I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.
When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
> I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products
You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a UX-first company and reasonably priced.
> You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.
That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.
So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.
But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.
Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now.
Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.
> In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]
I wasn’t really sure about paying for Kagi but I was convinced when I couldn’t find some meme video I saw only a year ago using Google, DDG, Bing, etc., but found it almost immediately using Kagi. I hadn’t realized how bad most search providers had gotten.
I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?
I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.
Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.
I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.
Yes and no. Because of aggressive action from IP holders a lot of these sites went underground and deliberately aren't indexed in the US and EU but providers from Russia or Switzerland got shadowbanned.
> When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted
Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.
The increased fuzzy interpretation is Google's greatest downfall. It takes away any ability to use it as a power user or for super-specific stuff. No Google, you don't know better than me. I need something really specific and you're "smoothing" the results to what some average random searcher might want!!
I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.
It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.
I'm no Google apologist (I use ecosia personally), but did you try using searching in quotes? That should force the search to only find specifically your query directly as spelled. Just curious if you did try it and there was still that "fuzziness."
I switched as well and I actually use the AI assistant since then primarily. It’s awesome to connect search directly with AI, almost always get what I want immediately.
I'm curious, how is the AI assistant experience different from Perplexity or even ChatGPT's search feature? Is it just the convenience of having several models there or are the outputs inherently better because the results are from Kagi's engine instead of google?
I had a similar experience. When using DDG my results were never very good and I’d always end up using !g to throw the search to Google. With Kagi, when I checked other engines it would come up empty as well. On more than one occasion I was on an outage call at work where there were many people using Google to find an answer (for hours), and I joined and did a quick search in Kagi and found the answer.
I switched last year and haven't looked back as well. Only thing I miss for convenience sake is the Shopping tab but obviously the privacy concerns arent worth that convenience.
To me, the killer feature has been the ability to filter out sites from my search results. I removed all of Pinterest, several tabloids and conspiracy sites, any obvious AI-generated sites that I run into, and just with that my search result quality has increased drastically.
It's a feature that I'd like other search engines to adopt natively.
> In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google
Could you (or someone) share some specific search terms that you feel are better than Google? I've tried Kagi a few times and felt no significant difference in the results.
Try anything related to visas.
"us esta", "canada eta".
On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.
These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches.
edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good.
The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.
FWIW, it's much better to downrank a page than to outright block it. Blocking is for a page you never, ever want to see.
I personally dislike Pinterest and TikTok, but sometimes it might be the only source of an image or video. Blocking means you don't get to see that result.
Most of the time I agree with you, and prefer downranking, but I have to take issue with your example of Pinterest, because my experience with Pinterest is that if I'm searching for a specific image, I will always get a thumbnail of exactly what I want from Pinterest, but when I click on it, I'm taken to a page of completely unrelated results. It is beyond frustrating, and specifically blocking Pinterest was one of the primary features that sold me on Kagi.
I know I'm probably speaking to the choir but reports like this always make me sad. The internet and the webpages that filled it used to be so cool. Now its just like three websites that are only really judged by how useful they are to us.
Kagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches.
I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet.
As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too
It's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.
I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.
For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.
I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.
This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.
Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.
Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions.
A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely on technical merit: result quality, latency, privacy terms, and legal compliance. The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.
I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.
I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.
I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.
I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".
I take it you don't use any phones, especially no apple products then, right? After all, apples gigantic sponsorship of the Chinese government is well covered at this point.
Clothing is also a no-no, right? After all, there is *literally no way to purchase clothing from any store that hasn't been produced - in part - by effective slave labor and Chinese machinery.
Really, consumer boycott of nations is infeasible in a global market. The only thing you're doing is virtue signalling.
This is a silly argument. Clothing is not optional; Kagi is. They are deciding to go without an optional good because they don't like what they spend their money on. I applaud them for it and I like Kagi.
Conversely, Vlad’s strong sense of engaging in ethical business and utmost respect for and understanding of what it means to remain neutral to is precisely why I use Kagi, and why I believe Kagi will beat Google in the long run—why I invested in Kagi.
Perhaps they don't, but some do. And those who avoid Amazon or Google might be fine with using Russian companies.
We don't have the mental bandwidth to support every good cause or the capacity to avoid every bad player. That doesn't mean that you have to be fine with and use products from every company/country.
It's odd to put this as some kind of inconceivable checkmate. I have several family members that avoid Amazon, some strictly, some when possible, some when convenient. This thread is about Kagi, of course people boycott Google. 'Degoogling' has been in the zeitgeist for years.
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
Would you ever consider switching out Yandex for something like the Brave Search API or Bing (if they aren't already part of the mix)?
While I do understand your position, it's important to understand including Yandex in your index doesn't mean that politics aren't influencing your results; it's not an apolitical position.
By that definition precisely noting is apolitical. And that’s really the point, isn‘t it? Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.
Also, do Kagi’s Russian users deserve to be punished because of their leader’s actions? Is that virtuous?
If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action, you should reconsider your ability to do so morally
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.
Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"
> If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action
Yandex does not equal Russia though.
The United States gov't has participated in what many consider illegal acts of aggression (i.e., war crimes) and do so using tools like PowerPoint. Is it moral to accept Microsoft as a client?
I'm not saying I know the right answer here, but the purity test you're proposing seems quite stringent.
You'll be shocked to learn that some people avoid US products for exactly the reasons you've mentioned. Right now some avoid Israeli stuff for similar reasons. And so it shouldn't be a shock to learn that some people don't want their money to end up in pockets of Russians and their state (via taxes).
Okay, propaganda, sure. Propaganda is a different argument - it compromises the quality of search - and I will happily agree with you. I want to emphasize, that the claim was: using Yandex through Kagi is supporting war criminals. Which war criminals? Which war crimes is Yandex complicit in? I plainly do not accept that propaganda === war crimes.
Following that reasoning, is Gazprom invading a country? No? Then I guess we should buy their gas. Why not send the latest and greatest ASML lithography machine to Mikron? It's not like they're actually launching the missile using the processor they manufacture.
Well, the US and a lot of the US companies fund the Palestinian genocide, and you're OK with that, so people support the genocides they like. So don't be a hypocrite.
I don't know if you should drop Yandex or if the alternatives are better or not, but I feel that you're missing the point here.
