8 ms·

Kagi Assistant

492 points by darthShadow 2y ago

bicepjai 2y ago
Hey folks, how does Kati compare to perplexity.ai ? I have been using the latter and seems like I can’t go back to anything else. I did use magi for a while but perplexity seems crazy perfect for search and quick summaries a
jonathonlacher 2y ago
I wonder what the limits are? Don't see any mention on the announcement page.
- freediver 2y ago
  The Assistant currently has no hard limits on usage. We would like it to stay unlimited and will be monitoring this actively. Just added to announcement FAQ
zzanz 2y ago
"Integration with Kagi’s legendary quality search results" I don't disagree that this is useful, but I personally don't consider an assistant to be a chatbot that can tell me the weather. Assistants actively engage your daily life and do things that are usually considered tedious for people with a lack of time. Sure, that's a big ask for A.I in its current generation, but now for example I can ask Google Assistant (Gemini?) to save the shopping list I just gave it or even answer my calls in some cases. It's also certainly not the standard of human assistants, but it's closer than a chatbot.
cstuder 2y ago
So for 25$ a month I get access to ChatGPT and Claude offerings in addition to access to Kagi search. This sounds like a good deal, compared to the 20$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I missing something?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dvh 2y ago
  You can not spend the $25 and you will save $25.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    It's like Jensen said: The more you buy, the more you save! /s
- bangaladore 2y ago
  You can use something like OpenRouter, which lets you access essentially all commercially available models. Including open-source models. There are no rate limits. You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and loaded 50$ with credits five months ago, but I still have over 1/2 of it left. I think it is hard to believe that Kagi would be any cheaper and have no rate limits.
  - cstuder 2y ago
    Thanks for the hint, a usage based model looks way more attractive to me right now.
    - exe34 2y ago
      deepinfra is pretty easy to use too, for llamas and other "open" ones.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Keep in mind that, while OpenRouter gives you the upstream price for OpenAI/Anthropic models (so you pay the same per token), there's a loading charge, so if you want to load $10 in credits you pay $12 or so. This means that it's more expensive than calling OpenAI directly, even though they have the same price per token.
scblock 2y ago
Cool, not a feature I personally want and behind a higher priced tier than I pay for now. That seems entirely reasonable for both Kagi and for me.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Hmmm One feature here that I think competitors lack is that the LLM's view of search results can be constrained by Kagi's search "lens" [0] that let you exclude various categories of results. I use Kagi but haven't dug into lenses, anyone have experience ? I'm currently trying to write python script interfacing with outlook's mailterm interface (win32com.client) and it's annoying. I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs... [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
- abound 2y ago
  I use the Programming, Forums, PDFs, Recipes, and Small Webs lenses pretty regularly, though I haven't tried making my own lens yet. The 'Programming' lens is probably what you'd want for your Python script. Note: I work part-time at Kagi (was a Kagi user before that), not doing search stuff.
- PhilippGille 2y ago
  If you want to restrict results to a single page you can all to use `site:example.com` in your search.
- flexagoon 2y ago
  > I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs Yeah, you can set up an allowlist of domains in the lens configuration. I have a "Reddit" lens that essentially just adds "site:reddit.com" to the searches
crowcroft 2y ago
This is actually really exciting for Kagi. In a lot of situations the underlying model (Claude, GPT4 etc.) isn't that exciting, it's the connection to search to retrieve and summarize recent information that's exciting. By already having a traditional search engine this puts Kagi at a big advantage compared to someone like Perplexity, or even Claude and OpenAI who I think are all cobbling together solutions on top of Bing's API.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The ability to use lenses with custom assistants is the killer feature IMO. Want to search for open source projects that implement some algorithm? Create a Github/Gitlab lens. Want to ask it questions only about some framework? Add it’s domain to a lens.
  - crowcroft 2y ago
    Yea, it solves a lot of limitations with LLMs generally struggling with 'niche' topics. Being able to innovate on the search side while everyone else loses a lot of many training LLMs feels like a good space to be in at the moment.
    - pjerem 2y ago
      It’s interesting, I feel like LLMs are precisely good with niche topics where search engines are becoming absolutely garbage. But maybe my search topics aren’t niche enough.
      - crowcroft 2y ago
        I guess it depends on what we define as niche. I'm thinking for coding type problems as an example smaller less well known languages or frameworks that don't have extensive coverage across multiple websites etc tend not to show up well in AI Chat. If you can focus the chatbot on a specific docs website with a lens though that problem might go away.
stagalooo 2y ago
I've been curious about Kagi as a search engine for a while now and this seems like a good time to try, given that I already pay $20/month for ChatGPT. The thing stopping me currently from trying this or Claude is I rely on the Opt+Space shortcut with the ChatGPT mac app. Are there any other options for a native mac app with integration as good as the ChatGPT app?
- viraptor 2y ago
  I don't know if they have shortcuts, but if not you could likely add some automation to do it: there's Msty and ChatBox that can use any model.
- vunderba 2y ago
  I use Raycast which is a drop-in replacement for Mac spotlight along with the ChatGPT extension that lets you quickly search conversations / ask questions / etc once you provide it with your OpenAPI key. https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9bffc9be49abe8ae4c126732/extensions/chatgpt https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9...
cube2222 2y ago
To repeat myself from a recent HN thread: I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent! Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on. The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well. All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.
- eli 2y ago
  Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that Reddit only lets Google crawl them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Old Reddit (and other website) content might actually be more valuable given the higher likelihood of newer posts being spam/AI bot posts.
    - DoughnutHole 2y ago
      That disregards the fact that facts change over time. If you google “best DSLR camera reddit” it’s much less valuable if the results are 5 years old, even if they’re LLM free - the cameras on the market may very well have changed in that timeframe.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
        What? Old reddit isn't using old facts. I skimmed down and if this was about Kagu indexing being out of date then sorry I just realized that
aeturnum 2y ago
I do think LLMs have their place in search and I think the Kagi approach feels a lot better than Googles'. Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere, but they've been making LLMs accessible in their search interface for a long while - this being the most evolved version of that effort. I am not totally sold on everything they are doing but I hate their integration of LLMs the least.
- lawn 2y ago
  Kagi's auto summary feature when you add a question mark after your query is absolutely excellent. It essentially summarizes the top search results for you, leaning in on a strength of LLMs (summarizing) while reducing its greatest weakness (hallucinations).
  - aeturnum 2y ago
    For me, search integration of LLMs also helps bring together the value prop of paid search. It's not just privacy, it's the skillful integration of a premium information processing service (with built in privacy).
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere Kagi has AI generated stubs for some of the search results, probably originating from some of the search indexes they pay for.
