Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
/*
Hide pre-translated webpages.
"sri-group" is main result, "__srgi" are sub results.
You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
*/
:is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
display: none !important;
}*
It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.
That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)
The chatter in search right now is related to AI-assisted answers, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile — local results — 0 from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of code. We’re constantly working on search.
In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.
> The conversation about and innovation in the future of search right now is related to AI-assisted answers
I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.
But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.
The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
I also like traditional results, which is how I got into this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the conversation right now is about AI-assisted answers, and just revised to make that more clear what I referring to.
In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.
We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).
I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at the end of a query.
One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.
Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.
- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.
- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.
- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.
All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.
I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.
It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.
What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.
fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.
If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
> If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.
This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a backup (there are a handful of large websites that only allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular), but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest, and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.
Same here. I don't often feel the need to shill for paid products but Kagi is so good that I want to do everything I can to make sure it sticks around. It's like air in the sense that it's easy to forget how much I need it until I suddenly don't have it lol
I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.
Really. In the case of Google it’s even deeper for me. For some reason the ruination of their search engine feels like a betrayal for which Kagi’s proliferation feels like justice.
If you're comfortable sharing, what is your job/role, how does Kagi help with that (or is it more of a personal tool), and do you find it more helpful than something like Google + Claude (what I currently use and love)?
I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.
On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.
Same. Kagi has been a breath of fresh air after suffering years of enshittification with other search engines whom are much more interested in your clickstream than providing you with quality results.
Keep up the good work guys!