No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!
Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.
Been using Kagi (paid) for a few months now and I call it Google circa 2016. Just works pretty well, doesn't try to do too much. With ChatGPT doing search pretty well, I only really use Kagi for what I think of as "classic search" and it does what I want.
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
Bought a sub a year or so ago, and I'd say in the last 6 months especially, I never had to go to Google. Finally I am glad to say I no longer use Google for search or email.
I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools
2. Mozilla's documentation
3. The Cambridge dictionary
4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology
5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
I keep forgetting how bad search was before I switched to kagi. In a very rare moment where I don't find anything useful, I sometimes go to Google or other services, however I have not found any better results in the last year, rather I keep finding much more spam, advertisements and useless duplicates. Also image search has improved a lot, the only Google service I keep using is Google Maps.
The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.
Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.
I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.
Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.
"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
I don’t mind Medium being monetized, but I have the domain downranked, because posting on medium is a very strong signal that the content is worthless.
Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.
You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.
I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Sure, but given the shit state that Google is, I argue that normal users would rather have to curate their own blacklist a few times instead of being subjected to (at best) SEO spam or (worse) malicious websites.
I haven't set up blacklist for my kagi account. Searched for "python sum", got a link to the python doc as the first result. So imo. you dont need a blacklist.
Is it worth $10 so you don't have to search the Python docs directly? That seems terribly wasteful (monetarily, computationally), when you could use something like devdocs, among dozens of other options.
I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.
I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.
Google's customers are the companies who pay them to place adverts in search results. The results page includes them and it's not always clear at a glance which results are promoted/paid.
The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).
The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.
For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?
For me ChatGPT is great when I don’t really know what I don’t know. I still end up having to do a google search after to verify that the AI result isn’t insane. So for me ChatGPT often is just adding an extra step.
What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.
To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity).
If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.
Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...
If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.
That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).
Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.
If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.
This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)
Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.
Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches
In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.
Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.
Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.
99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
Use https://google.com/ncr (which stands for "no country redirect" IIRC). Has been working for me in a non-English speaking country for a very long time.
> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?
Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.
I've never had any issue using any Google service with an ad blocker. They make plenty off of me via YouTube Premium and Google Flights commissions - both services that I think are valuable, and one that I actually gladly pay for.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)
I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.
So you're saying it's good to have your results influenced by megacorporation exclusivity deals? I didn't use an adblocker because I was using the app, and having to rely on adblockers is cheating for Google, the services should be judged as is. Google isn't above blocking you from their services for using adblockers, too, as we can see from Youtube
The best part about Kagi is that if the default results don't seem helpful, one click restricts results to only discussions and forums, which is usually exactly what I want to do next.
If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.
Which is to say, I highly recommend using an LLM for exploring commands to run in a terminal. Once past the learning curve, it is a good way to avoid dozens to hundreds of cryptic short-options (just ask for only long options).
> If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.
Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.
I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.
The interesting thing is that there are objective measurements about code (like unnecessary commands in answers, or code which flat out never worked), in which generally people are not great. The amount of bad answers on Stackoverflow and on most of the blogspam is staggering. Even reference documentations are bad or wrong many times. LLMs work with that. They won’t be better than that.
> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English.
The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches.
That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi.
For those niche cases I have !g
I switched back to Google as I moved back to Italy. I lasted a week before resubscribing to Kagi, the AI spam and terrible results made me hate every single interaction I had with the site.
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
German here. My searches are probably like 50:50 German:English. I don’t notice any difference in quality with Kagi’s results between the two languages, and both are well ahead of Google.
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
> I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work
There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.
Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
I've also found that the extension configuration isn't very durable. I wound up having to re-do the arcane setup process semi-annually on each device or my searches would 403. Eventually just gave up. Brave search seems to work just as well.
I think there might be more to it. While it might just be me, I think Kagi could use some improvement here. I've been using Kagi with Safari on Mac for about a year, and never got the search extension to work consistently. It would sometimes give me Google, and sometimes Kagi. And sometimes it would give me one site then switch to the other after a several second delay.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
I don't know the details well enough to pinpoint the problem, but the fact that StopTheMadness is able to redirect consistently and the Kagi extension wasn't makes me think there is something they could fix to make it work better.
If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.
It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.
Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.