tinyhouse 2y ago
It's not clear from the post how to access this new assistant. The search page has no such option (not a paying user). When I run a search, I only see an LLM based summary of the results similar to Google's. Update: I see now that they say it's not available for free users. Need to pay $25/month. Not sure why, they can offer it for free users with the cheaper models like they do now to generate a "quick answer". I'm not going to pay to try it out.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  Kagi search isn't free either.
  - tinyhouse 2y ago
    Well, it works for me without paying. I don't use it often though.
test009 2y ago
[flagged]
test009 2y ago
[flagged]
rlad 2y ago
For users of both, how does this compare to searchGPT, in terms of results quality and quantity?
bun_terminator 2y ago
c-f "ai"; c-w. and onto the pile they go! Is it still legal do do something with a computer without involving "ai"?
- chankstein38 2y ago
  agreed. I'm getting pretty sick of AI summaries that will fully lie to me about things. Google's search summary AI is awful I'd expect Kagi's to be similar.
  - exe34 2y ago
    does Google ai summary lie? do you have examples?
    - Diti 2y ago
      https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    I think you should try Kagi before passing judgement, really clever design. You only get the quick summary if you ask for it (i.e. you're happy to take the risk). Another handy use, is web summarize, which looks at the specific webpage, lowering the risk even further. If you don't call these features it's straight up clean search with no ads and it's fast with good results.
- exe34 2y ago
  see roko's basilisk.
- TNorthover 2y ago
  uncertAIn.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  No, Microsoft and Google and Apple need to know everything you're doing, for the sake of the children.
daft_pink 2y ago
I love Kagi and I’m a paid user, but I’m not willing to pay $25 per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I already pay these companies directly and wouldn’t be able to cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer * I’m also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there I love Kagi and can’t recommend it enough. I wish I could just give them my api key for this instead of paying several different service providers for the same ai access to the same models. This is getting expensive.
- bossyTeacher 2y ago
  Can you explain to me why Kagi is so good? I don't use Google Search so don't try the privacy card on me
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    It does its job: provides web results relevant to the query. At the moment it has acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (quality varies per-query, but it has higher chances of useful links than web spam), which is why people tend to say it's good.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    Search results are ranked by what's best, not which advertiser pays the most. And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      >And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great. Any chance you can expand on this? I've used DDG for years and find the results great, but maybe we just query for different things. Is there any specific topics that you find DDG is bad at but Kagi is good at?
      - MostlyStable 2y ago
chiefrubberduck 2y ago
can you use the assistant to generate images as well?
- freeAgent 2y ago
  No, not yet at least.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
Oof, I wanted a better google, not a worse one.
- recursive 2y ago
  So did I. But for me, it is.
NayamAmarshe 2y ago
How does Kagi compare to Brave Search? Is it an independent index?
traceroute66 2y ago
I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value. For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those). For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean FFS I put the word "newest" in there ! They seem to have a habit of interespersing very weird Facebook links randomly in the middle of a list of results. For example I was searching for something related to a specific Prometheus function (which I explicitly named in the query, alongside the word prometheus) and Kagi insisted on interspersing the technical results with random links to Facebook pages of companies selling "girlie dresses for proms". I approached Kagi with an open mind, but having used up the 100 free searches nothing made me say "just shut up and take my money".
- recursive 2y ago
  > but its no big deal to scroll past those For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads. If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned. Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly than you do. Which is fine.
  - rvnx 2y ago
    40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element" extension. It's hard to beat.
    - MostlyStable 2y ago
      Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's because their interests and user interests are not well aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.
dubme1 2y ago
Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the product has a lot of room for improvment. Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant) while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  Paid Kagi user here. I love the AI additions, because to me it's an alternate interface to the core selling point: search. Whether or not Kagi can achieve more than the "search alone is hard enough" point however is fair - though i've been happy so far.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Same. I love the AI additions and I think they've introduced them very thoughtfully. To me, the best part of the AI additions is that it can (almost instantaneously) summarize information from the several top hits of a search. This is subtly but importantly different from having the LLM spit out an answer based on it's knowledge base, and also is able to quickly and easily cite it's sources! Extremely useful to me.
    - unshavedyak 2y ago
      Agreed! To me LLMs as they stand now are a natural extension of the classic "Google". Which is to say a Natural Language -> Search Results list. People (and products lol) got hung up on LLMs returning the answers directly.. and while they've been a definite disappointment in that realm, they can be great for summarizing and aggregating imo.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  I agree that they should focus on their core product, but ironically while I use Kagi from time to time, I'm still mostly on DDG- via Orion, a browser I'm willing to pay for.
- 2y ago
hollowturtle 2y ago
What’s the incentive for websites to let Kagi and others indexing content if llms in search show relevant informations right away? Wouldn’t something like perplexity ai making more sense then? Or perhaps better application of llms to search
- lilyball 2y ago
  I haven't used Kagi's Quick Answer very often yet, but when I do, it always cites its sources and I often end up clicking into at least one of the sources to look for more detail or context.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Bingo. I nearly always use the quick answer, and then will use the cited sources to click onto the page to either read more or verify that the summary was accurate (and it always has been in the 300+ times I've used it).
  - i80and 2y ago
    I've seen it cite sources, and then say the opposite of what the citations say If you're going to use this feature, always check the citations.
- onionisafruit 2y ago
  If you publish to make information known, then your incentive is that it helps spread that information to people who may not otherwise visit your site. If you are trying to make money off of search engine traffic then you might not like this much at all. I think most people would rather not be pointed to those sites in the first place, so it’s a win-win if they block crawlers.
  - internetter 2y ago
    This is a bad take. I don't make money off search engine traffic (beyond the occasional donated dollar), and yet I would quite rather[0] that AI doesn't visit my site. Imagine for a second a world where instead of publishing directly to your own website (home), you publish into the LLM's knowledge base. Nobody comes to you for information, they come to the LLM. Nobody cares about you, or the work you put in. Your labour is just a means to their end. To some extent, you could argue that Wikipedia works in this way, but it really doesn't. The work you put in is reproduced verbatim, and the work is collaborative. You get the joy of seeing your writing being used to help other people in a very direct sort of way, as opposed to being aggregated, misinterpreted and generally warped by a non-intelligent LLM. In other words, you cannot possibly expect others to want to work in a sweat shop, toiling away to provide you with instant gratification. We must leave room for human expression. [0]: https://boehs.org/llms.txt https://boehs.org/llms.txt
