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.
xyse53 · 3m ago
I want to stand on principle too. I switched from Google to Kagi about a year ago. If we're strictly comparing Google and Kagi, I consider Google far worse.
Livanskoy · 7m ago
Fastest subscription of my life, thank you for letting me know.
mxmlnkn · 25m ago
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.
mft_ · 16m ago
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...
thimabi · 2h ago
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.
eugenekolo · 3m ago
I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines.
There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
jasonvorhe · 55m ago
Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime Google around ~2008.
I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
mvieira38 · 15m ago
Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you get very good parental control options, for college and gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated feature of "lensing" the AI assistant.
The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
ufmace · 1h ago
One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.
youniverse · 28m ago
I believe they are developing their own browser and email to have a whole suite of software. Let's see how it goes.
thimabi · 1h ago
Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations… probably won’t have access to a better search experience.
jjtheblunt · 14m ago
I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber since right after the started) wondering if the partial defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly) improve search experiences even for non paying searchers, as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of online experiences.
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.
mvieira38 · 7m ago
That position seems to have changed, I think? They are supposedly allowing people to buy Privacy Pass tokens without a Kagi account in-the-future™:
"Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it."
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on Tor Browser for it to work)
flenserboy · 20m ago
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.)
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.
predkambrij · 32m ago
you can set search?q=%s&udm=14& for google and default to "web" tab, where you actually get search results. Works fine for me.
lee_ars · 18m ago
For now.
netsharc · 31m ago
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"?)
franze · 30m ago
soooo... he still uses search engines?
pyrale · 11m ago
Some people are still looking for source material rather than, say, an imaginary friend summarizing info that may or may not have been made up.
lief79 · 2m ago
How do you look something up?
lee_ars · 17m ago
I'm not quite finding that AI search works reliably for my use cases yet.
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.
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...
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.
There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
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.
"Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it." https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
They also provide a Tor hidden service which can be used with Privacy Pass (although you'd have to install their extension on Tor Browser for it to work)
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.
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"?)