I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.
I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
"Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.
I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster.
I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
You know now that I think of it me too. I absolutely never used the free google one because I never trusted it (you know what they say about free things).
If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.
I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too
I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free.
Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.
I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.
It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.
I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good.
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?
If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features.
But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.
Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?
Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort.
Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.
So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.
One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.
It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.
Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."
And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.
So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.
If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.
>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
Thanks for pointing out safereddit and other redlib instances! I had the old.reddit.com redirect configured for Uruky and was devastated that it no longer worked. Updated, cheers!
NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds.
I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!
(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)
> NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too.
That'd be an important milestone in enshittification when it comes to other entities that were previously happy to outsource their fan-forums, support, announcement systems, etc. And I do mean "enshittification" in a formal quasi-academic sense, because it's not just about things getting worse, but about the middleman starting to exploit people on either end. Adding a login-wall means that content and communities built up with a kinder kind of collaboration will become hostages, to boost Reddit Corporation's user-stats and creepy data harvesting for investors.
Kind of like how various groups started using Twitter as a way to provide a scalable stream of announcements--sometimes time-critical ones--to an audience. The entire use-case goes down the toilet when users aren't being shown your stuff in chronological order anymore.
Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.
I just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
I'm annoyed mostly because I always surf with private browsing, so I always have to log in again and again. And for some reason I haven't bothered checking, Firefox doesn't save the username field.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.
I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online.
You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
This is what we really need and others should focus on this, niche settings for AI implementations. We are already tired of seeing the same stuff come up again and again when using AI. This is the type of stuff that can make AI more enjoyable and useful
Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex.
The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more:
I have hundreds of pdfs of books, and a thousand dollar library (my friends call it) We have to keep this stuff. This isn't the first time we've lost our books. It happens every 80 or so years
I love Kagi so much. What an incredibly thoughtful, fast, powerful, customizable search tool. I love that I can filter-out / rank / save search tools, and their focus on speed & execution makes it deeply worth a few bucks a month.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE
Unfortunately, paying money to an economy of a country which started and still wages an unprovoked war against another country, killing civilians indiscriminately, is a choice. The only reason you can "focus on building great software" is because you are not in Ukraine, where Russian bombs paid for by the aforementioned Russian economy would be falling on your head.
Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
(to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
I've been building my own metasearch engine after using Kagi for a long while and I must say that my results are getting better even than theirs.
Kagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites.
I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases.
Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
The thing that bothers me about most paywalls is that they want you to take a subscription to remove it. I've got more than enough subscriptions in my life.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.
Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.
The app isn't great, but the price is right.
Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.
If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
This needs to have a whitelist feature, as I am a paying subscriber to a few well known paywalled news sites that I will use Kagi search to find years old articles. But I would like sites I don't subscribe to to be excluded.
I hate that our solution to the modern Internet is to engage in technical warfare just to make it usable. Will someone invent a new pay-to-play Internet that does not engage in warfare against its own users?
Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
Paywalls fucking suck. No I'm not going to subscribe to your publication just so I can read one fucking article. I would however pay 5-10 dollars a month to get access to a variety of news sites (ad free of course - albeit less of a problem using a real browser with UBO). No such service existed the last time I checked, but it doesn't feel like much of a leap for a paid service like Kagi to facilitate.
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.
I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
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"Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.
I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster.
I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
I thought the Kagi API was entirely pay-as-you-go.
EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
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I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
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My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works.
If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
You know now that I think of it me too. I absolutely never used the free google one because I never trusted it (you know what they say about free things).
If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.
> If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
Why?
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I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too
I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free.
Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.
I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
> Traditional search days are really numbered.
There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.
It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.
I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good.
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.
> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. "
which model?
Deepseek v4 Flash and OpenAi GPT 5.6 Luna are on their free plan, which is fab. I'm not sure more is needed, for web searching.
I find Kim best. I used 4.5, now 4.6 reasoning.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
Feels nice to read this, thank you.
I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?
If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features.
But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
I do like that it tends to reword your search query into the way you meant but couldn’t find the right words in your head.
I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.
What do you do to get the stickers?!
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i also want stickers...
Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?
Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort.
Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.
So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.
One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.
No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all.
They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.
Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...
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Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.
Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."
And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.
So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
Edit: Typo
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> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.
If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.
You can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...
>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
I subscribed to https://the-fence.com/ last year and it's been superb.
Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.
Longstanding user and it is great!
It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.
I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.
> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
I've been enjoying Kagi for the last couple years.
Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful.
Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects
EDIT: See here for a list of instances: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instances
I had Kagi configured to rewrite links old.reddit.com. Looks like I need to update it.
Edit: Actually I think this was part of their documentation to explain the intended use of that feature. Too bad this will now no longer work!
(https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html, see example 1)
LibRedirect is useful for this (and other sites) too if you want it to apply over the whole browser.
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
Wow, thank you. I never know this. I feel good now, in a strange way when a paid service serve me well instead of exploiting me.
Thanks for pointing out safereddit and other redlib instances! I had the old.reddit.com redirect configured for Uruky and was devastated that it no longer worked. Updated, cheers!
Super nice. Good reminder to donate to my favorite instance host, thanks.
NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds.
I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!
(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)
> NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too.
That'd be an important milestone in enshittification when it comes to other entities that were previously happy to outsource their fan-forums, support, announcement systems, etc. And I do mean "enshittification" in a formal quasi-academic sense, because it's not just about things getting worse, but about the middleman starting to exploit people on either end. Adding a login-wall means that content and communities built up with a kinder kind of collaboration will become hostages, to boost Reddit Corporation's user-stats and creepy data harvesting for investors.