matsemann 2y ago
Isn't the point of a corporate blog to drive users to your product? Then why do the blogs never have an easy way of getting there? Clicking the logo and things in the header all just take me to the front page of the blog. Pet peeve of mine.
- freediver 2y ago
  I think it is because bearblog (software we use, or at least the version we have) does not allow custom external in the navigation. But the product website is linked to in the very first sentence, and also from the home page of the blog. Still not good? :)
freedomben 2y ago
Something I love about Kagi that isn't often known, is they will pro-rate based on days. If you are on an existing plan, you can upgrade to Ultimate, try it out for a few days, and then downgrade and only pay for the days you used it. I despise the subscription model generally, but if we're going to have it then I wish more companies would do pro-rating! Anyway, you can try it out for very low risk.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  Now that's even better. I'm definitely going to try this by upgrading temporarily who knows maybe it'll stick. Good business practice by Kagi.
ewy1 2y ago
I appreciate that it's on a separate plan so that I don't have to interface with it.
doublerabbit 2y ago
I upgraded. Using the prompt: "something cool in html css" Mistral and GPT - Create the same example of a flip card Gemini - Creates glowing neon text and Claude - Produces a pulsing dot, that enlarges and shrinks and radiates a fading white shadow. That's cool.
throwing_away 2y ago
I love Kagi and happily pay their $25/mo but I think it's a mistake to think of their offerings as cutting-edge AI. It's obviously limited compared to open source software (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread already) and likely more expensive than raw API calls. This isn't the "best" AI experience. What it is though, is fast, available on all my devices, constantly upgraded, and integrated with their already excellent search engine. When I see these sorts of announcements and read some of the comments here, it makes me worry that bad customers cause enshittification and I hope kagi stays true to their human-friendly web search product.
mtrovo 2y ago
> You can edit the question and add that you’re working on a binary classification problem to get a more specific answer. This mid-thread editing feature sounds really useful, I'm curious how does it work when you switch between models in the middle of a conversation? Like, say I start with a general search question, then halfway through I want to switch to a coding model to ask something like, "Can you create a Python dictionary of the top 10 longest city names in the UK and their populations?" Does the context carry over smoothly, or would I need to rephrase things when switching models? Wondering how it handles tasks that require different kinds of expertise without losing track of the flow.
- voiceblue 2y ago
  What does “losing track of the flow” mean to you?
hyperbolablabla 2y ago
I don't find Kagi as compelling as some other users seem to, worked about as well (read, poorly) as most other modern search engines
- grantcarthew 2y ago
  There are two killer features being no ads, and customise your search. Don't want pinterest in your search results? Block it: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
jacooper 2y ago
Why would i use this over perplexity pro?
- arinazari 2y ago
  Sourcing information from better search results. I cancelled my Perplexity Pro since for any use case I had for it, I would instead use Kagi FastGPT. I tried Assistants (beta) but I didn't think it was anything special, didn't really see a way to integrate it as a daily tool, and ultimately FastGPT gave me the best answer, even better than their gpt4o and Claude Opus/Haiku based assistants.
dfee 2y ago
Annoyed this isn't available on the family plan.
- freediver 2y ago
  It is. You can upgrade family members to Ultimate tier on-demand.
NelsonMinar 2y ago
LLMs + search are really useful. I use phind.com regularly for this, it is remarkably good for enhanced search queries. I use Claude a lot for more general knowledge stuff but its inability to provide references or do web search like stuff holds it back.
nunez 2y ago
This is really cool. I'm very against AI in everything, so I probably won't use this, but I'm glad that they are making it an opt-in feature and that my $10/month plan doesn't go up to support it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pigeons 2y ago
I don't know how to make this more meaningful than just an anecdote, but I love the idea of Kagi but just cancelled my subscription. All the issues about google search becoming more and more useless are absolutely true, but I still continue to get much better results for most topics with Google than Kagi. Same for Kagi's LLM products compared to directly using Claude or others.
- sodapopcan 2y ago
  I agree, but they aren't _that_ much better and I'd rather do a little more digging than support Google. I still find what I need and make good money. I can also rationalize it that I'm not always just taking the first result and actually reading multiple solutions to my problem but yanno, YMMV there.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    My rule of thumb that I’ve found is that for the most part Kagi is on par with Google for anything non location-aware. Oftentimes it’s noticeably better actually since there’s less pumping of useless results to the top. For anything location-aware, however, it ranges from significantly worse to steaming hot pile of garbage depending on the search. That’s what eventually made me cancel. Loved it for what it does give but found myself rather annoyed about having to switch to Google to get actual usable results on the significant amount of location based queries. Never got into the habit of using bangs unfortunately. FWIW DDG is flawed in nearly the exact same way.
    - freediver 2y ago
      I am wondering if you reported any of these issues/example queries to Kagi/kagifeedback.org?
nathants 2y ago
the best feature is getting an llm prompt in the url bar: how do i _ in python !chat
pbf 2y ago
I used the Kagi Ultimate subscription intensively for approximately seven months and am considering downgrading now. While I am still happy with the search, I find the value of the assistant no longer worth it. At first, I thought I would be able to replace other providers with the wide range of offered models, but now I find myself often going to distinct providers. Kagi seems to have introduced a harsh and generalized input token limit for prompts (detached from what the underlying model can handle), which makes it almost impossible to work with code or documents. I think the VW example in the announcement makes it clear that the assistant is only intended to respond to prompts of a few sentences—searching by sentences instead of keywords. I don't see input for documents or things like code execution coming here, so the difference of $15 monthly can get me fancier features. Mixing the output of the model with the limited content of approximately five websites (= Assistant with internet access), on average, is most of the time counterproductive for me. The sites mentioned in the sources of the output are often not sites I would usually visit or get information from (they usually don't correspond to the top results on Kagi web search). I have used search engines for decades now and have built a sort of index/pattern/feeling in my head for which site I am going to visit, which AI can not match for me. The lenses are nice but are also pretty specialized. Most of the time I find myself just doing a broad query, which in most cases will already satisfy me. I will definitely continue to use Kagi for search. There is no comparable search experience out there, and it makes searching definitely more effective.
arinazari 2y ago