You're looking at this purely from a technical point of view. That makes sense when trying to make the best search engine, I guess, but humans are not machines. You talk about geopolitics and search quality, when the guy you replied to is thinking about indirectly funding a machine that is bringing war to a country and killing people (I have friends that have been affected by it).
Your profile says you're "humanizing the web". To do that, we can't ignore what humans are and how we work.
I understand your perspective and don't take these concerns lightly - I was a refugee of two wars myself, so I'm deeply aware of human suffering and its impact. Our mission to humanize the web means ensuring universal access to human knowledge, regardless of politics, delivered with clarity and protected with integrity - for everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances. A search engine that filters sources by political approval becomes something else entirely - it becomes a biased information provider that denies the very universal access we're fighting for. The most humane thing we can do is build tools that serve humans first by providing the best possible search results to everyone - before this conflict, after this conflict, and during all other 100+ armed conflicts taking place in the world today.
The thing to keep in mind is that for some people, and this includes some of your customers, there are things that are more important than your mission. Right now, some people avoid anything that is related to Israel. When the US invaded Iraq, some avoided US companies. I won't touch anything related to Musk after the two sieg heils and other things. The guy that complained clearly has an issue with what Russia is doing in Ukraine and doesn't want their money to end up in Russia.
It's a free market. You should do what you think it's right and then people will do the same with your product. Some will care more about search quality and pay, while others will care about the companies you decide to work with and use something else.
An upstream search index is not exactly a source and boy is that one politically biased. Given Russia's efforts towards destruction of civic society everywhere and replacing it with post-truth one, you very much risk compromising integrity by touching their products.
Where are your customers? Predominantly the West, likely the US? This is not a question of "geopolitical judgement" but rather of funding a regime that illegally invaded another country, one that is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, one that oppresses its own people and one that directly uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries.
Apply this same argument to North Korea or Iran. Assuming that either contributed meaningfully to the quality of your search results, would you be comfortable sending money to companies based in Iran or North Korea?
You can hide behind your technocratic arguments for a while. Look to Google and Facebook to see where that ends.
It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US? Somehow Ukranian lives are precious, but Iraqi and Bangladeshi lives are not?
I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian, nor do I particularly love either country. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.
Some people do avoid US companies for the reasons you've mentioned.
People tend to care more about what they are familiar with. Someone in Zimbabwe probably cares more about the war in Sudan and avoids dealing with the countries involved than with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and use Russian products. Same with someone in Iran, they probably care more about Syria and Palestine, and avoid Israeli products while using Yandex.
Maybe it's hypocrisy, but humans don't have the capacity to support every victim of every war.
We don't even have to leave the African continent do understand that people being okay with and performing genocides, waging war, etc, isn't an exclusive American trait.
I have no dog in the US / Russia debate but i recognise that both have tremendous ability to affect the world. Same with China and i avoid chinese products where I can.
That said, i'm much less concerned about North Korea, compared to Russia. The latter has sophisticated weapons and military tactics. North Korea may be an evil state but its small population and economy mean that their ability to sow chaos is limited.
Exact same argument with Sudan, the Houthis, etc. Iran is in the middle of this pack but Russia is far and away the most significant danger.
A leader who on principle legitimizes and pays companies that are literal tools of oppression will inevitably burn his customers. And isn't it funny how as a paying customer one still has as much say in this as with Google?
The "Google Alert" comment feels unnecessarily dismissive of a legitimate user concern.
The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.
Worth noting that it’s about 2% of their search costs, so at most $0.20/mo of your bill is going to a Russia company (probably much less given they have a profit margin, employee costs, hosting costs, etc).
I like the idea of zero going to help Russian economy (and in turn the war), but a bunch of major companies also do fractional percent business with Russia which I just don’t know about. I don’t want to over penalize the small company that’s honest about it.
This is like people who vigorously criticize Mozilla's moral failings while using Google Chrome. Heaven forbid we choose the option that is 2% evil instead of the one that is 98% evil.
Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.
It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.
Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?
If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.
But you don't sanction the country directly, but any company that may or may not support the war in Ukraine.
To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.
In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people
Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.
> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.
Ok, I did not know those specific details, thanks for providing. I was more talking general. Different story here it seems, but boycotting kagi because of it still sounds extreme to me.
I've never thought about it like that. To me, this is the most interesting part:
> If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
I wonder how different people decide on different metrics. For me, I probably don't even realize I'm deciding, making it mostly emotionally based I guess. Thanks for sharing with me!
Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.
For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.
For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.
Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith.
Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.
It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.
Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.
> It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere.
That's a good point. It's a nuanced topic and I was genuinely curious. I'm not involved in any international business with Russia, so it's interesting to hear about it from the perspective of someone affected by it financially.
You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly.
Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment.
What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.
In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
Just because you decide to do something, it doesn't mean that you have to do everything. Even if you wanted to, it's likely that you can't.
> In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
It does help him, but you're not going to support those who do nothing or feed the machine waging war just so Putin's propaganda gets a bit weaker.
If the average Russian doesn't understand that the reaction is due to their (well, mostly their governments) actions, then that's another problem that only them can fix.
It's a double whammy for me as I don't want to support Russia or the USA and I largely don't. But I also work in tech and need to get work done so I have to pick my battles, unfortunately.
"people", as in a perpetually offended tiny minority that want the entire world to bend to their comfort bubble. I'm fairly certain you're also one of the users that incessantly badgered them about excluding Brave's index, trying to portray it like the majority of Kagi users wanted that.
Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.
The Russian government is evil. Would you describe every person within its borders as evil? Every company?
Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.
With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.
I’m curious about your politics that are comfortable accepting a long list of invasions by the US, but somehow draw the line when it comes to this particular invasion.
I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.
I mean by all means, stick with Google and its ever-declining search quality and ever-expanding monopoly power while it builds AI tools for Israel to automate the slaughter of civilians, instead of a search engine startup that... has some minor partnership with another search engine that is located in a country where you don't like its government?
Russia is a dictatorship at war with Ukraine and the West by their own statements and actions. The idea they are leveraging tech companies for this purpose is ludicrous.
Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.
This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing.
I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.
Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.
