This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.
What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.
But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.
I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.
I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.
With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.
I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.
And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.
I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.
> I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.
I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.
It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.
The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.
Google clearly wins there.
Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.
Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.
Happy to pay kagi.
Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.
Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.
Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.
For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.
want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.
A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.
Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.
> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).
For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:
- w3school
- GeeksforGeeks
- real python
- programiz
- code academy
And only after do I get the official python docs.
On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.
Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.
And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.
Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers
Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.
This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.
> @hn !
This brings me directly to the front page of HN.
> @gh jj !
This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
> !guixc how do I install nginx?
This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.
> !p nginx
Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.
The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
There is a noticeable friction now in using Google for searching. A pretty good example of how a decent product gets ruined by accountants and shareholder demand.
However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.
Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.
If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.
Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.
Just recently I’ve created a bang in Kagi which redirects me to Google Maps roughly around my home with a query that I typed.
I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
Legally, Kagi can buy access to Yandex' API. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. It's the main reason I haven't tried Kagi yet, and probably never will, as the owners don't seem to have a problem with any of it.
They want access to Yandex's index. Given the quality of Kagi's results, I trust them with that call. Despite the Ukraine war being of deep personal interest to me.
In the link above they say they added Yandex Image search as a provider.
The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).
Two quotes from his response: "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics." "We set out to fix search, not the world."
All the technical explanations between these two quotes could have also been used to justify why they are not contributing to Russias economy. But he didn't do that. That is a conscious choice while clearly being aware of the issue.
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
Not one click but by no means a byzantine process
If this doesn't scare you already, I'll rephrase: Your queries may be sent to the built-in search engines even if you think you're only using Kagi! It does not actually replace the need for real custom search engine support in Safari. The official Kagi docs coyly acknowledge this [1]:
> For a better experience, we recommend selecting a single search engine to redirect (DuckDuckGo or Ecosia are recommended options as they have better privacy policies than other alternatives).
[0]: It's an amazingly portable device made ahead of its time - Apple really should revive this form factor and stick an M1 chip in it. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.
Eventually I gave up and uninstalled their extension. I switched to using StopTheMadness to do the redirects instead, and am having much better luck. I did switch from redirecting Google to redirecting Ecosia at the same time, and this might be the difference, and while I'd fully agree that Safari doesn't make it easy, but I think the base problem is that their browser extension just doesn't work that well.
(If you are familiar with both, you will understand that switching _to_ StopTheMadness for a better interface is pretty high in irony!)
When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.
Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.
The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
They may never become huge (they are explicitly building their business model such that it doesn't require growth to succeed), but if they ever do, they will be able to maintain their mission and goals, but they almost certainly won't be able to maintain that small, human feel.
People need to stop posting this blog post as if it's something incriminating, or even negative. I'm sure if GDPR is violated, Kagi will sort it out with their lawyers, but as of now I don't see what exactly are we worrying about. For me it's neither GDPR nor Vlad's "appalling" behaviour and if it's neither, this whole blog is utterly useless
Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
What an appalling waste of electrons. First, non-advert (labelled, and non-labelled) on page 3.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.
Additional details on the blog post about it.
I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.
For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)
Edit: I got this working.
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.
Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.
Some nice features that may not be obvious:
- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"
They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.
Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.
Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.
I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.
[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
And thanks JGruber for teaching me about !g + bangs. Useful!
I also trust @freediver more than Sam Altman :)
Edit: Ah I suppose that you meant the “Inline Maps”. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change the provider, only to enable/disable the feature: https://kagi.com/settings?p=more_search
Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages.
Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?
Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.
I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.
The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
> Works Everywhere - Control D can be used on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, without any installed software. To do the same with Pi-hole, you would have to set up a VPN which is a massive overkill for something as simple as DNS.
That said, the most astonishing thing was that I apparently do 100 searches a day, so 3k a month... I'm a bit sad that Kagi doesn't offer opt-in search history because I want to know what it is I'm searching for! (it's across three devices so looking at browser history is just above the threshold of how much effort I want to put in)
I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.
I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".
The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.
I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.
I also like https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass, if you use it they know that you've paid, but they still can't correlate your search queries with your billing identity. So thoughtful.
One gripe would be trying to use other features while using privacy pass. Eg, maps doesn't seem to work. They are regularly improving the experience though. And that's a key difference. Google is getting worse for their ad revenue, Kagi is getting better for paying customers.
So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.
Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
Do you know the feeling when you're using an alternative search engine that what you're looking for is missing, and to be 100% sure you have to compare with Google? I have the opposite problem now: whenever I use Google, I feel nothing relevant is being surfaced and I have to run back to Kagi.
I literally have learned to associate the Google search logo with "bad quality", which is fcuking tragic for a company that used to be known for their innovative search engine.
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.
I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
I tend to use bing as my default if only because they give you points in return for harvesting your data that you can redeem for amazon gift cards. Years ago I wrote a userscript to add a link to other search engines on bing and I still find myself heading to google regularly. (the script is half broken at the moment. Fixing it is on my list of things to do this summer)
This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.
There was a time I was interested in finding results from the small web such as personal blogs or local stores and Kagi did indeed provide better results, but I couldn't justify paying a monthly subscription over that.
I'm now paying for:
- Search
- News
- Backups
Of course I'd rather not spend the money, but ALL these services are leagues ahead of the ad-supported alternatives. This is how the Internet should work.
(Edit - formatting)
If you want an official website, always follow the link to the Wikipedia article, and there click on the link to the official website.
Also, I find Duckduckgo a lot better than Google in general.
Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).
Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:
- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia
and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
Check it out: https://github.com/wajeht/bang
Google's results are really awful, and it constantly nags me to install Chrome.
Kagi seems like an obvious acquisition target. They will never raise enough paying subscribers.
It's the first result on Duckduckgo.
Edit: Oh, I see in the linked article that the author does not have an ad blocker installed. That's user error.
I'm considering them both, buy I'll only pay for one...
<https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...>
For my part, I loved the eye candy on perplexity, but I caught it mixing up answers a few times and I lost confidence. The other part is that I felt passive in the search process, while on Kagi I am/feel empowered thanks to the advanced controls.
Usually the first 2 are the ones I'm looking for, but doing a deep dive is a lot harder on kagi
Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)
Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result
Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?
But the most important part is that it's very likely that there will _never be_ sponsored results. The business model means their incentive lines up with mine - give me good search and I'll give you ten bucks a month. If your search starts to suck, I'm not going to keep paying.
It still returned lots of results that were paywalled, lots of results with more ads than content, results that didn't contain words I put in quotes. Apparently there's options to filter out certain sites, but it's pretty pointless if there are so many that the task is impossible to do manually.
I've been using Duck Duck Go for a while. Can't say it's better, I even have the occasional search where ddg doesn't return results and revert to Google which does.