I honestly think FastGPT is the best implementation of AI w/search, and is extremely versatile/useful across domains (granted I don't code). I think it's the same thing as the Quick Answer feature from their standard search. In my daily work as an MD it's become my reflexive go-to for looking up answers to specific to general, easy to complex clinical questions. I use it far more frequently than UpToDate (which is no less than the holy book of medicine), more than PubMed/Google Scholar searches, and definitely more than a basic web search (Google, only b/c it's a hassle to log in to Kagi every session at work). Maybe 1 time out of 10 it won't give a correct or meaningful answer (in which case my prompt needs to be refined, or is just not suited for this kind of tool). But apart from that it will give me exactly what I need, because it uses Kagi search to source its answers. Kagi search does a decent job bringing to the top relevant journal articles (which in turn may mention other articles, adding indirectly to the trove of sources FastGPT pulls its final answer from). It shows the 5 search results it referenced at the bottom of the page, so more often than not if I don't get my answer in the direct summary, I have very relevant sources to read through. I also don't think you need a Kagi account to use it.
selcuka 2y ago
The library they (probably) use for abstracting the interfaces of different LLMs they use is also open [1]: > PyLLMs is a minimal Python library to connect to various Language Models (LLMs) with a built-in model performance benchmark. https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms
ta988 2y ago
I have been using Kagi for a while now. Something I have noticed recently is that it ignores a lot more of the words in my search queries, I felt the same thing with google over time, it shows results it thinks I want not the things I want.
- cornedor 2y ago
  Have you tried reporting those queries? I've seen issues like this being mentioned in the changelog with certain keywords.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  Yep, either it's gotten worse or they lied about not tracking your history, as it has gotten worse over time and I have found myself adding !g much more lately.
- mbwgh 2y ago
  +"Searching" +"Like" +"This" works for me. Whenever I try this with Google, I can't seem to get it to work though. According to [0], it is not an official search operator anymore. 0 - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
  - sedatk 2y ago
    Yeah they’d thrown that baby out with the bathwater because Google+ had wanted to use it.
    - UweSchmidt 2y ago
      "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater" means trying too hard to do something good but accidently overdoing it!? Just to make sure we're not accidentally giving Google a break, Google+ ended in 2019, if they cared for search at all they would have brought back this feature.
      - sedatk 2y ago
dantondwa 2y ago
After being a user for a long while, my enthusiasm for Kagi has decreased. Their UI is lovely, but I feel in the end they are just repackaging other indexers. I’ve started using Google + Ublacklist and for me it works the same. I also don’t like how much they have focused on AI, given even their Quick Answer, when it’s wrong, it does so with such confidence it makes the tool quite untrustworthy.
- i5heu 2y ago
  As a search provider AI is basically their bread and butter. There is no single useful web search index that does work without AI.
bugtodiffer 2y ago
Stop them ads please
nbenitezl 2y ago
Another happy Kagi user here.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
joshstrange 2y ago
I've been using Kagi for a while and I like it more that Google but I can't quite see myself paying for Kagi Assistant. I can't see myself paying for almost any pass-through AI subscriptions, I'd rather just pay for the core AI tool (ChatGPT/Claude). This field is moving very quickly and since there will always be a lag in getting new features/models into the "wrappers" I'd rather get it from the source. One random thing I wish Kagi could do is offer a way to promote the "official" website to the top of the search results. I have various up/down rankings applied but when I search for "DataDog" I want their official website at the top of the list, not under SO/Reddit/etc posts. If I'm searching for a problem then yes, I want those sites higher but it's slightly frustrating to have to scroll down 3-5 results to find the main website for a product/service/company. I feel like they should be able to differentiate between "search about X product" vs "X product".
- slaughtr 2y ago
  You could just pin those domains as you come across them. I’ve definitely done that with one or two things that I hit this issue with. Funny you mention Datadog, I specifically struggle to keep their blog/promotion/etc official results out of the way when digging around for documentation and troubleshooting. If I’m trying to find a solution to something weird with Datadog I’m often facing the opposite of your problem and wish Datadog’s site would get out of the way.
jaxr 2y ago
I've been trying out the new Android app. I know it's still beta, but it sucks big time. I'm a fan and paying user of kagi, just wanted to point that out in case any kagi developer is reading :) among other things, it randomly says I have no connectivity in an awful modal, I click to search and the keyboard doesn't open, I hit "enter" to search and nothing happens (I need to tap on the search suggestion). pretty bad so far. will try it again in a couple of weeks to see if there is any progress...
guerrilla 2y ago
Is there some reason Brave Search isn't more popular on this site? It already has an incredibly helpful assistant built into the search and it's free. I don't even use Brave Browser (long live Firefox!) but I feel like people are sleeping on theur search.
- xigoi 2y ago
  Brave is generally disliked here because of the affiliation with cryptocurrency.
yunwal 2y ago
No markdown blocks for code makes assistants really tough to use. It also seems to end up recommending that you search the exact same thing you ask it. For example, if I ask "name 5 websites similar to hackernews", it'll end up spitting out a link to a kagi search with "websites similar to hackernews". I might end up disabling web search until they've tweaked it a little more. I really like kagi search so I feel pretty confident that they'll get it, but I don't think it's ready to replace the brand-name chatbots.
- z64 2y ago
  Hi Yunwal, I work at Kagi. > No markdown blocks for code makes assistants really tough to use. Could you clarify if you are referring to the markdown from your prompt not rendering? Or the response from the model not rendering markdown for code blocks? The former was an intentional choice for now to simplify release; it is on our roadmap. The latter would be a bug - in which case, you can email the thread URL to zac@kagi.com and I'd be happy to take a closer look.
mr_machine 2y ago
I've been using (and paying for) Kagi since the beginning. For the first while, the search results were inarguably better than any alternative. I was thrilled and was recommending Kagi to anyone who'd listen. In the last six months or so, things have gone downhill. More often, my results ignore some of my search terms and I have to try to "trick" Kagi into matching them all. More often, I get only one or two pages of results when other engines give me notably more relevant hits. And more often, my search hangs or fails to return at all. I don't care if they noodle with AI or make T-shirts as long as the search is great. What I've experienced is the search getting worse while they noodle with AI and make T-shirts, though. The two may be entirely unrelated but from an outside perspective, it feels like their core offering is suffering because of these other-than-search undertakings. So far, I'm sticking with it, but my enthusiasm has definitely diminished. A couple of my friends have canceled their subscriptions in disappointment and I've started to consider cancelling mine, as well.
prinny_ 2y ago
I have been paying for Kagi for the past five or six months and apart from the truly niche cases where I need top of the shelf search results the majority of the time the top results are not that much different from, say, duck duck go. My other issue is that I am on the first subscription tier which currently supports 300 searches and I often find myself reaching that limit sooner that I would like. I will continue to pay for the service, but so far the, admittedly, better results haven't given me this light and day experience other users describe. Maybe I am just not using the engine to its full potential...
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
I am paying phind $20 for seemingly the same functionality. Is kagi any better?

