There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs…
Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.
Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough, because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
>Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards.
TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine.
This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity.
The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.
When you do want an AI overview you can have Kagi do that by adding a ? at the end of your query. It flows nicely for me as the difference between searching for something, or just asking the internet a question. Kagi cites sources and allows you to move the conversation to a new LLM session.
the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked. from that point on search results on Google have been what they want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact searches — & giving useful results could not be tolerated, whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)
I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently.
If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.
Does there exist another source for a good, broad web index that can provide results like mid-'00s Google?
I use DDG mostly but if I need to actually search the web I go to Yandex (I don't have Kagi... at least not yet). I don't know of another place that can do that.
If you want to support the people of Ukraine, the best thing you can do right now is give them money to buy more drones. This will have much more of an effect than Kagi's Yandex integration.
I recommend https://dzygaspaw.com personally, but there are many good crowdfunding organizers.
Would you consider boycotting Google or Amazon because of their relationship with the Israeli military? I avoid Amazon, but it's pretty tough to avoid Google.
I recently dumped Google on my phone because of the awful dark pattern they'd put in with a popup trying to generate an installation of the Google search app.
While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page, go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again. (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.)
Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi a go...
This was precisely the last straw for me as well. The dark pattern is so outrageous and abhorrent that it felt right to dump Google on principle even if Kagi were not better. That it is better is a welcome bonus.
Just as an FYI for anyone on iOS that is still tolerating this egregious dark pattern example, I successfully used Distraction Control in Safari to block this popup. Details here https://support.apple.com/en-gb/120682
The founder started that he was not interested in serving users who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and don't require an account.
People always joked that Incognito Mode is for porn, but I use it for search.
I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and trying to groom that list.
In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from Gemini either. I really don't like that.
I should be allowed to be curious about something without having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.
Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map.
I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.
We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were.
The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now.
So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction.
The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.
How can search(the utility, not the business model) possibly be dead?
AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.
I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up confident answers.
AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very well documented and often discussed topics.
If you run any kind of business - online or offline - you will have ten times more customers coming from Google search than from social media. Especially if you make any effort on your website. And those are the organic results, not the ads.
I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a potential long term cost.
Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined.
In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects.
I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations.
I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
I've wondered about that too. Feels like there's a risk to be stuck in some flavor of 2025 indefinitely, if the incentive to produce new content is eroded by the rise of LLMs.
The web is going to need a different business model. There's no way around it from this point. Traffic + Ads = Money is dead for anybody with content that can be summarized by an LLM. Even Traffic + Subscription = Money is also vulnerable if your offering is not easily discoverable outside of a search engine. I don't know the solution.
I share the same concerns, hence built my own search engine that is human-curated. There is already a push back against "AI slop content" online, AI search will online make this worse as it ingests this slop.
Google's search results are suffering a very obvious decline in quality. But is it bad enough to pay for Kagi? For me no; there are other viable free options.
I too have dumped Google for Kagi (within the same time frame, even). I encourage everyone to give it a shot and see if it clicks for you. For me, it was night and day. I used to be skeptical about the idea of paying for search, but I'm definitely sticking with Kagi after seeing how well it works.
Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)
When I used DDG, the results were worse than Google, and I kept going back to Google when I couldn't find something, always second-guessing the results. And it seems every time someone recommends DDG the first thing they point out is "you can just type !g to get google results!", so I assume this is still the case.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
The problem is that if you're not paying them, they have to make money off you in some other ways, none of which are good for you in the long run. A paid service OTOH has a clear business model.
I can't imagine searching with Google these days unless it's something very niche. Even free AI with web search are marginally better, even with the traffic spam they create, Google Search has made itself unbearable.
As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts for our daughters.
I'm fine paying for search, but I don't want to use LLMs and therefore I don't want to _pay_ for access to LLMs that I'm not going to use. If Kagi offered a lower cost subscription with zero LLM bullshit then I would happily resubscribe. I'm not holding my breath though, being able to actually find information on the internet is just probably dead forever.
While Google is certainly getting unusable, I don't see why privacy orientated search engine requires an account to even use it. Especially for non-ai tasks.
Kagi has given me the most value per dollar out of any subscription I have ever had. I find the things I want much faster. I use the AI summarize; for example, to summarize YouTube video when looking for specific info or to summarize reddit web results. I also use Kagi Assistant everyday; usually several different models. Most importantly, my wife likes it. I find google almost unusable now. I can't go back. I will never go back.
in my experience, kagi's search quality is not universally better than google - it still lags behind on current events, shopping, sports...
it is better at finding documentation and technical articles and deprioritizing SEO spam
89 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 76.9 ms ] threadStill, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.
Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
OTOH, the existence of Kagi Assistant made Kagi Teams a very easy sell to my employer.
I happen to be an Ars subscriber and that's about as much as I'd be willing to pay for Kagi too.
I'm hoping enough people agree with me for Kagi to be viable.
TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine.
This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity.
The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.
I use DDG mostly but if I need to actually search the web I go to Yandex (I don't have Kagi... at least not yet). I don't know of another place that can do that.
Like, is there a viable alternative for Kagi?
There isn't really an escape from helping despotic, genocidal regimes.
I recommend https://dzygaspaw.com personally, but there are many good crowdfunding organizers.
While I'm usually good at avoiding such things, this one somehow worked on me and was insanly frustrating: you click the wrong button, the App Store pops up, you switch back to the web page, go back, and then (via a redirect) the same thing happens again. (Whoever implemented that deserves punishment.)
Anyway, between this and also that for many a technical topic Google search results are just so full of nonsense sites that asking the question of an LLM is actually the rational approach despite the risks of hallucinations, maybe it's time to give Kagi a go...
The founder started that he was not interested in serving users who want anonymity. I see they've since added Privacy Pass using VOPRF tokens, which does provide anonymity by decoupling searches from user accounts. But by now LLM search tools are good and don't require an account.
I don't want to be in a group of people, someone asks me to look up how old some celebrity is, and then information about that person gets pushed to me by algorithms from then on. It's a trite example, but a real one. I've found myself becoming aware of which topics the algorithms know I've looked into, and trying to groom that list.
In Europe, you can't presently use Gemini without being logged in - presumably having something to do with their recent tech laws. I don't know if there's a way to delete searches from Gemini either. I really don't like that.
I should be allowed to be curious about something without having that curiosity etched into my permanent record.
I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.
We have new maps UI and working on improving search API accuracy so would love some feedback where we are currently falling short to guide our roadmap.
Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were.
The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now.
So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction.
The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.
AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.
I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up confident answers.
AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very well documented and often discussed topics.
Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined.
In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects.
I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations.
I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now do their own indexing.