sides" of a
| situation, or whatever mechanism for exposing them to things that
| someone else thinks are true.
|
| What I actually want is a curated set of things that are _useful
| to me_ personally _given my situation_. The most important things
| about my situation to give me useful news are things like: net
| worth, income, citizenship, family situation, where I live, what
| industries I work in, current investments, travel destinations,
| regulatory and political risks associated with any of those
| things, etc.
|
| Because those are the things that dictate how the parts of the
| world I can't control are going to affect me (especially if I
| don't react). I don't want to hear about random things that
| aren't going to affect me when I'm looking at the news. Sometimes
| I want to learn new random/useless things for fun, but that's a
| leisure activity. It's totally separate from the "news", which is
| a thing that adults consume as a chore to better plan their
| lives.
|
| The fundamental problem is that myself and others are not going
| to willing give out the personal information required to curate
| useful news feeds, so the news will always be filled with noise.
| Maybe local AI can help with that.
| pants2 wrote:
| ChatGPT Pulse has actually done a great job at this for me. It
| knows about an upcoming vacation I have planned and gave me
| some specific news about closures and events there, with
| recommendations on what activities to book in advance.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Don't want to sound too contrarian, but I feel like having LLMs
| involved with the process of disseminating news is a bit
| dystopian.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Link to iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-
| news/id6748314243
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Another russian disinfo laundering service.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This aspect matters and there is little comment here on this
| (other threads on Kagi have raised it).
|
| Kagi's 'neutral' stance on politics, their association with
| Yandex/the Russian state mean this will be interesting to
| watch.
|
| It's by far the best search I've ever used.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...
| amarant wrote:
| I really like this!
|
| I do wish I could have better control of what languages I'm
| getting. Right now the option is to either translate everything
| or nothing. I'd prefer news in their original, untranslated form
| if it's one of the 4 languages I speak, otherwise translate them
| to English.
|
| I added the category "Israel" and everything was in Hebrew, so I
| had to set my language to English, but now news in my native
| Swedish are translated to English and I have to kind of translate
| it back in my head as I read them.
|
| It's not the end of the world, but it seems like fairly low-
| hanging fruit!
| maleldil wrote:
| That's weird. I set the language to English, but the stories in
| the Brazil category are still in Portuguese.
| amarant wrote:
| There are different settings for interface language and story
| language. Might it be that your story language is "default"
| (this appears to mean untranslated) and your interface
| language is set to English?
| guywithahat wrote:
| One thing I found working on a startup which touched on the
| political sphere is people don't want curated lists imposed on
| them, they want to impose their curated lists on other people.
|
| I like that it only provides the list once a day (I do think
| that's a clever feature), but the inability to influence bias
| seems like a mistake, especially since the sources already seem
| to follow a bias.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "Community-driven sources: Our news sources are open source and
| community-curated through our public GitHub repository. Anyone
| can propose additions, flag problems, or suggest improvements."
|
| This sounds like it's going to be a massive headache. Activists
| with nothing to do all day will be all over this, for their
| chance to try to have influence over what other people read.
| k2enemy wrote:
| I like 1440 (https://join1440.com) for this. Once a day daily
| email digest. I like the email format because I'm less likely to
| start clicking around compared to a web site, and it doesn't
| require a separate app.
|
| I think it is human curated, but I'm not positive about that.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| one quick little usability thing, clicking the logo on the web
| version doesn't bring me back to the main page
| stared wrote:
| Nice to see an approach to reduce doomscrolling (for myself, and
| most of my bubble, the biggest addiction, impacting productivity,
| mental health, and neck).
|
| Yet, there is Hacker Newsletter (https://hackernewsletter.com/,
| which I like and use), there are others pointed by GPT5 that I
| don't Mailbrew and Digest. Kagi looks like the true former.
|
| What I do want is personalization - not by picking interest, but
| actual personality, prompt, tastes, good enough that it puts
| something other, rather than only narrowing and narrowing my
| view. Yet high quality, rather than clickbaits and other "fluff".