I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria. Kagi produces a product you find useful, and they are trying to run an honest business model that doesn't focus on surveillance, charges a subscription, and earns that by working to return the best results.
> I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria.
I don't think this follows. While some people may use morals as an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
> Is it really a net win to boycott them?
How much you value that facet is of course a personal decision.
I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
> it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
Agreed. I'd need to see evidence of that, though. People are lazy, and they hide behind moral stances that are completely impractical to avoid having to think through the complex moral realities of the decisions we make. I don't have a lot of patience for this. If it's part of a multi-faceted analysis, then I'd expect to see that reflected in the comments the person makes. That's not true in this case.
> I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.
You don’t have a leg to stand on when dismissing criticism as whataboutisms, chief.
“Kagi is superior product and a vital competitor to breaking the search oligopoly — but what about their loose and indirect association with the Russian economy?!”
Oh you're taking a moral stance? So how do you get by without search? Because surely Google and Microsoft have many other moral problems, likely even the same ones.
But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?
You can install an adblocker and Google/Microsoft end up losing money if you use them. You can't stop Kagi from sending money to Yandex, unless of course you stop using Kagi.
Happily the state of the world isn't the result of recognizing the state of the world, and attempting to avoid hypocrisy. Instead the world is a complex system that defies easy discussions on social media, motivated by overly simplistic and selectively applied moralism.
For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.
If we look at history, Russia government's capacity to withstand punishment of any kind in detriment to its own citizens is limitless. I applaud your determination but I wouldn't expect that to put any kind of pressure on Russia w.r.t its stance on the Ukraine invasion. Things need to get way uglier for Russia before its leaders take any corrective actions and I'd argue we'll never reach that threshold, sort of having (yet) another armed revolution of sorts (which I don't see happening either).
Been an Early Adopter, joined January of 2023 and I have never looked back or paused my monthly. I'm currently running with the Ultimate package which is good value for the $25/month price tag.
Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience.
I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.
I took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content.
My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.
Indeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.
Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.
Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.
On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.
Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
Ads are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case.
There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.
Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]
It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.
Are you talking about the United States? Like, yes, the Russian regime is awful, but how are you looking around at the the world and not applying the same standards to the US?
There have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.
I wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend.
For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
I think they are referring to this changelog item:
> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.
I tried to give Kagi a fair shot by using it for a few months. I loved a lot of features, especially the boost/block lists. But I always felt the responses were way too slow for something I use that much. I benchmarked a handful of queries and confirmed they were consistently ~3x slower than Google for normal searches and 5-10x slower for image searches on my home network. I’m sure there are many factors that play into that, so maybe the reason I haven’t seen others complain about the speed has just been that the problem is unique to my network. But ultimately I opted to switch back to Google for my daily driver and just use Kagi for specific lenses.
Yep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.
Please reach out to me at vlad@kagi.com and we'll set you up on an account (on us) and I'll personally get involved to see what is happening. Most our searches complete in less than 1000ms. We do dig much deeper than Google though, and we more often than not place what you are looking for in the top 3 results - and that has to count for something too.
So is it truly the case that I can now pay for Kagi without my searches being associated to my account? And I dont mean by scouts pledge, but I recall reading something about anonymous crypto tokens?
Maybe not a popular sentiment here on HN but I cancelled my Kagi subscription (9+ months) just recently. Increasingly, most of my queries/search have been through LLMs and Google search is just fine (and even better for restaurants, places, and the like). I don't think the improved search experience is worth the subscription anymore.
I really enjoy Kagi for search. It is a significantly better experience. I do still use Google Maps for looking up local things, and I kind of wish Kagi would redirect me there instead of their own maps implementation, which I just cannot imagine will ever be on par.
DDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.
Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
I thought their maps integration was pretty bad compared to Google, as well as the information widgets. It stressed me, I was always thinking that somethin isn't right and that I'm to blame, because so many love it so much over Google.
Awesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!
Happy Kagi user for many many months now. The only thing I fall back to Google for are local results (specifically local business search - like restaurants). I still have an Android phone, use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc - but Kagi has almost entirely replaced my standard Google search results.
And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying.
Can someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use?
I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
As far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX.
I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
Thanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search?
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
Probably they are using 'Kagi Assistant', which is essentially kagi acting as an intermediary to the major LLMs. You get a catalog and a monthly quota.
Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.
Interesting. The lenses sound similar to “Spaces” on Perplexity, where you can segment searches to a specific prompt every go and upload files etc for context. Safe to assume that’s a pretty common feature now, maybe I should look at Kagi again - it’s been a few years since I’ve last peeked at it.
Kagi has their Assistant which is where you can have an AI chat, deeper than the AI blurb from Quick Answer. It has access to several different models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and others.
Kagi is an interesting one, I've been meaning to test it out. I also made a search engine seek.ninja / searcha.page, and in trying to promote it I see Kagi come up a lot.
I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.
When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
> I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products
You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a UX-first company and reasonably priced.
> You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products.
I've been a satisfied customer of theirs since 2023.
That said, I've been burned by far too many companies - especially tech companies - who grew big, then proceeded to squeeze every drop of prior good-will out of their success to make a line go up and satisfy investors.
So my support goes as far as opportunistically recommending them for as long as they continue to be good. Which I still do, I use Kagi on every device and love their personal ranking system and translation services, and they've been a cornerstone of untangling my life from a Google login - speaking of being burned.
But going out of my way to evangelize them feels a bit icky, and I can't help but feel like there's another shoe waiting to drop. It kind of stinks to feel like that, because my hesitancy isn't even necessarily their fault.
Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now.
Information from trusted independent sources is the most useful tool we have to actually incentivize the market to actually create quality products that actually provide value to their users.
> In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide.
To be fair, advertising has always been a major thing, for example, The romans had a tonne of visual advertising[1]
[1}; https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/advertising-in-ancient...
I wasn’t really sure about paying for Kagi but I was convinced when I couldn’t find some meme video I saw only a year ago using Google, DDG, Bing, etc., but found it almost immediately using Kagi. I hadn’t realized how bad most search providers had gotten.
I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?
I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.
Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.
I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.
Try Yandex...
Not a bad solution if you're looking for things that are usually removed from results in the west, eg, torrents and stuff like that.
So streaming didn't kill the warez scene, it just got massively shadowbanned?
