I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.
I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop
Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.
I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.
It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.
I think the first time around they were included with the free shirt they sent out. Second time they were with the free socks. Maybe general merch store orders might include them too.
The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.
So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.
One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.
Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.
If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.
I just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would implement this like some kind of token replenishment or quota system like every IP address gets to access old dot like a very low number and if you log in with the same IP address you get more quota or replenished a little faster if you also come in with no auth like from a private window. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to do anything like this but yes, regional is likely as well.
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Is that trickery NAT, network address translation? It is a pretty widespread technique I think, we’d have run out of ipv4 addresses a while ago without it.
Wellp, not for me... Shame, reddit has/had really good answers to a variety of problems that I've had over the years. Not sure if there's a replacement for it, or if there will ever be another.
You can still add .json to any thread and get the full comments in a single object. The anti scraping features must be a rate limiting thing, because it’s very machine readable otherwise. They just want to push people to be logged in and use the app.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
should is the key here. The lack of something to support is reason to not pay. Like you, I lack a good local newspaper. There is the nearby city, but they don't cover the important local news well.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
There's still valuable info in your local newspaper even if their agenda is the opposite of yours. You just have to read between the lines and phone their bias.
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
You assume there is one. My 'local' covers high school sports, road construction, but none of the important issues that I need to care about to be an informed voter.
I need someone to be at the library board meeting, school board meeting, city counsel meeting... Some of these happen at the same time so I can't attend them all even if I didn't have other things not mentioned I'm doing then.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
they are reaching out out via normal means.
you don't get to redefine words because you are too cheap to pay for information and only read trash.
its so funny how you idiots gibble about "if you do not pay you are the product" but everything you know about the world is you being the product
By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.
Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!
Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).
Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.
(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).
I prefer ads because pihole blocks them. Paywalls block me, and then I have to reload and ninja enter reader mode, or if I’m reading inclined, find an archive link.
I think this short exchange highlights the problem really well.
Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.
Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.
If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.
> news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago
Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?
> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good
Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.
Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.
>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions, past, present, or future, of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online.
You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
uh, I did not know: what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround... (many thanks to them)
>what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'.
Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.
I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works.
If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
> If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
Why?
i am not sure i understand your question.
presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop
Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
I’m guessing because it’s valuable to have a trustworthy AI assistant that you can just explain what you want and it finds the best options
Keyword trustworthy, I think Kagi is one of the only companies that would be in a position to do this without pushback.
But, regular models and harnesses work okay for this too. You just have to specify “web search”, very important.
That's already possible, so I thought they were asking for more.
For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.
Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.
I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.
It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. "
which model?
I find Kim best. I used 4.5, now 4.6 reasoning.
Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
I use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.
What do you do to get the stickers?!
I think the first time around they were included with the free shirt they sent out. Second time they were with the free socks. Maybe general merch store orders might include them too.
For some reason I never received any stickers, shirts, or socks here in France.
I do remember them asking about shipping information at some point though.
i also want stickers...
The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.
So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.
One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.
Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.
Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.
A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.
If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.
You can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).
The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
Edit: Typo
Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?
Longstanding user and it is great!
It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.
I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.
> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it
True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.
I've been enjoying Kagi for the last couple years.
Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful.
Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects
EDIT: See here for a list of instances: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instancesWow, thank you. I never know this. I feel good now, in a strange way when a paid service serve me well instead of exploiting me.
I had Kagi configured to rewrite links old.reddit.com. Looks like I need to update it.
Edit: Actually I think this was part of their documentation to explain the intended use of that feature. Too bad this will now no longer work!
(https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html, see example 1)
LibRedirect is useful for this (and other sites) too if you want it to apply over the whole browser.
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.
I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
There are some defects like what does this mean?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn
Okay, strange, but that’s a bug, not a web app “feeling barebones” wrt. core functionality for most users, at least IMO.
Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.
I just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
That sucks to have to create an account just to read user generated content if you don't contribute.
I can still access old.reddit.com from my country/region
It is just people without accounts who are being blocked, and maybe it is regional?
If I could wave a magic wand, I would implement this like some kind of token replenishment or quota system like every IP address gets to access old dot like a very low number and if you log in with the same IP address you get more quota or replenished a little faster if you also come in with no auth like from a private window. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to do anything like this but yes, regional is likely as well.
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Is that trickery NAT, network address translation? It is a pretty widespread technique I think, we’d have run out of ipv4 addresses a while ago without it.
> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
Are you sure? If I visit https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/ in private mode (i.e. without my auth cookies) then I am asked to log in.
I guess they are A/B testing this “feature”.
Yeah, that loads right up for me.
Wellp, not for me... Shame, reddit has/had really good answers to a variety of problems that I've had over the years. Not sure if there's a replacement for it, or if there will ever be another.
They are just trying to close the loophole from the scrapers.
They are selling content to google et al for their LLMs and they don't want to give it away for free.
You can still add .json to any thread and get the full comments in a single object. The anti scraping features must be a rate limiting thing, because it’s very machine readable otherwise. They just want to push people to be logged in and use the app.
Not for me - both at work and home. I need to be logged in.
Doesn't work for me
Maybe for you.
I get a nice
> Log in to use old Reddit
> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
You in the UK?
I get the same, seemingly randomly, from US.
