I'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use, and programatic api use/agents can easily 100x that, performing dozens of searches for one user query. So either Kagi plan price increases and API calls then get included in the price (but then this impacts all users even those not using agents) or there is a pay what you use mechanism for API (which there is).
Any API use given away for free eats into Kagi's (already slim) margins, and unlike VC funded businesses, for Kagi money has to come from users or Kagi doesnt exist. It is a reality of running a user-funded business. If the user doesn't pay for something, Kagi has to.
I think the point is that it would be nice if people who are already paying for human-driven searches could also get an API key included in that plan.
Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.
No, and it's a real problem for free and trial tiers for services like this.
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
> Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.
I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.
I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.
I mentioned this in another thread. There's clearly a market for an agentic search engine for home/on-premise LLMs. I can download whatever frontier model, but I still have to crawl the web if I want it to have the latest information.
Others have argued the point at depth, but its somewhat more simple than that.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
Yeah the agent API access part is kind of lame. I do think i will start paying for Kagi search API at some point though. The search quality and ability to surface small blogs and sources which other search engines miss is probably well worth the cost.
It’s not free, I’m paying ten buck a month for it.
I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.
I'm paying ten bucks a month and I don't want to be paying for an API I don't use. If the options are raise everyone's prices to cover the cost of the searches that an extreme minority of people want to use or ask those people to pay a little bit more for that extra functionality I think the second option makes the most sense.
You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.
You could argue that it also includes the assistant that I’m barely using at all…
Why is this included in the sub while the main reason I use Kagi is the search, and the search itself is not included if performed via an agent?
I mean, presumably at some level you are using the search API - it's just a programmatic interface into the same underlying database calls. I don't know if Kagi web search uses the public API directly or if they share an underlying internal API, but I imagine there's not a lot of difference on Kagi's end.
The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.
That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.
Very happy Kagi user for a few years.
I extra appreciate the ability for me to set custom rankings for certain sites. For example, I have downranked Reddit so it only shows up if there's almost nothing else. They're also a whole bunch of AI garbage sites or listicle sites that have outright removed from all my search results.
I also love that it doesn't try to AI summarize everything I search, it only does it when I put a question mark on there so I can turn it on and easily.
And I pay for my account and use it on all my devices without having to buy four licenses.
Haven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.
> I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google
I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
Very rare for me to use Google nowadays for something niche. For those cases, I would assume it requires multiple sources to get a definitive answer, so it goes to ChatGPT.
I never said that? But when i’n searching for a certain answer, I don’t really care about paragraphs, posts, etc. A good chunk of time it might be data auto-generated from big databases too.
Time and place for every tech/use case. When I’m in the mood for reading long pieces, i do that deliberately.
> And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.
A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!
I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".
I used Kagi for a few years and was completely satisfied.
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
I love Kagi and have been a very happy subscriber for like a couple years now.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
Splendid news! I definitely think getting Kagi in front of people to try will be easier than requiring a sign up... Obviously it won't be for everyone, not everyone values the benefits of good search, but plenty would if only they saw it.
They have. Look in your account, it's in usage. If your usage exceeds what you have paid you will get told.
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic's flagship model with always-on adaptive
thinking ($$$$$). Best for deep reasoning, agentic
coding, and long-horizon work.
Cost $$$$$
Quality ●●●●●
Speed ●●
I have quite the opposite experience here where I almost never use the assistant. I much prefer the frontier labs alternative (I’m lucky enough to have my work pay for the subs).
They do, it’s capped at whatever your subscription cost is. But if you don’t have Ultimate the models are cheap and it’s hard to spend it all on assistant use.
Kagi is playing a smart game. They will catch the search traffic that Google is abandoning. Similar to what happened to RSS when Google Reader was shut down - a few other players caught a good amount users.
Pessimistically, I get the strong impression that AI is cannibalizing search traffic, not competing search engines. The delivery format overall is changing, even if power users prefer the traditional approach.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, the only non-Kagi workflow I end up using frequently is !gm instead of using the Kagi maps. Hopefully that gap closes up in the future.
Anything specific we can do? Feel free to reach out here publically or to dylan@kagi.com. Latency is a weak link rn for sure (from aggrigating so many 3rd party data providers) but we have a solution we're working through for that... along with many tweaks to continue to close that gap.
I'm in the same boat, but honestly it's mostly out of habit.
But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...
I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.
- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.
- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.
- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)
- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)
Not the OP but one thing I've noticed in my own town is locations that have moved still showing up at their old (and new) location, and sometimes the places that moved into the old locations not showing up at all. I tend to be fine with it for general geography but not for searching for places in an unfamiliar location.
would love the ability to give kagi a general location to use rather than whatever it is they use now. results for things like restaurants or events can be anywhere from a few towns over to halfway across the country so I often have to search again with !g or my specific location
I was a subscriber for 2 years but as of late, I've had less and less need for Kagi's awesome search experience. Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem and so I have my passwords almost everywhere that way. But like, I have a lot of devices and a whole family. Sometimes it turns out one is not set up properly and I logged in with a QR code.
