>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.
> 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://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)
> Country of origin: USA
[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.
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).
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 personally dislike Pinterest and TikTok, but sometimes it might be the only source of an image or video. Blocking means you don't get to see that result.
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.
must include: herrings | missing: herringsGoogle'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.
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...
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 a feature that I'd like other search engines to adopt natively.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
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.
I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.
Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.
With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.
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.
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.
But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?
“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?!”
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.
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.
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.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
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.
> 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?"
I wonder how different people decide on different metrics. For me, I probably don't even realize I'm deciding, making it mostly emotionally based I guess. Thanks for sharing with me!
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.
That's a good point. It's a nuanced topic and I was genuinely curious. I'm not involved in any international business with Russia, so it's interesting to hear about it from the perspective of someone affected by it financially.
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.
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...
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.
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%"
Yandex does not equal Russia though.
The United States gov't has participated in what many consider illegal acts of aggression (i.e., war crimes) and do so using tools like PowerPoint. Is it moral to accept Microsoft as a client?
I'm not saying I know the right answer here, but the purity test you're proposing seems quite stringent.
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, nor do I particularly love either country. 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 cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.
[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...
Please, you know this is a bad faith argument, so let's cut the false equivalence.
I dislike the US as much as anyone, but I appreciate that the US is much better than Russia.
People tend to care more about what they are familiar with. Someone in Zimbabwe probably cares more about the war in Sudan and avoids dealing with the countries involved than with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and use Russian products. Same with someone in Iran, they probably care more about Syria and Palestine, and avoid Israeli products while using Yandex.
Maybe it's hypocrisy, but humans don't have the capacity to support every victim of every war.
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.
The thing to keep in mind is that for some people, and this includes some of your customers, there are things that are more important than your mission. Right now, some people avoid anything that is related to Israel. When the US invaded Iraq, some avoided US companies. I won't touch anything related to Musk after the two sieg heils and other things. The guy that complained clearly has an issue with what Russia is doing in Ukraine and doesn't want their money to end up in Russia.
It's a free market. You should do what you think it's right and then people will do the same with your product. Some will care more about search quality and pay, while others will care about the companies you decide to work with and use something else.
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".
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google...
And american companies in general since america funds the genocide?
No? Too inconvenient to do that?
We don't have the mental bandwidth to support every good cause or the capacity to avoid every bad player. That doesn't mean that you have to be fine with and use products from every company/country.
Clothing is also a no-no, right? After all, there is *literally no way to purchase clothing from any store that hasn't been produced - in part - by effective slave labor and Chinese machinery.
Really, consumer boycott of nations is infeasible in a global market. The only thing you're doing is virtue signalling.
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
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.
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.
Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.
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 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.
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?
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.
Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience.
I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.
Chief_Searcha•3h ago