Kind of like how various groups started using Twitter as a way to provide a scalable stream of announcements--sometimes time-critical ones--to an audience. The entire use-case goes down the toilet when users aren't being shown your stuff in chronological order anymore.
Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.
I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
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> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.
I just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
I'm annoyed mostly because I always surf with private browsing, so I always have to log in again and again. And for some reason I haven't bothered checking, Firefox doesn't save the username field.
That sucks to have to create an account just to read user generated content if you don't contribute.
I can still access old.reddit.com from my country/region
It is just people without accounts who are being blocked, and maybe it is regional?
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> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
Are you sure? If I visit https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/ in private mode (i.e. without my auth cookies) then I am asked to log in.
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Maybe for you.
I get a nice
> Log in to use old Reddit
> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
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As of right now, on Firefox for Android, I am prompted to log in.
Not working for me either without an account anymore. Seems like a very recent change.
I had to login the other day to use it. Probably getting slowly rolled out.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
it works just fine for you, but not everyone.
Not for long, sadly.
This makes sense to me as a Kagi user. The chance that I'm going to subscribe to read an article I found via a search is zero.
If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).
However tracking that is tricky at best.
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
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but a Bloomberg.com subscription is ONLY $39.99/month.......
$2 intro deal!*
*binding arbitration agreement required
Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.
Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
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Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.
Exactly: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean
There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html
Yeah they should use privacy pass for the default accounts as well to decouple payment from account.
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And in addition, they just ask the minimal info to be able to use the service, an email address, and not a full usual registration.
I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
https://brave.com/origin/
Do you imply that you never order anything online?
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
Do you use Google instead?
Brave.
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Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.
I guess the idea is that such people strongly prefer seeing ads instead of a paywall?
I agree it is a choice.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
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I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
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They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
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Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
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Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
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There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
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What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
Did you create a new account to be rude? You’re bringing down the vibe. (showdead enabled in HN settings)
Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space.
That's why this is a good feature.
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This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
Would be nice if there was some transparency about which sites this will filter.
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online. You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
This is what we really need and others should focus on this, niche settings for AI implementations. We are already tired of seeing the same stuff come up again and again when using AI. This is the type of stuff that can make AI more enjoyable and useful
I wish Safari included Kagi as a built-in search bar option!
It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.
So goofy.
Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex.
The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more:
I have hundreds of pdfs of books, and a thousand dollar library (my friends call it) We have to keep this stuff. This isn't the first time we've lost our books. It happens every 80 or so years
I love Kagi so much. What an incredibly thoughtful, fast, powerful, customizable search tool. I love that I can filter-out / rank / save search tools, and their focus on speed & execution makes it deeply worth a few bucks a month.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
(Kagi founder here)
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE
Unfortunately, paying money to an economy of a country which started and still wages an unprovoked war against another country, killing civilians indiscriminately, is a choice. The only reason you can "focus on building great software" is because you are not in Ukraine, where Russian bombs paid for by the aforementioned Russian economy would be falling on your head.
Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
(to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
I am saddened by your stubborn stance on this.
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which search engines have no ties to the three countries currently waging illegal wars of aggression? :)
ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard
Actually it's kinda hard in a world where very few companies dominate the search index market and there's very few players who license out their data, one of them being a Russian one: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Ideally it would have a way to allow list domains for sources where I do have a subscription.
I've been building my own metasearch engine after using Kagi for a long while and I must say that my results are getting better even than theirs.
Kagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites.
I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases.
Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
The thing that bothers me about most paywalls is that they want you to take a subscription to remove it. I've got more than enough subscriptions in my life.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.
Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.
The app isn't great, but the price is right.
Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.
If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
This needs to have a whitelist feature, as I am a paying subscriber to a few well known paywalled news sites that I will use Kagi search to find years old articles. But I would like sites I don't subscribe to to be excluded.
Very useful feature to have. I've not dived into using Kagi just yet, but they may just win me over with this.
There is not firefox plugin for this?
I would like to be able to whitelist some paywall sites, e.g. I have an FT subscription and would like to have that bypass the block.
This is actually an excellent idea. Well done.
I’d pay for a search engine these days if it meant good results and no AI. Kagi almost fits the bill.
Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
I hate that our solution to the modern Internet is to engage in technical warfare just to make it usable. Will someone invent a new pay-to-play Internet that does not engage in warfare against its own users?
omg, great really!!!
When will this be available into HN, too ?
>When will this be available into HN, too ?
hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).
I don't see it offhand in the newsguidelines page nor the submit page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/submit
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
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Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
Just enabled it- Love Kagi!
Great decision
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
Kudos to Kagi!
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
Ah, shouldnt they rather introduce an option to bypass paywalls automaticly to Archive.PH? :-D
AI slopped extension for supposedly just badging paywalls, not excluding them, https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension
The update is useful, especially the paywall filter. I might even consider switching platforms; it seems convenient...
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
the paywall-removal setting is really just Kagi admitting that for most queries the best answer is a link it has to quietly break into for you
That should have been an option in Google since the first paywall was put up.
Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).
This started with expertsexchange:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
nice
Paywalls fucking suck. No I'm not going to subscribe to your publication just so I can read one fucking article. I would however pay 5-10 dollars a month to get access to a variety of news sites (ad free of course - albeit less of a problem using a real browser with UBO). No such service existed the last time I checked, but it doesn't feel like much of a leap for a paid service like Kagi to facilitate.
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Have they added an option to not fund russian invasion into Ukraine?
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
Have they stopped sponsoring terrorism?
Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.
https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
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Kagi, search engine that costs you to use has something against publishers who require a fee for their content. Interesting
It's not that they have anything against them, it's giving their customers who don't want to see them the choice not to.