For some reason after latest MacOS update (27.2) Kagi extension for Safari started failing frequently. I have Kagi configured to redirect Google, but now I just see Google search show up and stay there. It only redirects if I click the Kagi extension button myself. Seems like a bug, but happens so often that it really ruins the experience.
The extension is open source and macOS changes do interfere with it working. Apple is not making it easy. It is one of the reasons we created Orion - same lightweight, native Safari experience but integrated with Kagi.
I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.
It's sad that we have to pay a different company to do it, but it seems they mostly just remove junk or re-priorize Google results. Google is showing us results in a way that maximizes revenue for Google. Kagi is showing results in a way that maximizes the likelihood that you will pay Kagi for that search service itself.
This makes it sound nefarious but isn’t Kagi maximizing for subscriptions synonymous with them maximizing a great product that returns the desired results for users?
I knew Kagi was essentially a meta-search provider (they use lots of indexes to try and produce a more accurate search result), but wasn't aware they use a SERP provider with Google results. Uruky does and it seems to be offered upfront for users that want a more Google-like experience. I'm wondering where you found that out?
If you take them at their word, they would love to be able to pay Google directly for such an API. But I think it would take a government requiring it for Google to do it.
Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
I've found the assistant, particularly the android app, to be buggy as all hell. Perhaps it's fine in the browser but as a heavy phone user I couldn't make it work anymore.
Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. I digress. It’s not as if showing ads has somehow funded a better search experience, if anything ads go up and quality goes down is what I see. I pay for YT Premium. I would also pay for ad-free, more controllable, Google Search.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids on Kagi and they don’t want to go back to Google now.
I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.
I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.
You're saying you'd love to use Kagi at $7/month, but flatly refuse to do so at $10/month, which is what their unlimited Professional option costs? Really?
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
We can haggle over the ideal price but I do see sense in a cheaper version without the AI to appeal to more cost conscious people - I am a Kagi subscriber I never use the AI part (but I'm not so bothered that I'd demand a discount, maybe others are)
If you can find at least one other person you care about a little, then they do in fact offer unlimited for $7 or even $3.33
I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.
There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.
I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.
I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.
But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.
I love Kagi. I especially appreciate how it pushes back against AI slop and makes the web feel more human again. I haven't looked back at Google since switching. The search results are consistently better.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
Surely I am not the only one that has basically stopped using web search almost completely? Wikipedia, YouTube search I still use sure, but almost anything I'd have searched Google for 5 years ago I just...plop into ChatGPT now. No outdated StackOverflow links, no Pinterest spam, no generic SEO slop. It seems Kagi has some AI stuff...but...why?
If you'd like to skip all those garbage results but not deal with an AI then kagi is great. Also, they don't track you and sell your data like AI companies surely do (or will do soon)
Still no option to pay on a per search basis? Still not remotely interested then. I don't search nearly enough to justify paying for a search engine subscription.
I tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
Counterpoint: I use Kagi Assistant on the $10/mo plan for literally everything I would have used Google for before and have never burned my monthly credits.
hey quick question, what part of Hermes were you using for search? Do they have a similar web portal to Kagi's Assistant or is it more like the AI overview below the search bar?
I am running it locally at home with tailscale for access outside of my home network. I added a tavily key for search and pageloads. There are various FE projects that can connect to Hermes, they also have a frontend, but it's not a "search" interface.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
I think you’re objections are fair and real so I won’t dismiss them
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
Wait til you realize the search engines you use now are funding directly AND indirectly even more pointless wars than that one...
Can we get a summary of each? I'd like to see various metrics on the scale and brutality of the war compared to state ownership of the company, direct monetary contributions, and indirect monetary contributions to the war effort.
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
They are separate entities. In fact you buying gas rises the global price of oil which in turn gives money to Russia to fund the war. Better leave those keys at home and walk if you actual care about not funding Russia. I doubt you care enough.
It being useful is entirely orthogonal to the original commenter’s (and my) issue with it: money going to them is money being used to bomb my family’s home.
Exactly! I too prefer only FSB approved information.
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.
Huh? I assume you're being sarcastic but I don't go on Yandex looking for news. I said it's a useful tool for circumventing western censorship. For example copyrighted info, info from outlawed political groups (western designated terrorists), or rich people info censored under various defamation or "right to be forgotten" court orders.
I know Kagi is supposed to be a curated experience but I really, really wish they'd have a setting I could toggle to see more than 200 search results per query. 200 is just 2 pages and for more obscure search topics (like, "pyroelectric partcile acceleration") I found that Kagi could never "curate" and actually deliver the links to the research paper PDFs that other search engines could find. Even google with it's 400 maximum search results and Bing with 900 are more useful because of this. But it not like search engines used to be where you could dive deep into many hundreds or thousands of results and find serendipitous things related to the intended search. I really miss and would pay for the ability to read and select search results myself instead of having them curated for me by some algorithm. Or at least give me a couple thousand "curated" results.
