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: herringsWith price increases, more subscriptions needed, more restrictions, etc, we'll probably see more people sailing the high seas.
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.
Had been having this recurring weird behaviour with the Apple TV. Every time it happened I'd spend a little while trying to search for it and figure out what was going on. The results were consistently completely irrelevant and useless. This had been ongoing for months.
First time it happened after I started my Kagi trial I tried looking for an answer with Kagi. Second result nailed it. Understood what was going on, pressed one button and put it back.
Then knowing the answer I went back and tried the exact same search with Google. I did find the answer... somewhere at result 50+ well past a link to Google Books offering me an article in a 2008 copy of Men's Health Magazine.
Didn't even use up the rest of my free trial. Subscribed right there and haven't looked back.
I don't know that Kagi's always better, but I've yet to run into anything where it's substantially _worse_. I haven't had a single instance where I've exhausted Kagi and tried Google and found a result there instead.
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...
I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.
That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.
So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.
But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.
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.
On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.
https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png
https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
Yeah, of course. Anyone with a brain does. But "Kagi doesn't have ads" is a different statement than "Kagi's results are better than Google's." I've never seen anyone actually give a search term that Kagi does better at.
You may tried Kagi, but after a week or so of Kagi it was awful going back to Google (plus a blocker).
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.
Agreed. I'd need to see evidence of that, though. People are lazy, and they hide behind moral stances that are completely impractical to avoid having to think through the complex moral realities of the decisions we make. I don't have a lot of patience for this. If it's part of a multi-faceted analysis, then I'd expect to see that reflected in the comments the person makes. That's not true in this case.
> I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.
> It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.
Did I imply it was my decision? I don't think I did. In fact, I pointed out that I don't even have the data available to me to evaluate the decision against the decision-making axis I provided (how much value is Yandex providing to the search results?) I am struggling to understand what you're trying to get across here besides contrarianism.
The hard fact of the matter is that you are obviously right: I cannot make decisions for Kagi. This was never in question. I can share my feedback with them and vote with my money.
> Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.
This is another unprovable statement.
I took your musing about the value of removing Yandex as creating a sort of spectrum of hypothetical products that could be offered, and then musing that some hypothetical one would be better than what exists. My point was: we can only select from what exists (or who exists), and then work with them from there. This was intended to tie into a larger theme I'd been trying to emphasize around choosing a product that's closest to your ideal, and then iterating towards perfection from there. The moral-stand approach is to go with free stuff because you don't want to give money to a non-perfect product/company. My assertion is that single-factor approach is something I see regularly, and an approach that leads to suboptimal choices in the long run.
My statement about Kagi was not indended to be someone we'd prove, but rather what the company themselves has stated as their intention, in contrast to their competitors, who don't even try.
Cory Doctrow has written up some findings with respect to how Google search results are intentionally bad. When Kagi uses Google's index via the API (that's paid!) they can produce a better search product than Google does. That's notable!
Assuming you seriously considered Kagi, and have now chosen not to pay them, where have you turned for search?
> Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing.
The acknowledgement that issues are not one-dimensional is not artificial. Sincerely: you're deluding yourself that you're helping Ukraine by not subscribing to Kagi.
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.
> "minimum impact on my own life"
Which I justified:
> 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?
But you should absolutely feel free to do so if you are so inclined!
> 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.
> In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
It does help him, but you're not going to support those who do nothing or feed the machine waging war just so Putin's propaganda gets a bit weaker.
If the average Russian doesn't understand that the reaction is due to their (well, mostly their governments) actions, then that's another problem that only them can fix.
Punishing all russians, well, punishes all russian independent of opinion.
The sanctions are hurting Russia, so it’s at least partially effective.
Why should I? How about not mixing up civilian and military targets? Current trajectory is heading straight into total war, I simply would restrain on target military targets.
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.
What?
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%"
https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
I'd say propaganda is often necessary, and usually successful, at allowing governments to execute war crimes. I think most modern war crimes are lied out of existence by propaganda outlets like Yandex (or any number of US news outlets at other points in recent history).