Yes and no. Because of aggressive action from IP holders a lot of these sites went underground and deliberately aren't indexed in the US and EU but providers from Russia or Switzerland got shadowbanned.
> When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted
Same, I found it took a while to adjust my searching too. Kagi is much more sensitive to spelling things wrong. Google gets around that by only using the search query as an inspiration but that also introduces a lot of fuzziness in the result IMO. With Kagi, you get as much out of it as you put in is what it feels like to me. It's slightly harder to find things sometimes, sure, but at least we're using a product instead of being the product and that adds enough value for me for this to be the better deal overall.
The increased fuzzy interpretation is Google's greatest downfall. It takes away any ability to use it as a power user or for super-specific stuff. No Google, you don't know better than me. I need something really specific and you're "smoothing" the results to what some average random searcher might want!!
I am the point in my software engineering career where I simply don't need those dumbed down results. I need some niche research paper or the one guy's extremely in-depth benchmarking blog I found months ago but forgot to bookmark.
It got to the point where Google simply could not help me in my day job so I see the monthly cost as an essential expense similar to my JetBrains sub.
I'm no Google apologist (I use ecosia personally), but did you try using searching in quotes? That should force the search to only find specifically your query directly as spelled. Just curious if you did try it and there was still that "fuzziness."
Google overrides quotes whenever it feels like nowadays. Has for a few years.
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"Around" "every" "word" "I" "know" "should" "be" "contained" "in" "the" "result"? :)
I switched as well and I actually use the AI assistant since then primarily. It’s awesome to connect search directly with AI, almost always get what I want immediately.
I'm curious, how is the AI assistant experience different from Perplexity or even ChatGPT's search feature? Is it just the convenience of having several models there or are the outputs inherently better because the results are from Kagi's engine instead of google?
I had a similar experience. When using DDG my results were never very good and I’d always end up using !g to throw the search to Google. With Kagi, when I checked other engines it would come up empty as well. On more than one occasion I was on an outage call at work where there were many people using Google to find an answer (for hours), and I joined and did a quick search in Kagi and found the answer.
I switched last year and haven't looked back as well. Only thing I miss for convenience sake is the Shopping tab but obviously the privacy concerns arent worth that convenience.
To me, the killer feature has been the ability to filter out sites from my search results. I removed all of Pinterest, several tabloids and conspiracy sites, any obvious AI-generated sites that I run into, and just with that my search result quality has increased drastically.
It's a feature that I'd like other search engines to adopt natively.
Imagine if they analyzed all the user-blacklisted domains and deranked them from other (new) users' results. Death of SEO!
> In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google
Could you (or someone) share some specific search terms that you feel are better than Google? I've tried Kagi a few times and felt no significant difference in the results.
Try anything related to visas. "us esta", "canada eta".
On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.
The government sites are the first result for both searches on Google for me.
https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png
https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
> the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them.
It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.
640 KB ought to be enough for anybody
These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web searches.
edit: This is detailed in the article, but leaving this here for those like me who first jump to the HN comments
IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good.
The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.
Are there some recommended curated lists, that I could use being new to kagi?
I don't like pinterest and co. either. (Specific things one likely has to tweak)
Yes, start here https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard (logged in)
FWIW, it's much better to downrank a page than to outright block it. Blocking is for a page you never, ever want to see.
I personally dislike Pinterest and TikTok, but sometimes it might be the only source of an image or video. Blocking means you don't get to see that result.
Most of the time I agree with you, and prefer downranking, but I have to take issue with your example of Pinterest, because my experience with Pinterest is that if I'm searching for a specific image, I will always get a thumbnail of exactly what I want from Pinterest, but when I click on it, I'm taken to a page of completely unrelated results. It is beyond frustrating, and specifically blocking Pinterest was one of the primary features that sold me on Kagi.
I have a hard time relating to the perspective that Kagi returns bad results, but at least I can remove them.
I know I'm probably speaking to the choir but reports like this always make me sad. The internet and the webpages that filled it used to be so cool. Now its just like three websites that are only really judged by how useful they are to us.
Cool sites are still out there. They never went away. Google search isn’t the web.
Kagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches.
I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet.
As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too
It's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.
I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.
Not trying to shill LLMs but learning German is way easier with them. I've ditched Google translate for everything but simple word translations.
For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.
I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.
This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.
Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.
Yep, I still use Google maps for food discovery. It's very good at that, still, and Kagi maps has a ways to go.
Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions.
A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely on technical merit: result quality, latency, privacy terms, and legal compliance. The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.
I've written a longer explanation of our position and how Kagi works technically which you can find here https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
[delayed]
I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.
I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.
I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.
I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".
I take it you don't use any phones, especially no apple products then, right? After all, apples gigantic sponsorship of the Chinese government is well covered at this point.
Clothing is also a no-no, right? After all, there is *literally no way to purchase clothing from any store that hasn't been produced - in part - by effective slave labor and Chinese machinery.
Really, consumer boycott of nations is infeasible in a global market. The only thing you're doing is virtue signalling.
This is a silly argument. Clothing is not optional; Kagi is. They are deciding to go without an optional good because they don't like what they spend their money on. I applaud them for it and I like Kagi.
No, internet search really isn't optional. Try it for a month. Good luck!
I didn't say internet search was optional. I said Kagi was optional.
Conversely, Vlad’s strong sense of engaging in ethical business and utmost respect for and understanding of what it means to remain neutral to is precisely why I use Kagi, and why I believe Kagi will beat Google in the long run—why I invested in Kagi.
Do you boycott google and amazon who enable Israel's genocide in Gaza?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google...
And american companies in general since america funds the genocide?
No? Too inconvenient to do that?
Perhaps they don't, but some do. And those who avoid Amazon or Google might be fine with using Russian companies.
We don't have the mental bandwidth to support every good cause or the capacity to avoid every bad player. That doesn't mean that you have to be fine with and use products from every company/country.
Agreed. Just because acting ethically isn't always easy, doesn't mean you need to give up on every cause.
>Do you boycott google and amazon
It's odd to put this as some kind of inconceivable checkmate. I have several family members that avoid Amazon, some strictly, some when possible, some when convenient. This thread is about Kagi, of course people boycott Google. 'Degoogling' has been in the zeitgeist for years.