We're planning on adding support for more pages. We can't guarantee a specific number of results, but at least you should be able to get more than you do right now.
Yes, sir(s)! Using a search engine without ads is such a life improvement that it’d be a steal at twice the price.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
I'm informing of psychological facts, in the hope that you realize that you are not a platonic unity always in absolute control of your perceptions, beliefs, and tendencies.
Use a meta-search engine like SearXNG [1] and you're searching not only ad-free but also - if you choose your sources right - mostly bias-free as far as that is possible. You'll get the results Google filters out but others show, those which Kagi doesn't want you to see but others show, those which those others don't want you to see but Google or Kagi or fill_in_the_blanks show.
regardless of whether the ads are "working" (what does that even mean?), they're additional cognitive load; things my eyes see and add to the overall din that the web has fallen to. I use adblock, but even then, the search results on supposed privacy respecting search engines might be influenced by sponsors for the simple reason that the incentives are not aligned.
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
Isn't the whole point of this announcement that you don't need an account? The 50 searches they mention is just client side stored. if you don't store cookies for kagi.com you have unlimited searches.
I believe very strongly that Russia started a completely unjustified war of agression against Ukraine, and that our moral, political, monetary, and military aid (through the sale of weapons, not direct involvement) should be firmly on the side of the Ukrainians.
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
No where in my comment says, or even implies that. Your interpretation says more about you than me.
-edit- And even if it did (again: doesn't), there is nothing contradictory in being willing to having my mind changed, even if I think one particular person is arguing in bad faith. Other people exist. I am always open to being wrong. Maybe someone else, who is arguing in good faith, could convince me. Taking potshots that add nothing to the conversation however, will not convince me.
Without any more qualifiers, that could be any large country on Earth. Except, maybe, for China. I don't remember them going around invading other places.
Kagi pays Yandex for search results. It's only one of many inputs but some of the money you pay to Kagi does go to Russia. Kagi's stance on this is that product quality is more important than "geopolitics". It's an extremely disappointing take to use "geopolitics" as a euphemism for "supporting genocide and wars of aggression", which is what doing business with any Russian entity is.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
Defeats the purpose of the free tier.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users. Not to mention, as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
I refuse to believe there is a negligible margin decrease for agents using the regular search budget. Searching is cheap.
A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.
I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.
I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.
I was just really surprised.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.
You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.
The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.
That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.
I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
Time and place for every tech/use case. When I’m in the mood for reading long pieces, i do that deliberately.
What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.
1. DDG
2. Google
3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand
4. This is information the world was not meant to know
(Also Marginalia for deep search)
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
For those that are looking for it, you can track your current month's billing/ai-usage here: https://kagi.com/settings/billing
Hopefully we can win you over soon enough <3
- dylan (maps team)
But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...
I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.
- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.
- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.
- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)
- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)
> For example, searching Kagi for !w Monty Python will search Wikipedia directly for "Monty Python" and take you to that Wikipedia search result. [1]
If you're on a plan with limited searches per month, it does not count against your quota.
DuckDuckGo has bangs as well.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
May I recommend a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC[0], with a YubiKey[1] and some folder synchronization across machines?
[0]: https://keepassxc.org/
[1]: https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-yubikey-howto
https://orionbrowser.com
I wish they would. The extension works well for me most of the time, but every once in a while I end up on Ecosia and I’m confused for 2 seconds.
Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Am I searching for the range of input voltages an Arduino can safely handle? Kagi.
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.
There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.
I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.
I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.
But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
[0] https://kagi.com/smallweb/
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
Remember their “early adopter” drama? Wasn’t their only drama.
Wait til you realize the search engines you use now are funding directly AND indirectly even more pointless wars than that one...
How is funding america any better?
EDIT: Also technically Russia is in Europe ;)
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.
And the UI is also cluttered with useless stuff I don't need.
I feel that we lost good search engines here.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
No need to cast shade on others who aren't like you.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
As always, I'm open to having my mind changed.
> I am open to having my mind changed. Also I think you are arguing on bad faith.
My dude.
-edit- And even if it did (again: doesn't), there is nothing contradictory in being willing to having my mind changed, even if I think one particular person is arguing in bad faith. Other people exist. I am always open to being wrong. Maybe someone else, who is arguing in good faith, could convince me. Taking potshots that add nothing to the conversation however, will not convince me.
OP in the linked thread wanted to boycott Russia and Russian businesses. The “context” is that Kagi gives money to Yandex.
The answer from them : we are unimpressed by world politics.
Man… they are on my short list now.
(Not OP)