And so on. You can see the problem with this...
Also, ‘In August 2024, the company was accused of collaborating with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to direct users to fake websites for the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, groups composed of Russian supporters of Ukraine. The websites collected data from Russians who may be interested in joining the organisations and supporting Ukraine.’
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.
The US invaded more and killed more innocent civilians, so pretending it's any better than Russia is hypocrisy at best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russi...
Can you give an equivalent US atrocity to what’s happening in Ukraine right now?
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.
I have no dog in the US / Russia debate but i recognise that both have tremendous ability to affect the world. Same with China and i avoid chinese products where I can.
That said, i'm much less concerned about North Korea, compared to Russia. The latter has sophisticated weapons and military tactics. North Korea may be an evil state but its small population and economy mean that their ability to sow chaos is limited.
Exact same argument with Sudan, the Houthis, etc. Iran is in the middle of this pack but Russia is far and away the most significant danger.
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".
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.
Hence he's on point, as ddg ultimately uses bing under the hood, pretty much all search engines would be out.
A plausible argument could be that you're only using it, not actively giving them money (at least for Google/MS). It'd still call that hypocrisy though, if someone made such an argument.
Do you mean in the sense of investing in your tools, or do you mean that you're one of Kagi's investors?
There appears to be a conflict between ethics. Some won’t let a cent of their money go to Russia. Some will as they value their search engine and freedom of information. You and Kagi have picked one over the other.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
Everything is politics, whether you acknowledge it or not. And right now you are taking a political stance.
No, not everything is politics.
Kagi is a well-made tool, and part of the reason why it works so well is exactly because it tries not to be political. Thanks to the founder's reply, we know it ranks its sources based on utility to its users. Part of being a search engine is allowing the users to be exposed to all the information available on a given topic. The user decides how to use the tool.
I am (as many europeans) against the war that Russia started against Ukraine, but that shouldn't prevent me from looking into what Russia is saying about it should I desire to do so, and having the Yandex integration means that I, the user, am in control whether I want to click on the Yandex result or not, but at least I'm aware it exists. If the platform would decide to shut out Yandex, it wouldn't make the problem disappear, it would just remove your awareness and knowledge of it.
For what it’s worth, I went to Yandex and tried searching Bucha, Navalny and a few other topics and the results seemed inline with Google, so I’m wondering about the accuracy of that claim (or is it a geographic thing?).
While I do understand your position, it's important to understand including Yandex in your index doesn't mean that politics aren't influencing your results; it's not an apolitical position.
Also, do Kagi’s Russian users deserve to be punished because of their leader’s actions? Is that virtuous?
I'm with you
> Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.
Wait, when did I suggest that they adopt values based on "whichever way the wind is blowing"? I'm just asking them to not support the economy of a country whose invaded another free and democratic country for the purpose of expansion, and has engaged in war crimes to do so. People are upset about this, not because it is trendy, but because they think it is wrong.
There isn’t a moral truth here. It’s just politics. Prove to me that Kagi’s support of Yandex has uniquely enabled a Russian war crime and maybe we could start having a real discussion about whether Kagi is morally culpable. Prove that Kagi is committing more harm than my other options. Prove that Kagi is committing more harm than the good that quality search results provides the world, provides people who are fighting and speaking against the war.
Otherwise yes this level of guilt by hand waving association based on making you feel good in the moment is exactly the definition of virtue signaling.
Choosing to ignore the provenance of your suppliers is absolutely a political decision even if you wish it wasn't.
Is there any chance of adding an ‘exclude Yandex’ option to user accounts? No money to Yandex and no improved search results.
I doubt my chances but miss my favourite search engine.
I do — I disagree strongly with your choices, which is why I cancelled my subscription and why I bring this up. It's doubly sad, because I liked your service.
Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month into the economy of a country that's invaded another and sent people in that have literally raped infants to death? Uh, no.
Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month to a company headed by someone that contributes to anti-gay causes and is a COVID skeptic and amplified COVID denial? Also no.
Are those contributions worse than using Google and contributing to their damage of society and the internet?
Are those contributions worse than using one of the AI providers who will gobble up power at absurd rates and contribute meaningfully to the slow death of the planet?
Are those contributions a meaningful concern compared to the fact that I work remotely creating value for a US company whose tax dollars end up going to support Israel and the genocide they're committing in Gaza?
I honestly have no idea. But I can't really see how "not using Yandex" is the absolute stance that everyone should be expected to take, all things considered.
52 bcm gas to 10 EU countries
13 million tonnes oil to 3 EU countries
2800 tonnes enriched uranium/fuel to 7 EU countries
Source: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/strategy/repowereu-roadmap_en
I wanted to point out that holding Kagi to your believed highest standards does lead to moral inconsistencies on a very material level if other providers of commodities are not held to the same standards.
That is not whataboutism.
Now - if you are European and still feel like downvoting me - go to the next MEP‘s local office first and ask them what they do about the facts stated in my first post. After that you are cordially invited to come back and still downvote my posts. Literally any of my posts. Oh you don’t know the address? Try the search engine of choice but don’t think to hard about the global implications of doing so…
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.
He dumped his entire blocklist, which must include a bunch of sites that he finds personally annoying.
Here is the list of domains owned by the 16 companies discussed in the post that he linked to: https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters/src/branch/m...
Obviously, there are a number of websites in there outside the 16 Companies from the linked article in my post, and the Kagi top blocked domains that I've added myself as I scroll through search results.
I understand that my taste may not be for everybody so will make it clearer in the post and give a bit more options.
Sound good?
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.
For example, one of their default lenses is "Academic". It searches research institutions/scientific journals/universities/etc. So as an example, if I search "ulcer risk of ibuprofen":
The "Academic" lens returns the NIH with "Research summaries -- Preventing peptic ulcers"[0] and ScienceDirect with a paper on "The gastrointestinal effects of nonselective NSAIDs and COX-2-selective inhibitors"[1].
Searching without the lens, I get Healthline's "Ibuprofen and Ulcers: Why They Happen and How To Avoid Them"[2] and Medical News Today's "Ibuprofen ulcers: Effects, symptoms, causes, and more"[3].
You can apply these lenses to searches the AI assistant performs separately from the prompts/context/etc. So, for instance, I can set up an "assistant" based on Claude called "Research" restricted to the "Academic" lens. When I ask that assistant questions and it performs a web search, only results from the academic lens (research institutes, universities, etc) will be returned to the AI.
You could do similar with, e.g., setting up an assistant for "Coding with Python" and creating a lens that's restricted to the Python documentation, one for "Local Knowledge" that's restricted to sites from your region, "Recent Developments" that only considers sites published in a certain timeframe, "eBooks" that only returns epub results, etc.
Your prompt/etc is configured separately as part of the "assistant" you're using. So you could have a research assistant with a prompt that asks it to approach the problem step-by-step and evaluate the veracity of the sources, a coding assistant whose prompt includes the language/framework, etc. But there's nothing stopping you hooking your "research assistant" up to your "Coding with Python" lens.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310269/ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490... [2] https://www.healthline.com/health/ibuprofen-ulcer [3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ibuprofen-ulcers
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
But also feel free to try adding "!ai" to send the query to the assistant for a deeper dive
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.
Sometimes kagi will take up to ~5 seconds to give me results.
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.
It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.
There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...
I use Kagi Assistant which uses LLMs from AI companies mixed with their own indexes. It works great and is included with Kagi.
It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.
If you're paying for kagi, you can use ChatGPT or gpt 4.1 mini -- OpenAI uses bing as a backend so it'll be a strict improvement for you
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.
The cars still use that faster horse as a core engine before answering.
Having a better engine makes for better answers keeping the model constant
I'd consider getting an account if so.