Based response, I support that view.
Evaluating other responses, people complain over Yandex, but asking for the very same experience. Only different in the illusion filtering happens to their wishes.
Would you ever consider switching out Yandex for something like the Brave Search API or Bing (if they aren't already part of the mix)?
While I do understand your position, it's important to understand including Yandex in your index doesn't mean that politics aren't influencing your results; it's not an apolitical position.
Brave is part of the mix, and that's also the reason I don't use Kagi myself.
By that definition precisely noting is apolitical. And that’s really the point, isn‘t it? Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.
Also, do Kagi’s Russian users deserve to be punished because of their leader’s actions? Is that virtuous?
Thank you for creating Kagi, sorry that you're dealing with misguided folks and thanks for the in-depth explanation.
Dang, this is a refreshing take. Going to take a look at Kagi.
Would it not be possible for the user to disallow certain sources for searching, so as to not pay them for the API call?
I think is a more comfortable position to take.
If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action, you should reconsider your ability to do so morally
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, startup founders aren't exactly known for putting anything else above money and their ideas, particularly actual human well-being.
Consider that you, too, will have to live in the world that you help create, including the consequences of "a mere 2%"
> If you can't judge that funding war criminals is a wrong action
Yandex does not equal Russia though.
The United States gov't has participated in what many consider illegal acts of aggression (i.e., war crimes) and do so using tools like PowerPoint. Is it moral to accept Microsoft as a client?
I'm not saying I know the right answer here, but the purity test you're proposing seems quite stringent.
You'll be shocked to learn that some people avoid US products for exactly the reasons you've mentioned. Right now some avoid Israeli stuff for similar reasons. And so it shouldn't be a shock to learn that some people don't want their money to end up in pockets of Russians and their state (via taxes).
Is Yandex directly complicit in war crimes?
I can't vouch for the source, but this provides a factual chronology of Yandex's (forced) integration into Russian state propaganda:
https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
Okay, propaganda, sure. Propaganda is a different argument - it compromises the quality of search - and I will happily agree with you. I want to emphasize, that the claim was: using Yandex through Kagi is supporting war criminals. Which war criminals? Which war crimes is Yandex complicit in? I plainly do not accept that propaganda === war crimes.
Following that reasoning, is Gazprom invading a country? No? Then I guess we should buy their gas. Why not send the latest and greatest ASML lithography machine to Mikron? It's not like they're actually launching the missile using the processor they manufacture.
And so on. You can see the problem with this...
Well, the US and a lot of the US companies fund the Palestinian genocide, and you're OK with that, so people support the genocides they like. So don't be a hypocrite.
So by your logic everyone who participates in capitalism (including yourself) is immoral.
I don't know if you should drop Yandex or if the alternatives are better or not, but I feel that you're missing the point here.
You're looking at this purely from a technical point of view. That makes sense when trying to make the best search engine, I guess, but humans are not machines. You talk about geopolitics and search quality, when the guy you replied to is thinking about indirectly funding a machine that is bringing war to a country and killing people (I have friends that have been affected by it).
Your profile says you're "humanizing the web". To do that, we can't ignore what humans are and how we work.
I understand your perspective and don't take these concerns lightly - I was a refugee of two wars myself, so I'm deeply aware of human suffering and its impact. Our mission to humanize the web means ensuring universal access to human knowledge, regardless of politics, delivered with clarity and protected with integrity - for everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances. A search engine that filters sources by political approval becomes something else entirely - it becomes a biased information provider that denies the very universal access we're fighting for. The most humane thing we can do is build tools that serve humans first by providing the best possible search results to everyone - before this conflict, after this conflict, and during all other 100+ armed conflicts taking place in the world today.
That's a completely valid position to have.
The thing to keep in mind is that for some people, and this includes some of your customers, there are things that are more important than your mission. Right now, some people avoid anything that is related to Israel. When the US invaded Iraq, some avoided US companies. I won't touch anything related to Musk after the two sieg heils and other things. The guy that complained clearly has an issue with what Russia is doing in Ukraine and doesn't want their money to end up in Russia.
It's a free market. You should do what you think it's right and then people will do the same with your product. Some will care more about search quality and pay, while others will care about the companies you decide to work with and use something else.
An upstream search index is not exactly a source and boy is that one politically biased. Given Russia's efforts towards destruction of civic society everywhere and replacing it with post-truth one, you very much risk compromising integrity by touching their products.
this is a terrible response.
Where are your customers? Predominantly the West, likely the US? This is not a question of "geopolitical judgement" but rather of funding a regime that illegally invaded another country, one that is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, one that oppresses its own people and one that directly uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries.
Apply this same argument to North Korea or Iran. Assuming that either contributed meaningfully to the quality of your search results, would you be comfortable sending money to companies based in Iran or North Korea?
You can hide behind your technocratic arguments for a while. Look to Google and Facebook to see where that ends.
It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US? Somehow Ukranian lives are precious, but Iraqi and Bangladeshi lives are not?
I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian, nor do I particularly love either country. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.
[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...
Some people do avoid US companies for the reasons you've mentioned.
People tend to care more about what they are familiar with. Someone in Zimbabwe probably cares more about the war in Sudan and avoids dealing with the countries involved than with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and use Russian products. Same with someone in Iran, they probably care more about Syria and Palestine, and avoid Israeli products while using Yandex.
Maybe it's hypocrisy, but humans don't have the capacity to support every victim of every war.
But someone in Zimbabwe would care if their country commits a genocide. But most Americans don't when their country does it.
We don't even have to leave the African continent do understand that people being okay with and performing genocides, waging war, etc, isn't an exclusive American trait.
it is this plus the ability to affect the world.
I have no dog in the US / Russia debate but i recognise that both have tremendous ability to affect the world. Same with China and i avoid chinese products where I can.
That said, i'm much less concerned about North Korea, compared to Russia. The latter has sophisticated weapons and military tactics. North Korea may be an evil state but its small population and economy mean that their ability to sow chaos is limited.
Exact same argument with Sudan, the Houthis, etc. Iran is in the middle of this pack but Russia is far and away the most significant danger.
let's not pretend that US democracy, flaws included, is in any way comparable to Russia.
Please, you know this is a bad faith argument, so let's cut the false equivalence.
