Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
techcrunch.com471 points by elorant 5 hours ago
471 points by elorant 5 hours ago
I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…
I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).
All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
I did not intend to spread misinformation here, and would like to hear more about the general-purpose index Kagi is working on. I had based my comment on several Kagi pages, but mostly https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm..., which mentions Teclis as Kagi's own index, but https://teclis.com/ makes it pretty clear that it's a "small web"-focused tool:
> Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.
> Teclis includes its own crawl as well as results from Kagi Small Web index and results with permission from Marginalia Search.
> Teclis works best with broad queries such as 'machine learning', 'vegan diet', 'religion' etc..
Is there another crawler doing the general-purpose stuff?
How broad will they be? Do you aim to ever have large scale indexing of the web?
Hey do you guys have posts or sharing about it? It would be awesome to see what you are trying to accomplish, maybe it's time to post on HN ;)
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
Hurry. Google might give up the ghost on its search product and maintaining indices on anything not geared for LLMs.
I'm not sure antitrust will help you.
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If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.
Censorship of search results and deciding which companies to do business with are two completely separate topics.
Censorship? This isn't about free speech, there's a war on.
There's not just one war on, there are many. Should Kagi exclude all the results from American companies because of the actions of the US government in Iran?
No search engines are uncensored, not even Yandex. Partly because they have to exist in a country somewhere, and partly because really nobody wants to index CSAM.
We are not talking about censoring anything here, just buying paid sources of index data.
I am unhappy with money flowing into Russia, for reasons that should be obvious (and I will not respond to whataboutism-style baiting here).
yandex provides objectively better results for many things than google/ddg/bing
The results are kind of weird, but it does have one advantage: either nobody bothers to DMCA them, or they ignore it, or both.
Western companies also bought strategically important Nazi Germany industrial products in the 1930s because they were considered superior. Commercial convenience and technical quality are not moral or geopolitical absolution. Would you buy cheap quality gold if the Nazis were selling it knowing what it supports?
What other countries do you want nothing to do with?
North Korea, Eritrea, a few others but Russia is the only one in the list getting paid for search indexes.
This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity
It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?".
Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.
The logical answer is that a person like this wants a very strong firewall, so ethically impure bits don't cross into their LAN.
> Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft?
A completely reasonable question that you should be able to answer if you're giving your money out to them.
Maybe not that ridiculous, since one can guess that the underlying thoughts are more about geostrategic concerns than favorite color of the day.
The United States (I guess that's also the premise here, I'm not USA citizen myself) has notable rivalries with several countries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. These nations are often considered adversaries due to various geopolitical tensions and conflicts.
I guess that Kahi is doing nothing illegal, so if people have that kind of question, it feels legitimate to reply with a demand of what is the extend this patriotism stance is going beyond the judicial requirements.
What's the point in stopping paying money to Russia if Kagi is incorporated in Palo Alto, so it's paying money and will continue to do so to a country causing no less troubles than Russia?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Much of the HN audience lives in the US, giving money to the US is unavoidable in life. But in return we do have the democratic ability to try to alter the behavior of the country.
It still makes sense to avoid giving money to other bad actors who are acting in direct opposition to your home country, and whom you have no control over, when you can.
Then one should ask for Kagi to move to a country that doesn't use taxes to invade other countries, and stop supporting them, instead of just asking to "stop paying money to Russia". Because fixing two wrongs is better than just fixing one, right? And I want to believe that living in the US doesn't make you agree with your country's foreign policy (which doesn't seem to change significantly even with your democratic ability to try to alter it) specially if you're worried about Russia.
Why that ability didn't result in less loss of lives in middle East for such a long time.
Ru-speaking audience is ~2 times bigger than Russia, why would they cut this? Only because of SJWs like you? I'd much prefer one search engine that searches well on two languages, instead of using different engines for each language. Ru-net has huge amount of usefulness in it, cutting it out is like cutting a finger. Fun fact, before the RU-UKR war, most Ukranians contributed to the Runet, so that would cut their heritage too.
Yandex isn't just a "Russian language search engine", it's a Russian company with quite close ties to the Kremlin. See: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
I'm frankly a bit surprised that it's even legal for a US company like Kagi to do business with Yandex, considering it's sanctioned: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=18711. Though in fairness, I don't know enough about how exactly sanction laws work so it might be legally okay even if I find it morally questionable.
Yes, Yandex was effectively seized by Ru govt "friends" and turned into propaganda tool. And that's very unfortunate. But I'm not talking about getting the propaganda, only about search index. About money - don't think this income is even remotely comparable with oil/gas incomes, which EU passes to RU.