Also, since they are the token signer, make sure you use a different IP to get tokens signed / when logged in, otherwise the traffic for the "private" searches is trivially reversible.
So... Kinda useless right now?
You make out like this is a bad thing, implementing these features would undermine your anonymity. It's explained in detail in their announcement blog: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=If%20Kagi,pe...
You have to log in to the extension to use Privacy Pass. They are fully capable of pulling your block list and removing those entries at the frontend.
And safe search toggling via a query string parameter when using a token does not, in any way, expose any reversible information about a user.
PokemonNoGo•6mo ago
>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.
ajdude•6mo ago
bangaladore•6mo ago
> 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
jwr•6mo ago
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
junon•6mo ago
jwr•6mo ago
haiku2077•6mo ago
The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
threetonesun•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
skrtskrt•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
skrtskrt•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
lostlogin•6mo ago
dcow•6mo ago
lostlogin•6mo ago
dcow•6mo ago
lostlogin•6mo ago
‘Middle East’ is a broad and also hard to compare. Lots of US policy I disagree with but is it like the Ukraine invasion?
mbarria•6mo ago
Ar-Curunir•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
Redirecting discussion about Russia's shittiness to a criticism of the US is a dumb propaganda tactic that a lot of people here are engaging in. And many others are swallowing. I'm happy to talk about the US or NATO or Israel, just not with the partisans who for some reason assume I fully support any of the above.
xigoi•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
And that handwaves the equivalence of the US and Russia as well as their relationships with corporations.
Ar-Curunir•6mo ago
I know that HN is an American website, and it is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively, but outside the US you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the complete support that US (and its corporations!) have been providing to Israel in its genocide in Gaza.
It is okay to want to boycott one and not the other, but one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
You really gotta see past stereotypes and reductive takes. The absence of criticism of the US in a discussion about two different countries doesn't implicitly mean "Amurica o7".
> you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq...
Those people need to look a little deeper than "these are/were both voluntary wars". If someone is unwilling to engage beyond the shallowest possible academic level, it's not worth the effort.
> one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.
My intent was to defend the people engaging in the boycott. I don't recall scolding people for not participating but perhaps that was implied somewhere. Certainly I have not shied away from condemning Kagi/Yandex/Russia but it's not the same as saying "you should too". In fact, one of my main points has been that ideological inconsistency is okay of not great.
dcow•6mo ago
Add to that the value that good search provides humanity, even Ukrainians and Russians against the war, and it’s not even obvious that boycotting a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company is doing more good than harm. So you’re arguably actually perpetuating harm more than reducing it.
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
I literally said this. Please read.
> a company that does a minuscule amount of business with a Russian company
Should be easy to excise then.
dcow•6mo ago
Please demonstrate or reason that Kagi buying Yandex’s search index (1) does harm and (2) does more harm than good.
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
tomjen3•6mo ago
All countries pay for their militaries. Russia invaded Ukraine and is actively comitting genocide.
There is a difference.
J_McQuade•6mo ago
barbazoo•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)
> Country of origin: USA
Chief_Searcha•6mo ago
mossTechnician•6mo ago
[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49
lostlogin•6mo ago
7373737373•6mo ago
dcow•6mo ago
The only people morally responsible for committing atrocities are those who commit them. Shall we hold the farmers who grow food that Russian leaders consume morally culpable for those leaders’ actions? I’m dead serious. You cannot in good faith actually argue that everyone is indirectly morally culpable for any action that is “enabled” by something they do.
Like freedom of expression, neutral objective search is too important to poison with identity politics and virtue signaling.
joshuaturner•6mo ago
My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.
anon7000•6mo ago
joshuaturner•6mo ago
lostlogin•6mo ago
Presumably enough have that it hurts a little.
dcow•6mo ago
lostlogin•6mo ago
Another view is that they are losing customers due to this, and have chosen to make the information harder to find.
For company that believes in accurate data above all else, its not a great look.
camel-cdr•6mo ago
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.
Tadpole9181•6mo ago
Heidaradar•6mo ago