I dislike the US as much as anyone, but I appreciate that the US is much better than Russia.
How many countries have Russia invaded in the last 50 years? And the same for the US?
The US invaded more and killed more innocent civilians, so pretending it's any better than Russia is hypocrisy at best.
Disappointing response. Guess I'll continue to avoid Kagi.
A leader who on principle legitimizes and pays companies that are literal tools of oppression will inevitably burn his customers. And isn't it funny how as a paying customer one still has as much say in this as with Google?
The "Google Alert" comment feels unnecessarily dismissive of a legitimate user concern.
The core issue for many, myself included, is not about asking a search engine to make "geopolitical judgments" in its search rankings. Rather, it's a question of corporate ethics in selecting business partners. The decision of which companies to partner with and fund is inherently separate from the algorithm that ranks search results.
> The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine.
Everything is politics, whether you acknowledge it or not. And right now you are taking a political stance.
Worth noting that it’s about 2% of their search costs, so at most $0.20/mo of your bill is going to a Russia company (probably much less given they have a profit margin, employee costs, hosting costs, etc).
I like the idea of zero going to help Russian economy (and in turn the war), but a bunch of major companies also do fractional percent business with Russia which I just don’t know about. I don’t want to over penalize the small company that’s honest about it.
These are EU imports from Russia in 2024 in the energy sector alone:
52 bcm gas to 10 EU countries
13 million tonnes oil to 3 EU countries
2800 tonnes enriched uranium/fuel to 7 EU countries
Source: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/strategy/repowereu-roadmap_en
This is like people who vigorously criticize Mozilla's moral failings while using Google Chrome. Heaven forbid we choose the option that is 2% evil instead of the one that is 98% evil.
Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.
It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.
Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?
If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.
But you don't sanction the country directly, but any company that may or may not support the war in Ukraine.
To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people(who still exists) while still buying oil from saudi arabia for example. Ask Kashoggi about it. Or any of those other poor bastards that got rid of without anyone caring about them.
In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
Well, here we're discussing Yandex, there's no "may or may not" about that one: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people
Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.
> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.
Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.
Ok, I did not know those specific details, thanks for providing. I was more talking general. Different story here it seems, but boycotting kagi because of it still sounds extreme to me.
So go head and sanction the US because as far as I am aware its still the largest imperial power in the world
This is a well thought out response that I can connect to. I support the 3 metrics you laid out.
I've never thought about it like that. To me, this is the most interesting part:
> If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"
I wonder how different people decide on different metrics. For me, I probably don't even realize I'm deciding, making it mostly emotionally based I guess. Thanks for sharing with me!
Or as the saying goes:
Perfection is the enemy of good.
Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.
For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.
For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.
I live in the Eastern Bloc. I fear Russia. We still see the bulletholes in the old houses in the inner city that were done by the "liberators".
Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith.
Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well.
It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere. With Russia it's actually easy: an unprovoked invasion of another country, targeting civilians, raping and murdering, there have been few wars where things were so black and white in the history of mankind. With other countries it's more difficult, but I still draw a line, and state-sanctioned genocide falls beyond that line.
Some people say one should not "punish" entire countries or populations for the actions of their leaders. I disagree. Leaders are leaders because they have been elected, and/or have support within the population. And in 21st century there should be consequences for choosing, supporting, or allowing the growth of power of a leader that is a war-raging lunatic.
I do not accept simply doing nothing.
> It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always say "but what about… [insert country here]". I decided to draw the line somewhere.
That's a good point. It's a nuanced topic and I was genuinely curious. I'm not involved in any international business with Russia, so it's interesting to hear about it from the perspective of someone affected by it financially.
"I do not accept simply doing nothing."
You can also donate to the Ukrainian army directly. Or to amnesty international. Or a tons of other options instead of collective punishment. What is the ordinary russian against the war supposed to do? They don't even have a real option of leaving the country as most other states don't want them because they are russian.
In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
Just because you decide to do something, it doesn't mean that you have to do everything. Even if you wanted to, it's likely that you can't.
> In my opinion this helps Putin in his propaganda that the west just hates russia.
It does help him, but you're not going to support those who do nothing or feed the machine waging war just so Putin's propaganda gets a bit weaker.
If the average Russian doesn't understand that the reaction is due to their (well, mostly their governments) actions, then that's another problem that only them can fix.
It's a double whammy for me as I don't want to support Russia or the USA and I largely don't. But I also work in tech and need to get work done so I have to pick my battles, unfortunately.
Dig deep enough (not even very deep at all, actually) and you’ll find evil. It’s not like the US is in any way squeaky clean.
can you perhaps elaborate on which companies and in what capacity?
Yes, Yandex, they pay them for some of their search results. Here is their own statement, where they refuse to stop, even though people keep asking them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
"people", as in a perpetually offended tiny minority that want the entire world to bend to their comfort bubble. I'm fairly certain you're also one of the users that incessantly badgered them about excluding Brave's index, trying to portray it like the majority of Kagi users wanted that.
Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.
'Offended' is a weird word to describe people choosing to boycott evil.
Then get your ass off of the internet because there as so many commercial entities profiting off of every bit of your use.
Yandex is evil?
The Russian government is evil. Would you describe every person within its borders as evil? Every company?
Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.
With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.
Boycott particular examples of evil that they disagree with politically.
I am curious about your politics that favor the invasion of Ukraine.
I’m curious about your politics that are comfortable accepting a long list of invasions by the US, but somehow draw the line when it comes to this particular invasion.
I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.
Can you describe my beliefs on US foreign policy in more detail?
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You sound really mad that people would criticize Russia.
I mean by all means, stick with Google and its ever-declining search quality and ever-expanding monopoly power while it builds AI tools for Israel to automate the slaughter of civilians, instead of a search engine startup that... has some minor partnership with another search engine that is located in a country where you don't like its government?
You know a lot about what I'm doing.
> Is Yandex an arm of Russian intelligence? Any more than Google and Bing are arms of US surveillance?
Yes.
Russia is a dictatorship at war with Ukraine and the West by their own statements and actions. The idea they are leveraging tech companies for this purpose is ludicrous.
Is Yandex == Russia? Is West == unquestionably good? Do you have the same stance on Israel?
