▲I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
reply▲optionalsquid2 hours ago
[-] Yeah, it's become quite noticeable. The amount of clearly LLM generated sites that I've blocked just keeps going up and up. The only advantage Kagi has in that regard is that blocks are account wide, regardless of what device you use
reply▲I would be interested in seeing that block list if you have it somewhere
reply▲Kagi nowadays has a feature called "SlopStop" that you can opt into. It's basically a global block list for LLM generated websites, etc that is shared across all users who opt into and anyone can report sites/content to it.
Kagi of course reviews it but generally it's good enough that I don't see much LLM generated content in the results anymore.
> Kagi of course reviews it
They had quite some lag at the beginning. I made reports from the very day they announced it, and none of them were processed last month. But they are now! (Though they rejected half of them)
optionalsquid1 hour ago
[-] I doubt that my list would be of much use to you, since a lot of the sites relate to specific hobbies.
However, as eloisius mentioned, you can view the most commonly blocked sites. Going through that list is a good start: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
I didn't know that page existed, thanks! I was amused to see that my blocklist already includes most of the sites that appear there.
reply▲If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it
reply▲The percentage of quality content on the web has still gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (
https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.
But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.
reply▲Arkhaine_kupo1 hour ago
[-] > The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures.
But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe.
The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers to wade through the bs and return good results. They just rather have bad results and good ads because that is where their bread is buttered.
A lot of competitors are working with a fraction of the budget, teams and data. So asking a small team to do proper AI detection, to return smaller indexed sites with high quality info over mass linked SEO abused hellscapes is very complicated, but asking Google to figure it out is proportional to their talent, expertise and resources.
It just not going to move their bottom line, so search is de prioritised compared to ads (some might even argue its made worse on purpose to make ads look even better)
This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.
reply▲Google can both be worse because of the web results declining in quality and terrible product decisions. It is of course much easier to see one of the two, and make an alternative search interface possibly using different rating criteria. It just can’t solve the entire issue, because spam is also absolutely cheap to mass produce now.
reply▲Yes I agree. I don't begrudge competitors trying to do better at search at all. Maybe they'll succeed. I've just always been skeptical that they will be able to make significant progress on this problem, because I think the problem is ultimately garbage in garbage out.
reply▲kagi sorts by recency and thats the best. i dont just want this months results but whats been update.
of course i dont know how they calculate but hopefully they SEO proof against listicles that just increment date stamps with the same stale content
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
reply▲What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
reply▲vivzkestrel43 minutes ago
[-] i dont follow em closely but wasnt there a new firefox ceo who wanted to push AI everywhere
reply▲I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
reply▲I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
reply▲They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.
reply▲Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
reply▲I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.
reply▲If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).
reply▲Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
reply▲I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
reply▲giancarlostoro2 hours ago
[-] I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.
reply▲I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
reply▲I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.
I might try it again sometime.
Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
reply▲Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.
reply▲$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.
reply▲I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.
reply▲I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough
reply▲Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:
Jul 2026 939
Jun 2026 1,317
May 2026 1,924
Apr 2026 2,537
Mar 2026 2,183
Feb 2026 2,038
Jan 2026 2,392
It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.
reply▲I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.
Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O
But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.
Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.
If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.
reply▲I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
reply▲the_lucifer33 minutes ago
[-] > It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:
- Custom CSS.
- Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result.
- Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...
Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same
For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
Also, Google isn't scraping your data....
reply▲Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?
Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.
You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.
reply▲Forgeties7949 minutes ago
[-] I think it’s well worth it but we all make compromises. I have an iPhone after all lol.
reply▲I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
joshstrange2 hours ago
[-] I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).
The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.
eipi10_hn11 minutes ago
[-] You can pay per year ($54 for 3600 searches/year) and see how far you can go in a year.
reply▲You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
reply▲Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.
everfrustrated2 hours ago
[-] I feel sorry for Kagi. I've paid for the last couple of years as I support a better web search.
But I've found my web searching is so small now with AI.
I checked and I did less than 300 Kagi searches last month so downgraded my plan.
I wish them the best but timing is a b**.
