I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.
When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
jorvi · 1h ago
> I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products
You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a UX-first company and reasonably priced.
kevincox · 1h ago
Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now.
Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.
drannex · 33m ago
> In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]
I wasn’t really sure about paying for Kagi but I was convinced when I couldn’t find some meme video I saw only a year ago using Google, DDG, Bing, etc., but found it almost immediately using Kagi. I hadn’t realized how bad most search providers had gotten.
Tallain · 2h ago
I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?
vohk · 11m ago
I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.
Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.
I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.
rrr_oh_man · 2h ago
Try Yandex...
throw123xz · 47m ago
Not a bad solution if you're looking for things that are usually removed from results in the west, eg, torrents and stuff like that.
barbazoo · 2h ago
> When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted
Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
The increased fuzzy interpretation is Google's greatest downfall. It takes away any ability to use it as a power user or for super-specific stuff. No Google, you don't know better than me. I need something really specific and you're "smoothing" the results to what some average random searcher might want!!
I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.
It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.
metasaval · 59m ago
I'm no Google apologist (I use ecosia personally), but did you try using searching in quotes? That should force the search to only find specifically your query directly as spelled. Just curious if you did try it and there was still that "fuzziness."
terribleperson · 55m ago
Google overrides quotes whenever it feels like nowadays. Has for a few years.
I had a similar experience. When using DDG my results were never very good and I’d always end up using !g to throw the search to Google. With Kagi, when I checked other engines it would come up empty as well. On more than one occasion I was on an outage call at work where there were many people using Google to find an answer (for hours), and I joined and did a quick search in Kagi and found the answer.
coldpie · 52m ago
> In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google
Could you (or someone) share some specific search terms that you feel are better than Google? I've tried Kagi a few times and felt no significant difference in the results.
xnx · 2h ago
> the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them.
It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.
rrr_oh_man · 2h ago
640 KB ought to be enough for anybody
prophesi · 2h ago
These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches.
edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
thesuitonym · 1h ago
IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good.
The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.
lukan · 56m ago
Are there some recommended curated lists, that I could use being new to kagi?
I don't like pinterest and co. either. (Specific things one likely has to tweak)
I have a hard time relating to the perspective that Kagi returns bad results, but at least I can remove them.
beepbooptheory · 2h ago
I know I'm probably speaking to the choir but reports like this always make me sad. The internet and the webpages that filled it used to be so cool. Now its just like three websites that are only really judged by how useful they are to us.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
Kagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches.
I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet.
As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too
bobbylarrybobby · 53m ago
It's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.
weinzierl · 1h ago
For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.
I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.
This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.
skrtskrt · 46m ago
Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.
terribleperson · 54m ago
Yep, I still use Google maps for food discovery. It's very good at that, still, and Kagi maps has a ways to go.
karaterobot · 43m ago
Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.
Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.
On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.
Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
jwr · 2h ago
Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
freediver · 56m ago
Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions.
A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely on technical merit: result quality, latency, privacy terms, and legal compliance. The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.
I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.
I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.
I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.
I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".
ApeWithCompiler · 15m ago
Based response, I support that view.
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
7373737373 · 39m ago
If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action, you should reconsider your ability to do so morally
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.
Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"
mm263 · 4m ago
Is Yandex directly complicit in war crimes?
Jonovono · 46m ago
Dang, this is a refreshing take. Going to take a look at Kagi.
unfitted2545 · 24m ago
Would it not be possible for the user to disallow certain sources for searching, so as to not pay them for the API call?
Crash0v3rid3 · 49m ago
The "Google Alert" comment feels unnecessarily dismissive of a legitimate user concern.
The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.
TNorthover · 8m ago
Disappointing response. Guess I'll continue to avoid Kagi.
throw123xz · 26m ago
You're looking at this purely from a technical point of view. That makes sense when trying to make the best search engine, I guess, but humans are not machines. You talk about geopolitics and search quality, when the guy you replied to is thinking about indirectly funding a machine that is bringing war to a country and killing people (I have friends that have been affected by it).
Your profile says you're "humanizing the web". To do that, we can't ignore what humans are and how we work.