492 points by darthShadow 2y ago

Hey folks, how does Kati compare to perplexity.ai ? I have been using the latter and seems like I can’t go back to anything else. I did use magi for a while but perplexity seems crazy perfect for search and quick summaries a

jonathonlacher 2y ago

I wonder what the limits are? Don't see any mention on the announcement page.

freediver 2y ago
The Assistant currently has no hard limits on usage. We would like it to stay unlimited and will be monitoring this actively. Just added to announcement FAQ

zzanz 2y ago

"Integration with Kagi’s legendary quality search results" I don't disagree that this is useful, but I personally don't consider an assistant to be a chatbot that can tell me the weather. Assistants actively engage your daily life and do things that are usually considered tedious for people with a lack of time. Sure, that's a big ask for A.I in its current generation, but now for example I can ask Google Assistant (Gemini?) to save the shopping list I just gave it or even answer my calls in some cases. It's also certainly not the standard of human assistants, but it's closer than a chatbot.

cstuder 2y ago

So for 25$ a month I get access to ChatGPT and Claude offerings in addition to access to Kagi search. This sounds like a good deal, compared to the 20$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I missing something?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dvh 2y ago
You can not spend the $25 and you will save $25.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  It's like Jensen said: The more you buy, the more you save! /s
bangaladore 2y ago
You can use something like OpenRouter, which lets you access essentially all commercially available models. Including open-source models. There are no rate limits. You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and loaded 50$ with credits five months ago, but I still have over 1/2 of it left. I think it is hard to believe that Kagi would be any cheaper and have no rate limits.
- cstuder 2y ago
  Thanks for the hint, a usage based model looks way more attractive to me right now.
  - exe34 2y ago
    deepinfra is pretty easy to use too, for llamas and other "open" ones.
- stavros 2y ago
  Keep in mind that, while OpenRouter gives you the upstream price for OpenAI/Anthropic models (so you pay the same per token), there's a loading charge, so if you want to load $10 in credits you pay $12 or so. This means that it's more expensive than calling OpenAI directly, even though they have the same price per token.

scblock 2y ago

Cool, not a feature I personally want and behind a higher priced tier than I pay for now. That seems entirely reasonable for both Kagi and for me.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

Hmmm One feature here that I think competitors lack is that the LLM's view of search results can be constrained by Kagi's search "lens" [0] that let you exclude various categories of results. I use Kagi but haven't dug into lenses, anyone have experience ? I'm currently trying to write python script interfacing with outlook's mailterm interface (win32com.client) and it's annoying. I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs... [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

abound 2y ago
I use the Programming, Forums, PDFs, Recipes, and Small Webs lenses pretty regularly, though I haven't tried making my own lens yet. The 'Programming' lens is probably what you'd want for your Python script. Note: I work part-time at Kagi (was a Kagi user before that), not doing search stuff.
PhilippGille 2y ago
If you want to restrict results to a single page you can all to use `site:example.com` in your search.
flexagoon 2y ago
> I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs Yeah, you can set up an allowlist of domains in the lens configuration. I have a "Reddit" lens that essentially just adds "site:reddit.com" to the searches

crowcroft 2y ago

This is actually really exciting for Kagi. In a lot of situations the underlying model (Claude, GPT4 etc.) isn't that exciting, it's the connection to search to retrieve and summarize recent information that's exciting. By already having a traditional search engine this puts Kagi at a big advantage compared to someone like Perplexity, or even Claude and OpenAI who I think are all cobbling together solutions on top of Bing's API.