Please don't start political debate. I do not like censorship of any kind, hence my initial response. I want to have available information in full.
Please don't pretend I'm turning this into a "political debate". Your position is, "Kagi ought to keep doing business with Russia". That in itself is highly political. No side of this issue is apolitical.
My position was more about access to information, that business side for me is secondary, as unavoidable evil. If kagi will find a ru-index with decent quality, I'll be more than happier. Right now yandex has the best index, but given the decay of ru tech sector now, especially now when it's oligarch-managed, that might not be for long.
Yandex has quite a few international entities, which are probably not direct subsidiaries, which in turn probably helps with sanctions. Yandex Cloud seems to be sold by a UAE company internationally: https://yandex.cloud/en/about#impressum
> We're actively working on building our own indexes
Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".
Wikipedia is prob in "other sources", as they actually say they have a direct license for it.
https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search#:~:text=Wikipedia,...
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.
You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.
I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.
It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.
That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)
Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats
About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.
Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.
I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.
But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(
Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.
Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.
When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.
> Nobody wants to pay for anything
Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.
I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
They are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.
If anything, this makes me want to pay them twice. Once for search and once for exploiting google.
Qwant and Ecosia try to build their own index: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/qwant-and-ecosia-debut-sta...
I do not believe that Qwant can produce something good, they always were a company to extract money from the french taxpayer to wrap bing results.
I use and enjoy Ecosia, it works pretty well for most use cases. Unfortunately it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage.
One the things I hate about Google is being forced to have location-aware search. I love how Kagi actually lets me override the country.
I don't think they papered over this? They've been transparent about paying to scrape other indices while they work on their own.
I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
Yes, their argument is essentially that Microsoft spent $100 billion over 20 years trying to compete and still essentially failed.
They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
This is incompetence, not malice. YT devs would skip testing on Chrome if they could get away with it, but are forced to.
On numerous occasions, I had issues with YouTube and Firefox that were fixed by changing the user agent to make it look like chrome.
I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.
> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google
Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.
Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
I have found few CEOs capable of telling nothing but the truth. Based on that, I am nearly certain that lying is part of the job description.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
I don't walk around recording every conversation I have.
I'd also argue that calling a tech CEO a liar is far from extraordinary. It'd be extraordinary if I accused him of honesty.
Only problem is that the original quote you commented on was not kagi lying, as they actually say the same here
https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
You said that you were not surprised that kagi was lying, only that they were not in this occasion. When you accuse somebody of lying it makes sense to provide at least some evidence of that.
At the very least, they are very clear about which indexes they use and how.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
I mostly interact with their AI through bangs.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
I'm curious: what is your use-case for a search engine that justifies Kagi over free search engines? Are you not finding your results on page one, first try, with other engines?
This is constantly the case, anytime I Google something more obscure than the front page of a top 50 website.
Even when Google gets it right (often they don't) I have to wade through a bunch of AI slop and countless ads. After that, it's dozens of SEO referral link sites trying to sell me garbage.
Kagi gives me better results by default, no ads, and I can customize results by prioritizing or blocking different domains. Very much worth the small price.
Kagi uses Yandex which is Russian.
But does it surface relevant search results?
Many things on the web use Yandex.
Its funny because Kagi apparently also uses Google, and Microsoft and other threads were complaining about it.
It sounds like they use everything to give their subscribers good results. Which is what it sounds like I am paying for.
I use a great number of russian sites, mostly when I want to download textbooks, audiobooks, etc.
Yandex is great if youre searching for pirated content or for DMCA'd content that ended up on Gitflic.ru
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
I just use the tools that work.
Yandex pays taxes in Russia. Which is then directly used at their attempted genocide in Ukraine.
The small thing that annoys me is that I am 100% sure somebody at Apple has a directive: never allow Kagi search integration.
I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
On iOS, there is an app called xSearch that integrates into Safari and sneakily hacks around the limited search engine options by watching your browsing history for queries to the search engine you've selected in Safari, then immediately rewriting the URL and navigating to the search engine you actually want.
Obviously this has security implications, but I don't ordinarily search for anything sketchy on my iPhone so I'm personally not too worried about it.
I know right. It’s simple. Google pays them over a billion dollars and Kagi doesn’t.
However, Apple does allow DDG, Ecosia, and Bing. They just don’t allow Brave or Kagi.
I get annoyed at Whatsapp and see it as a case for antitrust but apparently Google is just as guilty of this
Using third-party browsers on iOS isn’t nearly as annoying as it was a few years ago. I had been driven to switch back to Safari a few years ago after trying to make a go of it. But last year I switched back to a third-party default browser and have been happy.
Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
> Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
The one third-party keyboard that seems to work is the one from Google, if you want a better experience than Apple’s.
3rd party browsers don't actually exist. iOS Chrome is just V8 bolted onto Webkit/Safari. Chromium is not part of it.
The point was that in a third party browser you can usually set any search provider, not which rendering engine they use.
Then don't buy Apple!
There's more to device quality than whether a monkey can operate it and looks shiny.
It was actually difficult to find the AI interaction section. But it was useful when I wanted to find some real info on opensource GIS stuff; it helped me aggregate and review. That's the only integration that makes sense to me.
Same to me, been a Kagi subscriber for 2 years and only found the AI tool accidentally when I typed a "?" at the end of the query. It was surprising to not be annoyed by a AI feature for once, now I sporadically use it when it makes sense instead of having it shoved down my throat.
My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.
I enjoy my Kagi usage but there are still a few things I use the !g or !gm bangs for.
Shopping and finding locations is definitely one.
Yes, I am also hopelessly tied to Google Maps. Which I think is relatively distinct from web search, IMO.
The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.
Astroturf? I believe most of the reports here to be genuine. I'm just a paying user and when web search is debated on HN I share Kagi as a very happy customer.
Astroturfing implies that Kagi is paying for people like me to praise them, it's just a good product (for my personal use at least), and I'm glad to recommend it while it stays good.
Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.
I hope it stays small compared to the tech giants.
I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.
Well, for one thing at these user numbers using it is close to de-anonymizing yourself.
That chart is programmed to always shows the same shape, no matter if the number of subscribers increased by 10 or by 10 000.
I noticed if you change to the “all time” view it shows a steady linear growth, with no big spikes or valleys.
The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.
You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.
Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.
The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.
My annual Kagi subscription lapsed last week, so I decided to see how DuckDuckGo is doing these days.
The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively.
Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason.
I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.
Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.
Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g
I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.
I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).
What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
I use Le Chat as default search engine, using this search engine string: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=Give%20a%20list%20of%20links%...
(In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.)
A negative is the high latency.
(Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...
I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.
Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
I started hating Google Search because of its relentless AI dumps on the results page, but I have also stopped using it at all, more or less.
I got the Google AI Pro plan, which gives Gemini access by default with generous limits, and also includes free credits, code assist in VS Code and other editors, and also to Gemini CLI. And I'm just simply using that for all of my needs. It seems to work quite well so far. I see how Google Search is not relevant for me anymore.
I find the opposite, I can count on one hand the number of times I've deliberately resorted to using google search in the past year*
*except for maps results, Kagi is absolute hot trash for maps. I automatically append !gm to the end of all mappy-type searches. I wish Kagi would just kill their map product and redirect to google maps.
Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.
Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
Local business searches has been bad for years. I setup g! as a shortcut in the query to use Google for this specific reason. Part of the problem is that Google ratings search integration made alternatives like yelp irrelevant.
Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.
They do have something called Privacy Pass that lets you search using an untraceable cryptographic token instead: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
I’ve seen this, but can’t understand it.
- they issue you a code when you are logged in
- they track that code for multiple use
- all they can do is claim that the code was securely generated and it isn’t just an API KEY to your account… but they’re already telling you it is database tracked
How can you have any even the 1/2 best proof it isn’t just an API KEY that directly links to your account? I see no trust path other than “us, bro”.
I mean its as private as VPNs are and people pay for those too.
Mullvad lets you have completely anonymous accounts. No log VPNs like ProtonVPN have third party verification (though some metadata has been shared with auhtorities).
Does Kagi have the equivalent of either of these privacy mechanisms? Even with the limitations of the ProtonVPN approach, that would be an improvement. As far as I've seen Kagi has no equivalent: it's closed source and has no regular third party audits for privacy.
I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge
my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft
I'd be fine with it if Microsoft did it. I've used Bing Search daily for more than 5 years, and I sometimes go back to Google for the Image Search. Bing Images used to be great, now it's all buggy in Firefox.
We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
Can you give an example of your searches?
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?
I guess both my job and my personal life do involve a lot of searching, though i’d say that sometimes (a lot of the time) its also my ADHD getting the best of me.
Looking through some of my history of today:
- “github rate-limits”
- “oriental hornet”
- “riva 88 florida”
- “logistic map”
- “zeiss euv mirror”
- “authentik helm”
Just to name a few…
For a lot of these, LLMs would slow me down significantly. Most of the time I already know exactly what im looking for.
If you end a search query with a question mark, kagi answers with their version of search overview. But with a quality closer to asking an agent with access to your search results. It's great for one-off queries
Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.