Yandex is the Russian government, yes. It didn't used to be but it is now.
https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
Do you have recommendations of other search engines?
Do you also boycott American companies since America is funding a genocide in Gaza, or is that less convenient?
Wait until you hear about the EU! https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-russia-ukraine-war-natur...
Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.
This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing.
I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so.
Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artificial construct and result in doing nothing. I cannot do nothing.
I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria. Kagi produces a product you find useful, and they are trying to run an honest business model that doesn't focus on surveillance, charges a subscription, and earns that by working to return the best results.
Is it really a net win to boycott them?
> I don't find moral stands particularly compelling, because they're an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, and make complex decisions using only the most basic criteria.
I don't think this follows. While some people may use morals as an excuse to indulge in single-factor analysis, it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
> Is it really a net win to boycott them?
How much you value that facet is of course a personal decision.
I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
> it's also entirely possible to use a moral stance as just one of many facets of evaluation.
Agreed. I'd need to see evidence of that, though. People are lazy, and they hide behind moral stances that are completely impractical to avoid having to think through the complex moral realities of the decisions we make. I don't have a lot of patience for this. If it's part of a multi-faceted analysis, then I'd expect to see that reflected in the comments the person makes. That's not true in this case.
> I personally wonder how much less useful Kagi would really be without Yandex? Only Kagi knows, really.
It's not your decision. Your decision is whether or not to pay Kagi for their service. Kagi produces a product that tries to provide the best value, and doesn't surveil you.
You don’t have a leg to stand on when dismissing criticism as whataboutisms, chief.
“Kagi is superior product and a vital competitor to breaking the search oligopoly — but what about their loose and indirect association with the Russian economy?!”
Oh you're taking a moral stance? So how do you get by without search? Because surely Google and Microsoft have many other moral problems, likely even the same ones.
But you're morally pure so you use no search at all right?
You can install an adblocker and Google/Microsoft end up losing money if you use them. You can't stop Kagi from sending money to Yandex, unless of course you stop using Kagi.
Happily the state of the world isn't the result of recognizing the state of the world, and attempting to avoid hypocrisy. Instead the world is a complex system that defies easy discussions on social media, motivated by overly simplistic and selectively applied moralism.
For example I'm able to compare the impact on the world of Google, AdSense, etc... and Kagi's partial reliance on Yandex. Something tells me that's going to be taken as another case of "whataboutism" rather than realism.
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I'm sure Google and Bing don't show Russian websites including Yandex in results /s
If we look at history, Russia government's capacity to withstand punishment of any kind in detriment to its own citizens is limitless. I applaud your determination but I wouldn't expect that to put any kind of pressure on Russia w.r.t its stance on the Ukraine invasion. Things need to get way uglier for Russia before its leaders take any corrective actions and I'd argue we'll never reach that threshold, sort of having (yet) another armed revolution of sorts (which I don't see happening either).
Three years of 10-20% interest rates, brain drain, and war casualties. Their reckoning is coming, just not yet.
How's Putin's approval rate since the invasion?
Dunno. Are there any credible measures of this?
Been an Early Adopter, joined January of 2023 and I have never looked back or paused my monthly. I'm currently running with the Ultimate package which is good value for the $25/month price tag.
Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience.
I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.
I took a look at the linked block list[0]. There's a lot of junk in it, but I'm also seeing a lot of sites that have, in my opinion, pretty decent content.
My approach with Kagi is just to block SEO spam when it shows up in my results, but I don't think good SEO means it's a bad site with no useful results.
[0] https://paste.flamedfury.com/flamedfury-kagi-block-list
I had the same reaction – his list includes washingtonpost.com, amazon.com, alternativeto.net, medium.com, twitter.com, msn.com, etc.
He dumped his entire blocklist, which must include a bunch of sites that he finds personally annoying.
Here is the list of domains owned by the 16 companies discussed in the post that he linked to: https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters/src/branch/m...
Indeed, I despise SEO spammy sites and block them aggressively in Kagi, but I see many sites on there that do have good content, often paired with good SEO and lots of ads. I have blocked sites that have good content due to invasive ads before so I'm not one to cast stones, but I wouldn't blindly use this list as you're likely going to be cutting out some potentially good sources.
Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.
Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.
On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.
Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
You can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query.
It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.
If you're paying for kagi, you can use ChatGPT or gpt 4.1 mini -- OpenAI uses bing as a backend so it'll be a strict improvement for you
Ads are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case.
There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...
> Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.
I use Kagi Assistant which uses LLMs from AI companies mixed with their own indexes. It works great and is included with Kagi.
Kagi has an optional integrated search AI which you can activate by adding a question mark at the end of your query.
You can also use !ai at the end to redirect the query.
It'll redirect the query to kagi.com/assistant and use your default model or assistant for the search.
Do they still use Yandex?
>I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023
I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.
Kagi is still partnered with Yandex[0], but they removed a list of sources they used. When asked if the list could be restored, Vladimir Prelovac replied "Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need."[1]
[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/252-show-source-of-results/49
Not a great look. Even if you somehow believe partnering with Yandex is justifiable, you should stand by the decision.
My annual plan with Kagi renews in a few months and it might be time to look for alternatives.
They do stand by it: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Removing a previously public list of sources after being pressed on their integration with Yandex gives me a different impression.
Good links. Him making out that hiding it is to help users is a bit gross.
They would rather live in a world where they can find everything, including 2℅ atrocities they indirectly fund, than not
You're gonna have a hard time using anything right now if you want to avoid services run in a country not spending on a war somewhere.
It's not hypocritical to set the bar at a given place, like an ongoing war of territorial expansion and child abduction run by an autocrat that won't be replaced until his death. One with near complete popular support.
Are you talking about the United States? Like, yes, the Russian regime is awful, but how are you looking around at the the world and not applying the same standards to the US?
This could easily refer to any of the despots the US backs
Is that some sort of gotcha? By all means, boycott those countries as well. Support from the US certainly is not a free pass.
Follow the logic and boycott the US as well! Now you have zero viable search engines
Can you give me a line-by-line breakdown please? For example, I believe term limits are still a thing.
Thats not at all what he said.
All countries pay for their militaries. Russia invaded Ukraine and is actively comitting genocide.
There is a difference.