No more, since I installed the "always old reddit" plugin in firefox.
No, but I am not in the US
Not working for me either without an account anymore. Seems like a very recent change.
I had to login the other day to use it. Probably getting slowly rolled out.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
it works just fine for you, but not everyone.
Not for long, sadly.
This makes sense to me as a Kagi user. The chance that I'm going to subscribe to read an article I found via a search is zero.
If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).
However tracking that is tricky at best.
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
Ground news is biased, excellent video about it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CqE-SrgvTh4&pp=0gcJCXACo7VqN5t...
should is the key here. The lack of something to support is reason to not pay. Like you, I lack a good local newspaper. There is the nearby city, but they don't cover the important local news well.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
There's still valuable info in your local newspaper even if their agenda is the opposite of yours. You just have to read between the lines and phone their bias.
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
You assume there is one. My 'local' covers high school sports, road construction, but none of the important issues that I need to care about to be an informed voter.
I need someone to be at the library board meeting, school board meeting, city counsel meeting... Some of these happen at the same time so I can't attend them all even if I didn't have other things not mentioned I'm doing then.
but a Bloomberg.com subscription is ONLY $39.99/month.......
Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.
Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
they are reaching out out via normal means. you don't get to redefine words because you are too cheap to pay for information and only read trash. its so funny how you idiots gibble about "if you do not pay you are the product" but everything you know about the world is you being the product
By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.
Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!
Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).
Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.
(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).
Is the idea that you strongly prefer seeing ads instead of paywalls?
I prefer ads because pihole blocks them. Paywalls block me, and then I have to reload and ninja enter reader mode, or if I’m reading inclined, find an archive link.
Wait, then how do you expect the journalists, sysadmins, server bills, etc. to get paid without paywalls and ads?
I think this short exchange highlights the problem really well.
Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.
Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.
If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.
> news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago
Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?
> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good
Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.
Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.
Exactly: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean
There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html
Yeah they should use privacy pass for the default accounts as well to decouple payment from account.
Absolutely not. I don't feel it's necessary to pay the sacrifices needed for a trustless society.
I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
I don't really understand your first paragraph.
And in addition, they just ask the minimal info to be able to use the service, an email address, and not a full usual registration.
Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
https://brave.com/origin/
Do you imply that you never order anything online?
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
Do you use Google instead?
Brave.
Fair enough! How has it been for you?
It's actually a very similar UI to Google at least, in a good way if Google was ever good.
The results are quite good except images I like the results more then DDG or Startpage.
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.
I guess the idea is that such people strongly prefer seeing ads instead of a paywall?
I agree it is a choice.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
Yes, I also liked the crowdfunding model that the defunct YC startup Beacon Reader proposed. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.
Haha you couldn't pay me to read Bloomberg.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
>Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
it seems rarer, for sure. perhaps the quantity of good journalism is the same but there's a lot more trash to sift through?
but i wouldnt say it went out of business or anything. there's some fantastic journalists out there still.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
> Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
So Daily Mail, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, FOX and many others all went out of business decades ago?
That is breaking news to me.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
They do get paid, they are employees and get a salary. I pay for the premium plan and that funds the company.
Too bad the new Kagi settings does not support allowing some paywalled domains to show up.
Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.
Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
Why do you love it?
I think they have no imagination - like most rich kid “founders” they have no original ideas.
Would never use this trash
What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space.
That's why this is a good feature.
I wish Safari included Kagi as a built-in search bar option!
It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
(Kagi founder here)
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions, past, present, or future, of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard
Actually it's kinda hard in a world where very few companies dominate the search index market and there's very few players who license out their data, one of them being a Russian one: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Have they added an option to not fund russian invasion into Ukraine?
Ah, shouldnt they rather introduce an option to bypass paywalls automaticly to Archive.PH? :-D
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online. You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
Great decision
I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.
Ideally it would have a way to allow list domains for sources where I do have a subscription.
Just enabled it- Love Kagi!
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
Very useful feature to have. I've not dived into using Kagi just yet, but they may just win me over with this.
This is actually an excellent idea. Well done.
I’d pay for a search engine these days if it meant good results and no AI. Kagi almost fits the bill.
Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
I would like to be able to whitelist some paywall sites, e.g. I have an FT subscription and would like to have that bypass the block.
omg, great really!!!
When will this be available into HN, too ?
>When will this be available into HN, too ?
hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).
I don't see it offhand in the newsguidelines page nor the submit page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/submit
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
Yes here in FAQs:
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
it's in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
in other words, its not ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that do not have workarounds.
uh, I did not know: what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround... (many thanks to them)
>what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
ah, great.
Super clear now, thank you.
Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
Have they stopped sponsoring terrorism?
Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'.
Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.
Kagi, search engine that costs you to use has something against publishers who require a fee for their content. Interesting
It's not that they have anything against them, it's giving their customers who don't want to see them the choice not to.
AI slopped extension for supposedly just badging paywalls, not excluding them, https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension
Kudos to Kagi!
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
the paywall-removal setting is really just Kagi admitting that for most queries the best answer is a link it has to quietly break into for you
The update is useful, especially the paywall filter. I might even consider switching platforms; it seems convenient...
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
That should have been an option in Google since the first paywall was put up.
Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).
This started with expertsexchange:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
nice
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.