Comment by d12bb
5 hours ago
I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).
All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
I did not intend to spread misinformation here, and would like to hear more about the general-purpose index Kagi is working on. I had based my comment on several Kagi pages, but mostly https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm..., which mentions Teclis as Kagi's own index, but https://teclis.com/ makes it pretty clear that it's a "small web"-focused tool:
> Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.
> Teclis includes its own crawl as well as results from Kagi Small Web index and results with permission from Marginalia Search.
> Teclis works best with broad queries such as 'machine learning', 'vegan diet', 'religion' etc..
Is there another crawler doing the general-purpose stuff?
How broad will they be? Do you aim to ever have large scale indexing of the web?
Hey do you guys have posts or sharing about it? It would be awesome to see what you are trying to accomplish, maybe it's time to post on HN ;)
How do you build a search index in the days of Anubis pages everywhere?
So you will stop buying Yandex data at some point?
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
Hurry. Google might give up the ghost on its search product and maintaining indices on anything not geared for LLMs.
I'm not sure antitrust will help you.
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> We're actively working on building our own indexes
Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".
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Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.
Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats
About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.
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That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
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Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.
When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.
> Nobody wants to pay for anything
Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
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I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
They are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.
If anything, this makes me want to pay them twice. Once for search and once for exploiting google.
I don't think they papered over this? They've been transparent about paying to scrape other indices while they work on their own.
Qwant and Ecosia try to build their own index: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-sta...
I do not believe that Qwant can produce something good, they always were a company to extract money from the french taxpayer to wrap bing results.
I use and enjoy Ecosia, it works pretty well for most use cases. Unfortunately it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage.
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I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
Yes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.
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They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox
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> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google
Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.
Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
I have found few CEOs capable of telling nothing but the truth. Based on that, I am nearly certain that lying is part of the job description.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
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I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
I mostly interact with their AI through bangs.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
I'm curious: what is your use-case for a search engine that justifies Kagi over free search engines? Are you not finding your results on page one, first try, with other engines?
This is constantly the case, anytime I Google something more obscure than the front page of a top 50 website.
Even when Google gets it right (often they don't) I have to wade through a bunch of AI slop and countless ads. After that, it's dozens of SEO referral link sites trying to sell me garbage.
Kagi gives me better results by default, no ads, and I can customize results by prioritizing or blocking different domains. Very much worth the small price.
Kagi uses Yandex which is Russian.
But does it surface relevant search results?
Many things on the web use Yandex.
What's your point? Yandex is quite a competent search engine
Its funny because Kagi apparently also uses Google, and Microsoft and other threads were complaining about it.
It sounds like they use everything to give their subscribers good results. Which is what it sounds like I am paying for.
I use a great number of russian sites, mostly when I want to download textbooks, audiobooks, etc.
Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
I just use the tools that work.
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The small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration.
I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
On iOS, there is an app called xSearch that integrates into Safari and sneakily hacks around the limited search engine options by watching your browsing history for queries to the search engine you've selected in Safari, then immediately rewriting the URL and navigating to the search engine you actually want.
Obviously this has security implications, but I don't ordinarily search for anything sketchy on my iPhone so I'm personally not too worried about it.
I know right. It’s simple. Google pays them over a billion dollars and Kagi doesn’t.
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Using third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy.
Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
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Then don't buy Apple!
There's more to device quality than whether a monkey can operate it and looks shiny.
It was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
Same to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
I enjoy my Kagi usage but there are still a few things I use the !g or !gm bangs for.
Shopping and finding locations is definitely one.
Yes, I am also hopelessly tied to Google Maps. Which I think is relatively distinct from web search, IMO.
The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.
You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.
Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.
The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.
The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.
Astroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer.
Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.
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Growth is nearly linear for the past 3 years.
That chart is programmed to always shows the same shape, no matter if the number of subscribers increased by 10 or by 10 000.
I noticed if you change to the “all time” view it shows a steady linear growth, with no big spikes or valleys.
A good graph would start at 0
We started saving this data late :)
My annual Kagi subscription lapsed last week, so I decided to see how DuckDuckGo is doing these days.
The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively.
Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason.
I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.
Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.
Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g
I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.
I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).
What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
I use Le Chat as default search engine, using this search engine string: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%...
(In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.)
A negative is the high latency.
(Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...
I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.
Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
I started hating Google Search because of its relentless AI dumps on the results page, but I have also stopped using it at all, more or less.
I got the Google AI Pro plan, which gives Gemini access by default with generous limits, and also includes free credits, code assist in VS Code and other editors, and also to Gemini CLI. And I'm just simply using that for all of my needs. It seems to work quite well so far. I see how Google Search is not relevant for me anymore.
I find the opposite, I can count on one hand the number of times I've deliberately resorted to using google search in the past year*
*except for maps results, Kagi is absolute hot trash for maps. I automatically append !gm to the end of all mappy-type searches. I wish Kagi would just kill their map product and redirect to google maps.
Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.
Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
Local business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.
Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.
They do have something called Privacy Pass that lets you search using an untraceable cryptographic token instead: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
I’ve seen this, but can’t understand it.
- they issue you a code when you are logged in
- they track that code for multiple use
- all they can do is claim that the code was securely generated and it isn’t just an API KEY to your account… but they’re already telling you it is database tracked
How can you have any even the 1/2 best proof it isn’t just an API KEY that directly links to your account? I see no trust path other than “us, bro”.
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Privacy Pass.
I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge
my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft
I'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox.
We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
Can you give an example of your searches?
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?
If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries
I do try to search but often the results are pretty low quality.
Agents do. I'm actually very curious where does their traffic go.
Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.
Yandex also censors political things. Your best bet is to search everywhere because everyone is "compromised" from some side.
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
I've tried it, too. Loved it. Was nearly ready to pay for it. Then I learned that they source their data from Yandex. To hell with that! I'll rather get my search results on paper via carrier pigeon than support the rape of Ukraine.
Do not fund the Kremlin!
Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.
HN users really hate this piece of truth.
I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.