I don't know if you should drop Yandex or if the alternatives are better or not, but I feel that you're missing the point here.
freediver · 15m ago
I understand your perspective and don't take these concerns lightly - I was a refugee of two wars myself, so I'm deeply aware of human suffering and its impact. Our mission to humanize the web means ensuring universal access to human knowledge, regardless of politics, delivered with clarity and protected with integrity - for everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances. A search engine that filters sources by political approval becomes something else entirely - it becomes a biased information provider that denies the very universal access we're fighting for. The most humane thing we can do is build tools that serve humans first by providing the best possible search results to everyone - before this conflict, after this conflict, and during all other 100+ armed conflicts taking place in the world today.
eldaisfish · 32m ago
this is a terrible response.
Where are your customers? Predominantly the West, likely the US? This is not a question of "geopolitical judgement" but rather of funding a regime that illegally invaded another country, one that is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, one that oppresses its own people and one that directly uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries.
Apply this same argument to North Korea or Iran. Assuming that either contributed meaningfully to the quality of your search results, would you be comfortable sending money to companies based in Iran or North Korea?
You can hide behind your technocratic arguments for a while. Look to Google and Facebook to see where that ends.
vickychijwani · 1m ago
It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US?
I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoon and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.
A leader who on principle legitimizes and pays companies that are literal tools of oppression will inevitably burn his customers. And isn't it funny how as a paying customer one still has as much say in this as with Google?
scosman · 1h ago
Worth noting that it’s about 2% of their search costs, so at most $0.20/mo of your bill is going to a Russia company (probably much less given they have a profit margin, employee costs, hosting costs, etc).
I like the idea of zero going to help Russian economy (and in turn the war), but a bunch of major companies also do fractional percent business with Russia which I just don’t know about. I don’t want to over penalize the small company that’s honest about it.
sodapopcan · 1h ago
It's a double whammy for me as I don't want to support Russia or the USA and I largely don't. But I also work in tech and need to get work done so I have to pick my battles, unfortunately.
unclad5968 · 1h ago
Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.
margalabargala · 1h ago
It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.
Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?
If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.
lukan · 48m ago
But you don't sanction the country directly, but any company that may or may not support the war in Ukraine.
To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.
In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people
Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.
> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.
lukan · 36m ago
Ok, I did not know those specific details, thanks for providing. I was more talking general. Different story here it seems, but boycotting kagi because of it still sounds extreme to me.
andoando · 36m ago
So go head and sanction the US because as far as I am aware its still the largest imperial power in the world
lawn · 1h ago
Or as the saying goes:
Perfection is the enemy of good.
johnmaguire · 1h ago
Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.
For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.
For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.
rand17 · 47m ago
I live in the Eastern Bloc. I fear Russia. We still see the bulletholes in the old houses in the inner city that were done by the "liberators".
jwr · 1h ago
Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith.
Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.
It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.
Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.
I do not accept simply doing nothing.
lukan · 44m ago
"I do not accept simply doing nothing."
You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly.
Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment.
What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.
In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
zargon · 32m ago
This is like people who vigorously criticize Mozilla's moral failings while using Google Chrome. Heaven forbid we choose the option that is 2% evil instead of the one that is 98% evil.
dmje · 1h ago
Dig deep enough (not even very deep at all, actually) and you’ll find evil. It’s not like the US is in any way squeaky clean.
neurobashing · 2h ago
can you perhaps elaborate on which companies and in what capacity?
"people", as in a perpetually offended tiny minority that want the entire world to bend to their comfort bubble. I'm fairly certain you're also one of the users that incessantly badgered them about excluding Brave's index, trying to portray it like the majority of Kagi users wanted that.
Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
'Offended' is a weird word to describe people choosing to boycott evil.
drewbitt · 35m ago
Yandex is evil?
pphysch · 33m ago
Boycott particular examples of evil that they disagree with politically.
cosmicgadget · 8m ago
I am curious about your politics that favor the invasion of Ukraine.
contagiousflow · 1h ago
Do you have recommendations of other search engines?
Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.
jwr · 2h ago
This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing.
I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.
Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.
rpdillon · 1h ago
I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria. Kagi produces a product you find useful, and they are trying to run an honest business model that doesn't focus on surveillance, charges a subscription, and earns that by working to return the best results.