throwup238 2y ago
The ability to use lenses with custom assistants is the killer feature IMO. Want to search for open source projects that implement some algorithm? Create a Github/Gitlab lens. Want to ask it questions only about some framework? Add it’s domain to a lens.
- crowcroft 2y ago
  Yea, it solves a lot of limitations with LLMs generally struggling with 'niche' topics. Being able to innovate on the search side while everyone else loses a lot of many training LLMs feels like a good space to be in at the moment.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    It’s interesting, I feel like LLMs are precisely good with niche topics where search engines are becoming absolutely garbage. But maybe my search topics aren’t niche enough.
    - crowcroft 2y ago
      I guess it depends on what we define as niche. I'm thinking for coding type problems as an example smaller less well known languages or frameworks that don't have extensive coverage across multiple websites etc tend not to show up well in AI Chat. If you can focus the chatbot on a specific docs website with a lens though that problem might go away.

stagalooo 2y ago

I've been curious about Kagi as a search engine for a while now and this seems like a good time to try, given that I already pay $20/month for ChatGPT. The thing stopping me currently from trying this or Claude is I rely on the Opt+Space shortcut with the ChatGPT mac app. Are there any other options for a native mac app with integration as good as the ChatGPT app?

viraptor 2y ago
I don't know if they have shortcuts, but if not you could likely add some automation to do it: there's Msty and ChatBox that can use any model.
vunderba 2y ago
I use Raycast which is a drop-in replacement for Mac spotlight along with the ChatGPT extension that lets you quickly search conversations / ask questions / etc once you provide it with your OpenAPI key. https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9bffc9be49abe8ae4c126732/extensions/chatgpt https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9...

cube2222 2y ago

To repeat myself from a recent HN thread: I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent! Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on. The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well. All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.

eli 2y ago
Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that Reddit only lets Google crawl them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Old Reddit (and other website) content might actually be more valuable given the higher likelihood of newer posts being spam/AI bot posts.
  - DoughnutHole 2y ago
    That disregards the fact that facts change over time. If you google “best DSLR camera reddit” it’s much less valuable if the results are 5 years old, even if they’re LLM free - the cameras on the market may very well have changed in that timeframe.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
      What? Old reddit isn't using old facts. I skimmed down and if this was about Kagu indexing being out of date then sorry I just realized that

aeturnum 2y ago

I do think LLMs have their place in search and I think the Kagi approach feels a lot better than Googles'. Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere, but they've been making LLMs accessible in their search interface for a long while - this being the most evolved version of that effort. I am not totally sold on everything they are doing but I hate their integration of LLMs the least.

lawn 2y ago
Kagi's auto summary feature when you add a question mark after your query is absolutely excellent. It essentially summarizes the top search results for you, leaning in on a strength of LLMs (summarizing) while reducing its greatest weakness (hallucinations).
- aeturnum 2y ago
  For me, search integration of LLMs also helps bring together the value prop of paid search. It's not just privacy, it's the skillful integration of a premium information processing service (with built in privacy).
carlosjobim 2y ago
> Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere Kagi has AI generated stubs for some of the search results, probably originating from some of the search indexes they pay for.

tinyhouse 2y ago

It's not clear from the post how to access this new assistant. The search page has no such option (not a paying user). When I run a search, I only see an LLM based summary of the results similar to Google's. Update: I see now that they say it's not available for free users. Need to pay $25/month. Not sure why, they can offer it for free users with the cheaper models like they do now to generate a "quick answer". I'm not going to pay to try it out.

jjmarr 2y ago
Kagi search isn't free either.
- tinyhouse 2y ago
  Well, it works for me without paying. I don't use it often though.

test009 2y ago

[flagged]

test009 2y ago

[flagged]

rlad 2y ago

For users of both, how does this compare to searchGPT, in terms of results quality and quantity?

bun_terminator 2y ago

c-f "ai"; c-w. and onto the pile they go! Is it still legal do do something with a computer without involving "ai"?

chankstein38 2y ago
agreed. I'm getting pretty sick of AI summaries that will fully lie to me about things. Google's search summary AI is awful I'd expect Kagi's to be similar.
- exe34 2y ago
  does Google ai summary lie? do you have examples?
  - Diti 2y ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  I think you should try Kagi before passing judgement, really clever design. You only get the quick summary if you ask for it (i.e. you're happy to take the risk). Another handy use, is web summarize, which looks at the specific webpage, lowering the risk even further. If you don't call these features it's straight up clean search with no ads and it's fast with good results.
exe34 2y ago
see roko's basilisk.
TNorthover 2y ago
uncertAIn.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
No, Microsoft and Google and Apple need to know everything you're doing, for the sake of the children.

daft_pink 2y ago

I love Kagi and I’m a paid user, but I’m not willing to pay $25 per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I already pay these companies directly and wouldn’t be able to cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer * I’m also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there I love Kagi and can’t recommend it enough. I wish I could just give them my api key for this instead of paying several different service providers for the same ai access to the same models. This is getting expensive.

bossyTeacher 2y ago
Can you explain to me why Kagi is so good? I don't use Google Search so don't try the privacy card on me
- drdaeman 2y ago
  It does its job: provides web results relevant to the query. At the moment it has acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (quality varies per-query, but it has higher chances of useful links than web spam), which is why people tend to say it's good.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Search results are ranked by what's best, not which advertiser pays the most. And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great. Any chance you can expand on this? I've used DDG for years and find the results great, but maybe we just query for different things. Is there any specific topics that you find DDG is bad at but Kagi is good at?
    - MostlyStable 2y ago

chiefrubberduck 2y ago

can you use the assistant to generate images as well?

freeAgent 2y ago
No, not yet at least.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

Oof, I wanted a better google, not a worse one.

recursive 2y ago
So did I. But for me, it is.