This extension is a big ugly hack: It redirects result pages of built-in search pages to Kagi, sometimes _after_ the original page has fully loaded. This doesn't occur on my M4 MacBook Pro, but happens all the time on my much slower 12-inch MacBook [0].
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ...
With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.
I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.
They use their image search results, and according to CEO it sums up to 2% of their costs. I saw an explanation post in their forum about this issue, but can‘t find it right now.
> Is there any sensible explanation why Kagi does funding Yandex?
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
Yandex isn't on any sanctions list as far as I know, so Kagi is free to do business with Yandex. Yandex did need to reorganize (as their Dutch tax avoidance parent company was obviously causing them issues) but looking at https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 it seems like all of Yandex has been sold to a generic Russian investment fund.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
Legally they can. But we all know that Yandex had always had very strong ties with the Russian government. I used to work for Yandex for more than 6 years in early 2010s and even then there were signs of the state trying to influence it through censoring Yandex.News and various other means. And these days you have to be very naive to assume that it is not controlled by the state and people close to it.
Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
After a quick internet search apparently Google produces Pixel phones mainly in Taiwan with additional processes happening in China and India.
What is the point you are trying to make?
I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
Their way of not condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and sticking with support for Yandex, is pretty worrisome, and reminds me of the attitude of the Kaspersky sales reps. You need to ask yourself why.
> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real
Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
The first answer is to try each one full time for a week and see which one is better for your use case.
For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence.
The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.
I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I guess I'm a power user, I'm at
> Total searches this period 1,216
> Assistant interactions this period 92
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
I don’t think I’m a power user and I’m constantly over 1000 searches / month. Just a few days ago I upgraded my plan to the highest tier to play with the better models and in a few days it’s gonna renew for a year at this tier.
If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.
What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook
- you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN
- you can add shortcuts to the search box
- it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadTIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.
I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.
For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)
Edit: I got this working.
Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?
https://kagi.com/assistant
Additional details on the blog post about it.
https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all
Its subtly annoying that assistant.kagi.com doesnt work but translate.kagi.com does
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools 2. Mozilla's documentation 3. The Cambridge dictionary 4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology 5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.
Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
That's why I use Kagi.
Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers
Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.
Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.
And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.
Can you explain what this means in more detail? (To be clear, I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm asking for a sales pitch :) )
Kagi makes this a non-issue.
This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.
> @hn !
This brings me directly to the front page of HN.
> @gh jj !
This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
> !guixc how do I install nginx?
This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.
> !p nginx
Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.
The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).
# of searches is lower, total-search_time drops
I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)
If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier.
Edit to add: I just noticed I always use Kagi to search YouTube instead of YTs search directly (!yt <whatever>). I do the same for Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, GoodReads, Roger Ebert movie review site, and probably a few other sites I can't recall right now. And I also have some sites boosted and some others blocked, but I haven't been tweaking that for a long time now...
If I'm interested in a topic but don't know exactly what or where, or want a longer explanation aggregated over multiple sources, then I use Perplexity. I usually fire off my question, let it work in the background, and come back a bit later.
That's just my use case, I don't presume that everyone else behaves the same. Also I just recently got access to Kagi's assistant on my plan, which may cannibalize my Perplexity use (we'll see).
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.
This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)
Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.
Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.
99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
Google clearly wins there.
Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.
Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.
Happy to pay kagi.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.
[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...
Which is to say, I highly recommend using an LLM for exploring commands to run in a terminal. Once past the learning curve, it is a good way to avoid dozens to hundreds of cryptic short-options (just ask for only long options).
Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.
I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
There was a period of time when they had two apps, and I agree the old one was stupidly complicated. The new one, Kagi for Search, doesn't require this.
Like, should Apple have an open API for routing searches? Maybe. Would that get abused? Probably. Do I think Kagi should be on Apple's list? Yes. Does prioritising a 50,000-user engine into iOS's defaults create other issues? Yes as well.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.
Not one click but by no means a byzantine process
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
Kagi on the other hand is "apolitical" because it is good for business.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...
<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>
For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
If I’m gonna use the AI assistant with web access I’d assume my searches are gonna go up even more.
Thanks for the reply, it is helpful .
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
I'm sure my playful sarcasm above doesn't come through well, but thanks for the reply it is helpful.
Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).
Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:
- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia
and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.