There have been times when I loved and times when I absolutely hated Yandex. That being said, I am not going to disown everything associated with Russia. Also they are distancing themselves. It's far from perfect but the more independent indexes the better even if you disagree with those particular indexes.
I wonder how much of the advantages from kagi are due to their yandex backend.
For example, I recently tried to search for a text string from ao3 and google, bing, brave, qwant, ... all return no results, while yandex and by extension kagi found it in the first search result.
Also, the company is based in a country that has 'fueled' more wars in my lifetime than any other country has in the last 100 years. Definitely avoid.
I doubted this but it's true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi_(search_engine)
> Country of origin: USA
Do you have any links / sources for this?
I think they are referring to this changelog item:
> Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.
https://kagi.com/changelog#5340
They were asked to stop and refused:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Do you use American products?
Since, you know, America is funding Israel's genocide in Gaza with money and bombs.
Too inconvenient to boycott amazon and google?
They have search results from Yandex among others, yes, and Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore.
See for example https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
> Yandex isn't really a Russian company anymore
The Dutch owners sold Yandex to a group of Russian investors.
I tried to give Kagi a fair shot by using it for a few months. I loved a lot of features, especially the boost/block lists. But I always felt the responses were way too slow for something I use that much. I benchmarked a handful of queries and confirmed they were consistently ~3x slower than Google for normal searches and 5-10x slower for image searches on my home network. I’m sure there are many factors that play into that, so maybe the reason I haven’t seen others complain about the speed has just been that the problem is unique to my network. But ultimately I opted to switch back to Google for my daily driver and just use Kagi for specific lenses.
That is unusual. Have you tried reaching out to support@kagi.com ?
Yep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.
Please reach out to me at vlad@kagi.com and we'll set you up on an account (on us) and I'll personally get involved to see what is happening. Most our searches complete in less than 1000ms. We do dig much deeper than Google though, and we more often than not place what you are looking for in the top 3 results - and that has to count for something too.
So is it truly the case that I can now pay for Kagi without my searches being associated to my account? And I dont mean by scouts pledge, but I recall reading something about anonymous crypto tokens?
I'd consider getting an account if so.
I go to Kagi to try it out. Asks me to sign in to do search. That’s just a bad onboarding experience.
If you'd told me several years ago I'd be paying $10/month for a search engine, I'd say that's crazy talk. But it genuinely is worth it.
The blocklist thing is interesting, I finally took the plunge and installed the app and extension
I've never used Kagi before and wanted to try: how does Kagi stack up against Brave search?
Kagi results consume brave search among others before returning the result so should be a superset in quality
Maybe not a popular sentiment here on HN but I cancelled my Kagi subscription (9+ months) just recently. Increasingly, most of my queries/search have been through LLMs and Google search is just fine (and even better for restaurants, places, and the like). I don't think the improved search experience is worth the subscription anymore.
In Kagi, you can just ad a "?" to your query and get an instant answer, a la LLMs.
Or !ai to route it to kagi.com/assistant with your default model/agent to respond with kagi search results
I really enjoy Kagi for search. It is a significantly better experience. I do still use Google Maps for looking up local things, and I kind of wish Kagi would redirect me there instead of their own maps implementation, which I just cannot imagine will ever be on par.
DDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to brand advertisements? Answer: you'll insist it's 0, but it's impossible to know.
How much money do you spend per year that you wouldn't otherwise due to clicking one of the first few links and paying more for some service, often without realizing it's an ad? Again, the answer is that it's impossible to say.
Google is commonly said to own a "money-printing machine" on here. How can they print all that money without extracting any from you?
If Kagi would offer an easy to use pre-paid option, I would use it again.
Same. It would be great if they had something like the mullvads cards you can buy off Amazon in most countries to credit your account
I thought their maps integration was pretty bad compared to Google, as well as the information widgets. It stressed me, I was always thinking that somethin isn't right and that I'm to blame, because so many love it so much over Google.
Awesome post, love Kagi and learned some new things. One small gripe tho: publishing a "block list" and implying its for SEO sites, but then including sites like Facebook, Medium, WebMD, NyPost, Quora, TikTok, etc. is just goofy. "SEO" to me means "overly-long articles on niche topics that provide bad info just to sell ads", not "news sites I don't like"!
Kagi seems like an old tool for a bygone age. A faster horse carriage, instead of a car, you know?
Use kagi.com/assistant then?
The cars still use that faster horse as a core engine before answering.
Having a better engine makes for better answers keeping the model constant
Happy Kagi user for many many months now. The only thing I fall back to Google for are local results (specifically local business search - like restaurants). I still have an Android phone, use Gmail, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc - but Kagi has almost entirely replaced my standard Google search results.
And it's making me do something crazy. It's so good that I am even suggesting it to non-technical friends and family. 99% of them look at my like I'm crazy when I say it's a paid search engine, but hey - I'm trying.
I also find myself using the "quick answer" feature a lot too. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
You can trigger quick answer with a "?"
But also feel free to try adding "!ai" to send the query to the assistant for a deeper dive
Can someone who uses both Kagi and Perplexity Pro tell me how they compare or decide which to use?
I committed to Perplexity so I can have access to most models I care about easily, deep research, and better online search. I’m happy with Perplexity, but I’ve been Kagi curious for years and now I’m even less sure how I’d approach using it.
As far as I use it, it's much less AI-forward, providing more of a straightforward search experience. They are adding AI tools, but it's definitely an addition rather than the core of the UX.
I happen to prefer that and just rely on Claude to run its own searches via API, but I haven't used Perplexity so can't compare them directly. Hope that's helpful!
Thanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search?
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
Probably they are using 'Kagi Assistant', which is essentially kagi acting as an intermediary to the major LLMs. You get a catalog and a monthly quota.
Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.
Interesting. The lenses sound similar to “Spaces” on Perplexity, where you can segment searches to a specific prompt every go and upload files etc for context. Safe to assume that’s a pretty common feature now, maybe I should look at Kagi again - it’s been a few years since I’ve last peeked at it.
Kagi has their Assistant which is where you can have an AI chat, deeper than the AI blurb from Quick Answer. It has access to several different models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and others.
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Kagi is an interesting one, I've been meaning to test it out. I also made a search engine seek.ninja / searcha.page, and in trying to promote it I see Kagi come up a lot.