| Otherwise, following a few Reddits would do the job (with some
| API to send emails).
|
| What I would like even more is something that actually turns my
| social media into daily emails.
| Vexowsky wrote:
| I liked Kagi, was paying for it for a few months, but $10 is just
| too much
| 4dm1r4lg3n3r4l wrote:
| I don't find it too much. For $10 I get a search engine better
| than all the others, I get access to many AI models via Kagi
| Assistant and Kagi Translate.
|
| While I understand different people find value in different
| things, dismissing Kagi generally as "too expensive" is
| ignorant IMO.
|
| I think it also depends what you use it for. I use both their
| search and their AI models for software development and it
| saves me precious time when looking for information - in a way
| it pays for itself.
| Vexowsky wrote:
| I also used it for software engineering and personal use as
| well.
|
| I had two major issues with it:
|
| - it wasn't as snappy as google, but I _kind of_ got used to
| it
|
| - I wasn't trusting it (if that makes sense) and was falling
| back !g to make sure everything was searched
|
| For $10, I expect to get a premium service, not a just good
| enough one.
|
| I have to admit that I liked the idea, feeling of privacy and
| the ability to tailor a search engine for my needs.
|
| Unfortunatelly I think that they are not where they need to
| be for the $10 pricing plan.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I get by with the $5 plan. I don't use it at work, and it
| shows. I often curse during work that I can't exclude certain
| domains permanently from my Google search!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Every single news aggregation services promises the same "signal
| over noise" and "just the facts". I'm so numb from hearing that,
| that I don't believe it anymore.
|
| I do however like the fact that Kagi only pushes _once_ a day.
| Drinking from the firehose is physically and mentally exhausting.
| Even daily feels like too much these days other than a quick
| check to make sure the world didn't implode or the Rapture
| happened while I was busy trying to get CC to behave.
| digest wrote:
| Thanks for providing RSS feeds for Kagi -- just added them all to
| https://usedigest.com so users can use this as a drop-in
| replacement for their news instead of adding various RSS feeds
| from other news outlets.
| guybedo wrote:
| i'm doing something like this, summarizing HN posts because most
| of the time when there's hundreds or thousands of comments, it's
| not possible to read everything and i feel like i'm missing
| something.
|
| So far, i quite enjoy having a summary with bullet points.
|
| For example, here's the summary of this discussion:
| https://extraakt.com/extraakts/kagi-s-daily-news-ritual-spar...
| ashivkum wrote:
| Given that Orion (which I repeatedly attempt to daily drive due
| to the dearth of browsers meeting my requirements right now on
| macos) is still full of bugs that hamper usability, and seems to
| introduce new ones with every update, I don't know why Kagi
| insists on overextending itself like this. They just started
| porting their broken browser to Linux, they're creating a maps
| app, all while they clearly do not have the manpower to finish
| the projects they've already started.
| tiltowait wrote:
| Which bugs do you encounter? Orion works nearly perfectly for
| me.
| ashivkum wrote:
| A selection of recent ones:
|
| - Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently
| with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores
| these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a
| browser based on WebKit)
|
| - The password manager is busted on certain websites that
| have a third input box (so a captcha or 2FA code), where
| it'll fill the password twice
|
| - Kept randomly getting the error "Orion can't open this
| page: This operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate
| memory" with like 10 windows, ~30 tabs open. Haven't seen it
| recently but like many Orion bugs it is intermittent and hard
| to reproduce consistently.
|
| - Switching between Chrome and Orion sometimes
| (inconsistently) switches me to the last Orion window I had
| open (often on a different Desktop) rather than the one I
| clicked on.
|
| - On networks where I can form WebRTC connections in Safari
| and Chrome, I cannot in Orion.
|
| - This was just fixed but until like yesterday, the highlight
| color in their PDF viewer for ctrl F was a barely visible 10%
| opacity highlight that was totally unusable.
|
| - Various other intangible performance bugs that seem to pile
| up when you haven't restarted in a day or two. It starts out
| really snappy and tends to get slower the longer you've had
| it open.