NayamAmarshe 2y ago

How does Kagi compare to Brave Search? Is it an independent index?

traceroute66 2y ago

I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value. For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those). For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean FFS I put the word "newest" in there ! They seem to have a habit of interespersing very weird Facebook links randomly in the middle of a list of results. For example I was searching for something related to a specific Prometheus function (which I explicitly named in the query, alongside the word prometheus) and Kagi insisted on interspersing the technical results with random links to Facebook pages of companies selling "girlie dresses for proms". I approached Kagi with an open mind, but having used up the 100 free searches nothing made me say "just shut up and take my money".

recursive 2y ago
> but its no big deal to scroll past those For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads. If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned. Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly than you do. Which is fine.
- rvnx 2y ago
  40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element" extension. It's hard to beat.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's because their interests and user interests are not well aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.

dubme1 2y ago

Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the product has a lot of room for improvment. Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant) while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.

unshavedyak 2y ago
Paid Kagi user here. I love the AI additions, because to me it's an alternate interface to the core selling point: search. Whether or not Kagi can achieve more than the "search alone is hard enough" point however is fair - though i've been happy so far.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Same. I love the AI additions and I think they've introduced them very thoughtfully. To me, the best part of the AI additions is that it can (almost instantaneously) summarize information from the several top hits of a search. This is subtly but importantly different from having the LLM spit out an answer based on it's knowledge base, and also is able to quickly and easily cite it's sources! Extremely useful to me.
  - unshavedyak 2y ago
    Agreed! To me LLMs as they stand now are a natural extension of the classic "Google". Which is to say a Natural Language -> Search Results list. People (and products lol) got hung up on LLMs returning the answers directly.. and while they've been a definite disappointment in that realm, they can be great for summarizing and aggregating imo.
Apocryphon 2y ago
I agree that they should focus on their core product, but ironically while I use Kagi from time to time, I'm still mostly on DDG- via Orion, a browser I'm willing to pay for.
2y ago

hollowturtle 2y ago

What’s the incentive for websites to let Kagi and others indexing content if llms in search show relevant informations right away? Wouldn’t something like perplexity ai making more sense then? Or perhaps better application of llms to search

lilyball 2y ago
I haven't used Kagi's Quick Answer very often yet, but when I do, it always cites its sources and I often end up clicking into at least one of the sources to look for more detail or context.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Bingo. I nearly always use the quick answer, and then will use the cited sources to click onto the page to either read more or verify that the summary was accurate (and it always has been in the 300+ times I've used it).
- i80and 2y ago
  I've seen it cite sources, and then say the opposite of what the citations say If you're going to use this feature, always check the citations.
onionisafruit 2y ago
If you publish to make information known, then your incentive is that it helps spread that information to people who may not otherwise visit your site. If you are trying to make money off of search engine traffic then you might not like this much at all. I think most people would rather not be pointed to those sites in the first place, so it’s a win-win if they block crawlers.
- internetter 2y ago
  This is a bad take. I don't make money off search engine traffic (beyond the occasional donated dollar), and yet I would quite rather[0] that AI doesn't visit my site. Imagine for a second a world where instead of publishing directly to your own website (home), you publish into the LLM's knowledge base. Nobody comes to you for information, they come to the LLM. Nobody cares about you, or the work you put in. Your labour is just a means to their end. To some extent, you could argue that Wikipedia works in this way, but it really doesn't. The work you put in is reproduced verbatim, and the work is collaborative. You get the joy of seeing your writing being used to help other people in a very direct sort of way, as opposed to being aggregated, misinterpreted and generally warped by a non-intelligent LLM. In other words, you cannot possibly expect others to want to work in a sweat shop, toiling away to provide you with instant gratification. We must leave room for human expression. [0]: https://boehs.org/llms.txt https://boehs.org/llms.txt

matsemann 2y ago

Isn't the point of a corporate blog to drive users to your product? Then why do the blogs never have an easy way of getting there? Clicking the logo and things in the header all just take me to the front page of the blog. Pet peeve of mine.

freediver 2y ago
I think it is because bearblog (software we use, or at least the version we have) does not allow custom external in the navigation. But the product website is linked to in the very first sentence, and also from the home page of the blog. Still not good? :)

freedomben 2y ago

Something I love about Kagi that isn't often known, is they will pro-rate based on days. If you are on an existing plan, you can upgrade to Ultimate, try it out for a few days, and then downgrade and only pay for the days you used it. I despise the subscription model generally, but if we're going to have it then I wish more companies would do pro-rating! Anyway, you can try it out for very low risk.

KoolKat23 2y ago
Now that's even better. I'm definitely going to try this by upgrading temporarily who knows maybe it'll stick. Good business practice by Kagi.

ewy1 2y ago

I appreciate that it's on a separate plan so that I don't have to interface with it.

doublerabbit 2y ago

I upgraded. Using the prompt: "something cool in html css" Mistral and GPT - Create the same example of a flip card Gemini - Creates glowing neon text and Claude - Produces a pulsing dot, that enlarges and shrinks and radiates a fading white shadow. That's cool.

throwing_away 2y ago

I love Kagi and happily pay their $25/mo but I think it's a mistake to think of their offerings as cutting-edge AI. It's obviously limited compared to open source software (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread already) and likely more expensive than raw API calls. This isn't the "best" AI experience. What it is though, is fast, available on all my devices, constantly upgraded, and integrated with their already excellent search engine. When I see these sorts of announcements and read some of the comments here, it makes me worry that bad customers cause enshittification and I hope kagi stays true to their human-friendly web search product.

mtrovo 2y ago

> You can edit the question and add that you’re working on a binary classification problem to get a more specific answer. This mid-thread editing feature sounds really useful, I'm curious how does it work when you switch between models in the middle of a conversation? Like, say I start with a general search question, then halfway through I want to switch to a coding model to ask something like, "Can you create a Python dictionary of the top 10 longest city names in the UK and their populations?" Does the context carry over smoothly, or would I need to rephrase things when switching models? Wondering how it handles tasks that require different kinds of expertise without losing track of the flow.

voiceblue 2y ago
What does “losing track of the flow” mean to you?

hyperbolablabla 2y ago

I don't find Kagi as compelling as some other users seem to, worked about as well (read, poorly) as most other modern search engines

grantcarthew 2y ago
There are two killer features being no ads, and customise your search. Don't want pinterest in your search results? Block it: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

jacooper 2y ago

Why would i use this over perplexity pro?

arinazari 2y ago
Sourcing information from better search results. I cancelled my Perplexity Pro since for any use case I had for it, I would instead use Kagi FastGPT. I tried Assistants (beta) but I didn't think it was anything special, didn't really see a way to integrate it as a daily tool, and ultimately FastGPT gave me the best answer, even better than their gpt4o and Claude Opus/Haiku based assistants.

dfee 2y ago

Annoyed this isn't available on the family plan.

freediver 2y ago
It is. You can upgrade family members to Ultimate tier on-demand.

