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Ask HN: Is it impossible to use Kagi as default search engine on iOS?

19 points by seansh ↗ HN
I've been using Kagi for about a year and am very happy with it. But as of recently Apple stopped allowing custom search engines to be set as default for Safari. Kagi has a hack for fixing it where you set the default to something you never use and then the Kagi app somehow redirects that website but it kind of works but then stops working multiple times a day.

I tried their browser Orion which comes by default with Kagi and adblockers but the browser is very buggy and even loses my tabs sometimes.

I tried firefox and it's very nice but it doesn't have adblocker so it's a no go.

Any suggestions folks?

22 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] thread
Raed667
ask your representatives to stop apple from being apple.
seansh
Ahah got bigger problems with my representatives here in Turkey with 100% tax on iphones.
dotcoma
What is the tax like on Android phones?
seansh
Samsung galaxy is around 50% more expensive that US price but there are Android phones made by local companies that are less expensive.

The tax also applies if you bring your phone from outside. You'll be able to use it for 3 months and then you have to pay the tax or you won't be able to use any simcard.

dotcoma
Wow, that’s pretty aggressive.

Thanks for sharing.

unlikelymordant
I haven't tried on ios, but brave browser has an inbuilt ad blocker. Might be worth a try. I am quite happy with brave and kagi on android.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
kemotep
I just use Firefox for iOS and don’t use websites with excessive advertising. In fact with the out of the box privacy settings for Firefox and iOS, many sites ask me to disable my ad blocker before continuing. I don’t have one to disable which makes those prompts pretty funny.
nop_slide
Kagi for iOS was working great for the first month I had it but the last two weeks the extension seems to only work half the time. Glad to hear I’m not the only one.
DylanFuery
Agreed having used it since March 2022 the only disruption of failing to redirect has been since the last update. Used Orion for a bit, but the extension issues and Keychain / 1Password integration problems make it unusable.

To keep iOS system search working properly, though inconvenient. Using the Kagi iOS app (set to Bing) + the Safari extension seems to give the most stability.

Making sure you have macOS Safari extension set up the same also helps. At least for now.

nop_slide
I experimented with changing the Kagi redirect to use Bing but I was still having issues. I changed it back to Google because I figured if the redirect was going to fail I'd rather it fail back to Google haha.

Edit: Looks like they did a rollback

>We have rolled back Kagi Search for Safari extension because of issues reported by users. The URL to download the rolled back version is the same apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id1622835804. We are continuing the development of the 2.0 branch which is open source and you can follow the discussion here.

https://kagi.com/changelog#2856

ezekg
I also noticed this. Glad I wasn't the only one. My searches would randomly use DDG instead of Kagi and I wasn't sure why. Glad to see they rolled out a fix.
bcolumbia
You need to delete the Kagi app and reinstall. They had a bug and reverted the app to the working version again. It’s been working great since I reinstalled!
jryb
It also works fine for me, I've been using it for a few months now without incident, on iOS 17 currently.
freediver
Vlad from Kagi here.

We are in the process of rewriting our Safari extension for Kagi search, which proved to be very challanging (Apple seems to really not want people doint this). It is open-source and you can check the discussion here [1]

Our current extension should mostly work though (maybe needs full reinstall) [2]

We also launched Orion browser on both macOS and iOS which is made as a Safari replacement and comes with Kagi integrated. [3]

Finally, there are third party extensions that you can use like xSearch [4] and HyperWeb [5].

Do not forget to move Apple in the right direction to allow use of custom search engines by sending feedback [6]

[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions/pull/59

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id16228...

[3] https://kagi.com/orion

[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...

[5] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571

[6] https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

seansh
Thanks for commenting Vlad. I'll try to reinstall the extension and hopefully that'll fix it. When Orion becomes more stable I'd be happy to use that exclusively.
freediver
I am using Orion day to day and rarely see bugs. You can report bugs to orionfeedback.org to make sure they get seen.
aborsy
Does Kagi use something like ChatGPT in the backend?
phrz
My recommendation: use xSearch for iOS! It's a Safari extension app so no need to use a nonstandard browser. I use it to give me custom !bang searches for various databases, but it has an option to override the Safari default search engine. It works very reliably on iOS and Mac.