Yandex also censors political things. Your best bet is to search everywhere because everyone is "compromised" from some side.
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
I've tried it, too. Loved it. Was nearly ready to pay for it. Then I learned that they source their data from Yandex. To hell with that! I'll rather get my search results on paper via carrier pigeon than support the rape of Ukraine.
Do not fund the Kremlin!
Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.
I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.
Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. This is a fundamentally different approach than what Searx follows and solves most of the weaknesses of metasearch engines. Of course it has its own weaknesses as well, but most of these are not conceptual and can be resolved by improving the software (and datasets)
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid relying on external search engines - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions. Currently it can help with "recall" type searches mainly, but I'm planning to provide pre-indexed thematic datasets and I'm drafting a peer-to-peer index sharing concept. Maybe you can find it useful as well (or at least have some constructive criticism =]).
Links: - https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister - Background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen... - Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
This looks very promising. Thank you for investing time in this.
Assuming it indexes everything locally and falls back to traditional search engines if none found, how do you feel about adding a shared middle layer? A layer that simply indexes all the canonical data that doesn't have any personal info. This way, the contributors can automatically contribute the pages they index - building a shared search engine over time! The whole thing can work without a crawler of its own (under appropriate license so people can trust it)
This is an awesome idea in theory, I'd love to go to this direction, but it's a surprisingly complex topic. I find it hard to come up with an implementation that can guarantee both result quality (no malicious actors) and user privacy.
I'd appreciate any kind of help designing such system. We are on IRC/Discord/Github/Codeberg.
This is great news!
Hister sounds like a idea I had years ago but gave up on after running into issues with index size taking up way too much storage.
Long ago I've used Searx and really liked it but after some point didn't see the point as opposed to using Google more directly. But lately in the back of my mind I've thinking about checking in on it again.
Have been using hister for a while now and have found it super useful! There are so many times I find myself trying to remember a website I looked at a couple months ago and can't find it again via a regular search. Hister has saved me there already multiple times.
The only feedback I have is the initial indexing from my large history was rough. There were a lot of domains that kept blocking me for exceeding rate limiting or wouldn't let me index at all. I could see it being useful to import a history file and organize it by domain inside some sort of temporary database to track/distribute attempts and get a more detailed report on complete domain failures.
Regardless though - great work!
Thank you for your feedback, it's super useful to get insights from users.
I agree, browser import has rough edges. The issue you mentioned is known: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/31 . I try to prioritize it and find time to fix it.
I use my own domain index to navigate the web.
- If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?
- Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?
- Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)
My domain index
> If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?
Yes, Hister has a built-in crawler which supports standard HTTP and different browser based backends
> Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?
You can create priority rules to boost the ranking of the matching domains/URLs
> Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)
It is possible to add a label to indexed documents
It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.
It isn't supported yet, but it's a good idea and quite simple to implement it. I've added it to the issue tracker: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 . Thanks for the suggestion.
Thank you for making Searx, I use it as the web search tool MCP for local models and it works very well, so that not only big companies have the power to show or hide results now.
I'm on a self-hosted seaxng. It's great. I just need a computer up 24h/7d.
A VPS with without a black listed IP is good. A simple rootless container, update is easy.
Configuration takes little time, not much.
I still hate that I have to double the bang to use the same bang as DDG.
Example: "!!wde Ente" to go to the German wikipedia page about duck instead of "!wde Ente" with DDG.
I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse.
I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature contains exactly the answer I was looking for, and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it. It’s been a very positive addition.
> It messes up sometimes
i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
I've found that the AI overview is usually right but confidently wrong enough of the time that I don't trust it. The interface that you get with the 'AI Mode' button (which I assume is just Gemini with very low compute settings), however, is usually pretty solid for well-documented queries.
For simple queries it’s fine. The main value it adds is that it’s above the ad spam.
But it was trained on ad spam wasn't it?
And consistently quotes information from them, yes. They quite like showing reddit and news icons while searching, but expand the references and it paints a rather different picture, especially for common searches which are flooded with junk. Niche stuff seems more likely to reference decent sites, but have massively worse hallucinations.
Never ever trust AI summary cooking instructions. Holy crap.
I made a serious error with that once.
I was searching for reverse sear info and it told me to make sure the steak is at least 37f/3c internally before eating lol
I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.
Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.
I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.
When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.
I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
The blame for this is 100% on Google.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.
google literaly makes the rules for SEO and discoverability and penalise you for not following them. Hense all websites end up with slop content now.
That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.
Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.