Beside search, I found out assistant is worth trying.
reply▲Kagi Assistant + customised search/lenses is super powerful. It gives you control over what context from the internet the AI can use/you trust
reply▲I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!
reply▲This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).
reply▲everfrustrated31 minutes ago
[-] I would love a Kagi MCP to give my agents a better web search tool but they don't seem interested. I would pay for this.
reply▲I think their Kagi Assistant is quite fine for AI search. Free models, or cheap ones perhaps, but for search all are great. With some privacy benefits. I even use to cross-check the findings of Claude, which sometimes pays off! (new angles, discrepancy in important details to dive into, ...)
reply▲Happy Kagi subscriber here! I just wished Apple let them integrate into Safari without the need for silly hacks.
reply▲On Kagi, you can create custom assistant with customized prompt, LLM agent and lens. It's powerful to retrieve knowledge on a specific domain.
reply▲I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.
reply▲hyperionultra2 hours ago
[-] Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
reply▲LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.
reply▲Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.
reply▲hyperionultra52 minutes ago
[-] Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.
reply▲Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.
reply▲threetonesun2 hours ago
[-] So a slower search engine with fewer results?
reply▲hilariously2 hours ago
[-] Delivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.
reply▲Delivery food is worse everywhere I've ever had it.
reply▲Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.
I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.
eipi10_hn16 minutes ago
[-] You can do that with Kagi. Just put `?` at the end of the search and it will give you an answer.
reply▲They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.
I think the market segmentation is:
- Seeking documents: search engine
- Seeking answers: LLM
Yes, for me.
Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”
Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.
Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”
Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.
And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.
Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.
reply▲LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.
reply▲FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.
reply▲circularfoyers2 hours ago
[-] Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.
reply▲With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.
reply▲bigstrat200348 minutes ago
[-] Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).
reply▲shibaprasadb1 hour ago
[-] I was recently looking at the search engine referrers for my personal website. Was a bit surprised to see Kagi at the top of the list. Don't know how!
reply▲I've switched to Kagi full time. I even use Orion on ios and wish there was an Android version. Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also. I love that it gives me a more direct translation and then suggests alternatives and tells me what situations they would work best in.
reply▲I really wish I was in a position I could afford to subscribe to Kagi.
reply▲Me too, but to be honest startpage is just fine for me. Here we haven't had yet the degradation of results they have in the us somehow - google (and startpage, by extension) is stil great for showing local stuff. Haven't been able to replicate that kind of accuracy with the likes of ddg or brave search.
The only downside is that it can have bangs like ddg, which are a ridiculously great feature.
Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.
reply▲I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.
reply▲What made me leave Kagi was the abysmal offer of widgets, plus the repeated assertion that they were working on them and at least until recently, no progress has been made. Brave search has maybe worse results and I miss the bangs to change result location, but at least during the world cup, for example, I used its widgets frequently, plus the financial, weather widgets... I wish they would actually go through with their promises with those
reply▲amazingamazing2 hours ago
[-] I have found that AI search gets me what I want faster than any traditional search engine.
reply▲It’s enough to add a `?` to any Kagi query to get an AI answer. I like that I can choose for which queries I use AI and for which traditional web search.
reply▲Kagi has Assistant that is exactly AI search.
reply▲Kagi is amazing. Worth the subscription, 10 times over. I don't have to worry about sponsored search results, or slop from the "AI overview". High quality results, like Google used to be.
For a price of two cups of coffee.
Does Kagi work well in other countries for finding products?
reply▲It works well in Germany. For products too, at least what I tried. The last time I did a very German product search (association-management software) the first hit was a comparison on golem.de, which is pretty solid.
reply▲optionalsquid2 hours ago
[-] It probably depends on your country, and what you are looking for exactly, but it works fine for my needs
reply▲I find myself adding a !g bang when searching for products in the Netherlands, only to find out that the Google product results are NOT better than Kagi's
reply▲Using it in France: yes, it does.
reply▲Kagi is cool but it’s also easy enough to add “-AI -site:YouTube.com” to Google results
reply▲I don't find value in it. The hard search results are usually better than Google, but not always better than Google. And when I'm paying for it, it needs to be better every single time or I'm not a happy customer. They need to do better and index more relevant results and vaporize the crap or give me a $.99/month subscription.
reply▲How'd you solve the Arabic issue?
(the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)
Author here (I didn't submit the post though)
Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.
Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)
Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.
Leptonmaniac2 hours ago
[-] In my mind, this is the start of a heated comment chain about geopolitics, but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel
reply▲> but ultimately I don't think that chain Israel
Pardon?
mancerayder56 minutes ago
[-] I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
HelloUsername2 hours ago
[-] html.duckduckgo.com or lite.duckduckgo.com shows you pure search results without any ads or javascript
reply▲Kagi for me is same as Google. But Brave is a bit different plus it uses its own indexes
reply▲How about Kagi using YANDEX?
reply▲Kagi user for 5 years and still absolutely love it.
reply