Is it really a net win to boycott them?
johnmaguire · 1h ago
> I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria.
I don't think this follows. While some people may use morals as an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
> Is it really a net win to boycott them?
How much you value that facet is of course a personal decision.
I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
wswope · 1h ago
You don’t have a leg to stand on when dismissing criticism as whataboutisms, chief.
“Kagi is superior product and a vital competitor to breaking the search oligopoly — but what about their loose and indirect association with the Russian economy?!”
dingnuts · 1h ago
Oh you're taking a moral stance? So how do you get by without search? Because surely Google and Microsoft have many other moral problems, likely even the same ones.
But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?
freehorse · 1h ago
> This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world
No, what leads to the current sad state of the world is parroting one's country's foreign policy and campaigning against a small, independent company like kagi on the premise that it does business with yandex (and on the presumption that somehow that translates to supporting the russian atrocities in ukraine) while completely ignoring all the big tech that supports genocidal apartheid regimes elsewhere that one's country's foreign policy "happens" to support.
EA-3167 · 2h ago
Happily the state of the world isn't the result of recognizing the state of the world, and attempting to avoid hypocrisy. Instead the world is a complex system that defies easy discussions on social media, motivated by overly simplistic and selectively applied moralism.
For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.
gtirloni · 1h ago
If we look at history, Russia government's capacity to withstand punishment of any kind in detriment to its own citizens is limitless. I applaud your determination but I wouldn't expect that to put any kind of pressure on Russia w.r.t its stance on the Ukraine invasion. Things need to get way uglier for Russia before its leaders take any corrective actions and I'd argue we'll never reach that threshold, sort of having (yet) another armed revolution of sorts (which I don't see happening either).
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
Three years of 10-20% interest rates, brain drain, and war casualties. Their reckoning is coming, just not yet.
gtirloni · 54m ago
How's Putin's approval rate since the invasion?
cosmicgadget · 6m ago
Dunno. Are there any credible measures of this?
tiagod · 2h ago
I took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content.
My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.
Indeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.
PokemonNoGo · 2h ago
Do they still use Yandex?
>I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023
I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.
mossTechnician · 2h ago
Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]
Removing a previously public list of sources after being pressed on their integration with Yandex gives me a different impression.
lostlogin · 2h ago
Good links. Him making out that hiding it is to help users is a bit gross.
7373737373 · 44m ago
They would rather live in a world where they can find everything, including 2℅ atrocities they indirectly fund, than not
threetonesun · 2h ago
You're gonna have a hard time using anything right now if you want to avoid services run in a country not spending on a war somewhere.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
This could easily refer to any of the despots the US backs
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
Is that some sort of gotcha? By all means, boycott those countries as well. Support from the US certainly is not a free pass.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
Follow the logic and boycott the US as well! Now you have zero viable search engines
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
Can you give me a line-by-line breakdown please? For example, I believe term limits are still a thing.
Chief_Searcha · 2h ago
There have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.
camel-cdr · 2h ago
I wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend.
For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
J_McQuade · 2h ago
Also, the company is based in a country that has 'fueled' more wars in my lifetime than any other country has in the last 100 years. Definitely avoid.
I think they are referring to this changelog item:
> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.
The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
seabass · 1h ago
I tried to give Kagi a fair shot by using it for a few months. I loved a lot of features, especially the boost/block lists. But I always felt the responses were way too slow for something I use that much. I benchmarked a handful of queries and confirmed they were consistently ~3x slower than Google for normal searches and 5-10x slower for image searches on my home network. I’m sure there are many factors that play into that, so maybe the reason I haven’t seen others complain about the speed has just been that the problem is unique to my network. But ultimately I opted to switch back to Google for my daily driver and just use Kagi for specific lenses.
freediver · 43m ago
That is unusual. Have you tried reaching out to support@kagi.com ?
amendegree · 2h ago
The blocklist thing is interesting, I finally took the plunge and installed the app and extension
ekojs · 2h ago
Maybe not a popular sentiment here on HN but I cancelled my Kagi subscription (9+ months) just recently. Increasingly, most of my queries/search have been through LLMs and Google search is just fine (and even better for restaurants, places, and the like). I don't think the improved search experience is worth the subscription anymore.
baggachipz · 39m ago
In Kagi, you can just ad a "?" to your query and get an instant answer, a la LLMs.
joshuaturner · 1h ago
I really enjoy Kagi for search. It is a significantly better experience. I do still use Google Maps for looking up local things, and I kind of wish Kagi would redirect me there instead of their own maps implementation, which I just cannot imagine will ever be on par.
blitzpoet · 1h ago
DDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.
bbor · 45m ago
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.
Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
bbor · 49m ago
Awesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!
qwertox · 2h ago
I thought their maps integration was pretty bad compared to Google, as well as the information widgets. It stressed me, I was always thinking that somethin isn't right and that I'm to blame, because so many love it so much over Google.
dcchambers · 1h ago
Happy Kagi user for many many months now. The only thing I fall back to Google for are local results (specifically local business search - like restaurants). I still have an Android phone, use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc - but Kagi has almost entirely replaced my standard Google search results.
And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying.
Can someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use?
I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
bbor · 48m ago
As far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX.
I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
al_borland · 3m ago
Kagi has their Assistant which is where you can have an AI chat, deeper than the AI blurb from Quick Answer. It has access to several different models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and others.
testfrequency · 39m ago
Thanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search?
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
Chief_Searcha · 2h ago
Kagi is an interesting one, I've been meaning to test it out. I also made a search engine seek.ninja / searcha.page, and in trying to promote it I see Kagi come up a lot.
When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a UX-first company and reasonably priced.
Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.
To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]
[1}; https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/advertising-in-ancient...
Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.
I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.
Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.
I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.
It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.
No comments yet
Could you (or someone) share some specific search terms that you feel are better than Google? I've tried Kagi a few times and felt no significant difference in the results.
It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.
edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.
I don't like pinterest and co. either. (Specific things one likely has to tweak)
I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet.
As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too
I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.
This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.
Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.
On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.
Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely on technical merit: result quality, latency, privacy terms, and legal compliance. The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.
I've written a longer explanation of our position and how Kagi works technically which you can find here https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.
I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.
I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.
Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"
The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.
Your profile says you're "humanizing the web". To do that, we can't ignore what humans are and how we work.
I don't know if you should drop Yandex or if the alternatives are better or not, but I feel that you're missing the point here.
Where are your customers? Predominantly the West, likely the US? This is not a question of "geopolitical judgement" but rather of funding a regime that illegally invaded another country, one that is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, one that oppresses its own people and one that directly uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries.
Apply this same argument to North Korea or Iran. Assuming that either contributed meaningfully to the quality of your search results, would you be comfortable sending money to companies based in Iran or North Korea?
You can hide behind your technocratic arguments for a while. Look to Google and Facebook to see where that ends.
I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoon and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.
[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...
I like the idea of zero going to help Russian economy (and in turn the war), but a bunch of major companies also do fractional percent business with Russia which I just don’t know about. I don’t want to over penalize the small company that’s honest about it.
Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?
If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.
To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.
In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people
Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.
> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.
For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.
Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.
It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.
Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.
I do not accept simply doing nothing.
You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly. Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment. What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.
In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.
Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.
I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.
Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.
Is it really a net win to boycott them?
I don't think this follows. While some people may use morals as an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
> Is it really a net win to boycott them?
How much you value that facet is of course a personal decision.
I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
“Kagi is superior product and a vital competitor to breaking the search oligopoly — but what about their loose and indirect association with the Russian economy?!”
But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?
No, what leads to the current sad state of the world is parroting one's country's foreign policy and campaigning against a small, independent company like kagi on the premise that it does business with yandex (and on the presumption that somehow that translates to supporting the russian atrocities in ukraine) while completely ignoring all the big tech that supports genocidal apartheid regimes elsewhere that one's country's foreign policy "happens" to support.
For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.
My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.
[0] https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list
>I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023
I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.
[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49
My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.
For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)
> Country of origin: USA
> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.
https://kagi.com/changelog#5340
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.
Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying.
I also find myself using the "quick answer" feature a lot too. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
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