What they’ll do is embed ads in the text, which will also be unblockable. I imagine the future will entail running an LLM to remove the ads that another LLM generated :P
Hey, finally a real use for AI in the browser. It could probably be a pretty small model, too.
Sure, at the beginning it will be some "sponsored by" text, maybe even highlighted for you, that is easy to snip out. But the long game is slowly slowly shifting you towards Russian victory, manosphere rage bait, South African immigration, or whatever other manipulation someone is willing to pay a nickel for.
It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…
Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall"
"Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
I've encountered this as well. I'm pretty sure it is unable to produce answers involving some copyrighted works. For example, I was trying to find an old video and it filled in the gaps in my knowledge very accurately, however it absolutely could not provide an actual link to the video or any concrete content related to the video.
In my case I suspect the original uploader took down their videos from YouTube or there was some legal process involved. But it was very weird for the Gemini answer to confirm exactly what I was looking for but be unable to articulate in a way that helped me. Totally bizarre, as if the topic was ablated from the LLM.
I would much prefer getting a straight answer, "due to copyright I can't discuss this" or something.
This is literally Google’s core business… advertising, surely they could have offered you a link to purchase said movie or the studios that made said movie and then they could collect some revenue from it but nooooo… they send you, the consumer, on wild goose chases to duck duck go.
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)
I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.
It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible.
I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cost far too much in compute.
Yeah I'm guessing it's using one of the gemini-flash-lite models which are really basic. What I don't get is how they settled on this idea rather than having full Gemini generate a good answer and CACHE IT rather than having this silly lite model generate a different answer a million times a day.
Same here , about 95% of my searches o just look at the AI overview, and that’s been enough.
I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine
So you are not actually searching for anything on web. This is more about using google as a web search engine, something it could do maybe a decade ago.
The primary way that Google's AI Overview appears in my life is having to correct the misapprehensions of older family who see the immediate answer on top of their search and just uncritically accept it. Based on that, I think it must be wrong quite a lot.
> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse
Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.
A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.
I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.
We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.
Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.
Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.
Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.
If the AI overview produces plausible sound answers, how do you know that it messes up very rarely?
If I search topics I am knowledge about, the overviews are almost always at least slightly wrong.
Not all websites are correct sources of information, but I am generally aware of which websites are trustworthy and can cross check.
When it comes to programming, it’s very easy to tell whether it’s right or wrong. Just run the code.
The small/fast model used for the overview isn’t smart, but it’s still pretty great at helping me find the function I need and syntax. Best of all, clearly and plainly, unlike many documentation pages.
This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.
Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.
If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human.
I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.
Same thoughts exactly.
I wonder if Google is aware of its identity crisis? Even long after "don't be evil", Google was still "we earn so much from a healthy web that making the web a healthy one is almost a straight forward company interest". Now web content is actively relegated to training input and LLM chat replacing delegating to the source, that web that Google made so much money of, as healthy or not one considered it to be, will soon be gone. Could be either at Google, complete lack of awareness or desperate "we can't stop it but we might still try to profit a little from what we can't stop"
I don’t doubt that people feel this way. I doubt that every new account inflating the apparent consensus is genuine.
Have you bothered to check @nekzn’s comment history? Attacking new people here is going to ensure we’re left with only bots. This is one of the reasons why HN has the guidelines that you’re repeatedly breaking. If you do suspect a bot after at least taking the ten seconds to check their comment history, the best thing you can do is not engage.
I agree that not engaging would have been preferable and is going forward.
From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
There is no insinuation. The astroturfing objectively occurs and that it does so is an inherent strain on the credibility of engagement like that of the GP.
To me, it read like you implied the poster to be an astroturfing account. Though I may have misinterpreted that.
they are 100% implying the poster is astroturfing,
easier to accuse someone of astroturfing than accept that different people can have different opinions. especially an opinion as world-shaking as not minding ai overviews.
this sort of accusation is becoming pretty common, and eventually going to ensure that the only new users actually are bots, because any potentially new humans that want to sign up are going to get fed up with the llm/astroturfing accusations.
What you infer from reading the text is your problem, not mine. My follow up comment articulates exactly my position.
"This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing "
that is basically a direct accusation of astroturfing, man. no weaseling your way out of it. you're saying their opinion does not hold weight because it is likely to be llm-enabled astroturfing. there is no other interpretation.
if you're gonna break the rules and accuse someone of something, at least stand by it. wet-noodle accusations are even worse.
(p.s., sort of funny to see someone with a post-llm account accuse other post-llm accounts of being an llm!)
If I give you a piece of titanium and tell you a piece of lead with equivalent volume would have greater mass I have in no way said the density of titanium is zero.