|
| I should note that the pace of developement would be much
| faster if they would open source the browser, but instead of
| that they keep starting new, closed source projects that will
| likely have the same fate. Their Linux Orion port is from
| scratch, none of their macOS code is reusable.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > - Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently
| with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores
| these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a
| browser based on WebKit)
|
| oh i hate it when developers get cute with DNS. this
| doesn't happen with Safari? i've also had issues with the
| password manager (even after telling it i want to use
| Passwords, it just... doesn't sometimes).
|
| i've been in the same boat as you - i really want to
| diversify the browser ecosystem, so i've been daily driving
| orion for a bit, but their stance toward open source (which
| you mentioned) is a big bummer.
| ashivkum wrote:
| hmm last time i tried it, Safari blocked the sites
| correctly as did Chrome. just tried it again and Safari
| let me through, so maybe that one's not on Orion.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| If I was giving my money to Kagi I'd be mad that they invest it
| in bullshit side products like this instead of search.
|
| It seems like all their recent releases are just following into
| the AI hype.
| davelacy wrote:
| Nice design. I like the "today in history" feature
|
| Lately I've been working toward less app time and more boredom
| https://youtu.be/orQKfIXMiA8?si=ZyvxO0SFjoGGHbdK -\\_(tsu)_/-
| works wonders
| richardanaya wrote:
| I love Kagi!
| sktrdie wrote:
| Cool but how does it compare to something like subreddits? There
| are still biased moderators behind the scene just like
| subreddits. Seems to not have the upvoting/downvoting side of it
| which imo is crucial to democratize the entire thing.
|
| I think upvoting/downvoting is a crucial aspect to
| news/information/knowledge. But we've been doing it with just
| numbers all along. Why not experiment with weights or more
| complex voting methods? Ex: my reputation is divided in
| categories - I'm more an expert in history then politics hence my
| vote towards historical subjects have more weights. Feels like
| that's the next big step for news. Instead of just another
| centralized aggregator?
|
| No offense to the cool system and website though
| larodi wrote:
| I doubt anything comes close to Perplexity News at the moment,
| its truly amazing.
| kkfx wrote:
| I'd like to pay Kagi if I can submit my feeds and the insights
| from them, as I see from the portal now it's not that
| interesting...
| ta2112 wrote:
| Am I the only one thinking that "Cagey News" sounds like anti-
| marketing?
| nvarsj wrote:
| Because Google news was such a great idea. I'm enjoying Kagi but
| this isn't it.
| W0lfEagle wrote:
| I really like this for practising a foreign language by switching
| the content language. I do agree with other comments here though
| that it will need greater control over which languages are
| translated.
| alexsmirnov wrote:
| Funny coincidence. This morning, my news aggregator delivered its
| daily results. The stack: Miniflux
| (https://miniflux.app/) in Docker, fetching 75 RSS feeds I've
| collected over the years ~200 lines in a Jupyter
| notebook: - Fetch entries from Miniflux API (last 24-48
| hours) - Convert to CSV, feed to LLM. GPT-5 identifies
| trending stories across sources - Each article gets web-
| fetched and summarized via Gemini-2.5-flash - Results
| render via IPython.display Ten minutes per day, fully
| informed.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Mind sharing that feeds and 200 line code? Thank you
| ugoasidjg wrote:
| Kagi, I'm willing to pay if you hire people to fact check the
| generated articles. Or maybe have the community fact check and
| visually distinguish checked sentences from unchecked sentences.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Or just let an advanced model do extended research on each
| article
| Animats wrote:
| Nice, but navigation is awful. After reading a story, the back
| button doesn't take you back to the table of contents.
|
| (Edit) Now I see. You have to scroll through the story and click
| "Close story" to get back. It's "mobile first".
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| As a paying customer of kagi (family account) it saddens me to
| see my money spent this way.
| kstrauser wrote:
| As a paying customer of Kagi (family account), I'm delighted to
| see them spend my money in a way that seems utterly compatible
| with their history of making the web pleasant to use again.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-09-30 23:00 UTC)