NelsonMinar 2y ago

LLMs + search are really useful. I use phind.com regularly for this, it is remarkably good for enhanced search queries. I use Claude a lot for more general knowledge stuff but its inability to provide references or do web search like stuff holds it back.

nunez 2y ago

This is really cool. I'm very against AI in everything, so I probably won't use this, but I'm glad that they are making it an opt-in feature and that my $10/month plan doesn't go up to support it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pigeons 2y ago

I don't know how to make this more meaningful than just an anecdote, but I love the idea of Kagi but just cancelled my subscription. All the issues about google search becoming more and more useless are absolutely true, but I still continue to get much better results for most topics with Google than Kagi. Same for Kagi's LLM products compared to directly using Claude or others.

sodapopcan 2y ago
I agree, but they aren't _that_ much better and I'd rather do a little more digging than support Google. I still find what I need and make good money. I can also rationalize it that I'm not always just taking the first result and actually reading multiple solutions to my problem but yanno, YMMV there.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  My rule of thumb that I’ve found is that for the most part Kagi is on par with Google for anything non location-aware. Oftentimes it’s noticeably better actually since there’s less pumping of useless results to the top. For anything location-aware, however, it ranges from significantly worse to steaming hot pile of garbage depending on the search. That’s what eventually made me cancel. Loved it for what it does give but found myself rather annoyed about having to switch to Google to get actual usable results on the significant amount of location based queries. Never got into the habit of using bangs unfortunately. FWIW DDG is flawed in nearly the exact same way.
  - freediver 2y ago
    I am wondering if you reported any of these issues/example queries to Kagi/kagifeedback.org?

nathants 2y ago

the best feature is getting an llm prompt in the url bar: how do i _ in python !chat

pbf 2y ago

I used the Kagi Ultimate subscription intensively for approximately seven months and am considering downgrading now. While I am still happy with the search, I find the value of the assistant no longer worth it. At first, I thought I would be able to replace other providers with the wide range of offered models, but now I find myself often going to distinct providers. Kagi seems to have introduced a harsh and generalized input token limit for prompts (detached from what the underlying model can handle), which makes it almost impossible to work with code or documents. I think the VW example in the announcement makes it clear that the assistant is only intended to respond to prompts of a few sentences—searching by sentences instead of keywords. I don't see input for documents or things like code execution coming here, so the difference of $15 monthly can get me fancier features. Mixing the output of the model with the limited content of approximately five websites (= Assistant with internet access), on average, is most of the time counterproductive for me. The sites mentioned in the sources of the output are often not sites I would usually visit or get information from (they usually don't correspond to the top results on Kagi web search). I have used search engines for decades now and have built a sort of index/pattern/feeling in my head for which site I am going to visit, which AI can not match for me. The lenses are nice but are also pretty specialized. Most of the time I find myself just doing a broad query, which in most cases will already satisfy me. I will definitely continue to use Kagi for search. There is no comparable search experience out there, and it makes searching definitely more effective.

arinazari 2y ago

I honestly think FastGPT is the best implementation of AI w/search, and is extremely versatile/useful across domains (granted I don't code). I think it's the same thing as the Quick Answer feature from their standard search. In my daily work as an MD it's become my reflexive go-to for looking up answers to specific to general, easy to complex clinical questions. I use it far more frequently than UpToDate (which is no less than the holy book of medicine), more than PubMed/Google Scholar searches, and definitely more than a basic web search (Google, only b/c it's a hassle to log in to Kagi every session at work). Maybe 1 time out of 10 it won't give a correct or meaningful answer (in which case my prompt needs to be refined, or is just not suited for this kind of tool). But apart from that it will give me exactly what I need, because it uses Kagi search to source its answers. Kagi search does a decent job bringing to the top relevant journal articles (which in turn may mention other articles, adding indirectly to the trove of sources FastGPT pulls its final answer from). It shows the 5 search results it referenced at the bottom of the page, so more often than not if I don't get my answer in the direct summary, I have very relevant sources to read through. I also don't think you need a Kagi account to use it.

selcuka 2y ago

The library they (probably) use for abstracting the interfaces of different LLMs they use is also open [1]: > PyLLMs is a minimal Python library to connect to various Language Models (LLMs) with a built-in model performance benchmark. https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms

ta988 2y ago

I have been using Kagi for a while now. Something I have noticed recently is that it ignores a lot more of the words in my search queries, I felt the same thing with google over time, it shows results it thinks I want not the things I want.

cornedor 2y ago
Have you tried reporting those queries? I've seen issues like this being mentioned in the changelog with certain keywords.
chipsrafferty 2y ago
Yep, either it's gotten worse or they lied about not tracking your history, as it has gotten worse over time and I have found myself adding !g much more lately.
mbwgh 2y ago
+"Searching" +"Like" +"This" works for me. Whenever I try this with Google, I can't seem to get it to work though. According to [0], it is not an official search operator anymore. 0 - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
- sedatk 2y ago
  Yeah they’d thrown that baby out with the bathwater because Google+ had wanted to use it.
  - UweSchmidt 2y ago
    "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater" means trying too hard to do something good but accidently overdoing it!? Just to make sure we're not accidentally giving Google a break, Google+ ended in 2019, if they cared for search at all they would have brought back this feature.
    - sedatk 2y ago

dantondwa 2y ago

After being a user for a long while, my enthusiasm for Kagi has decreased. Their UI is lovely, but I feel in the end they are just repackaging other indexers. I’ve started using Google + Ublacklist and for me it works the same. I also don’t like how much they have focused on AI, given even their Quick Answer, when it’s wrong, it does so with such confidence it makes the tool quite untrustworthy.

i5heu 2y ago
As a search provider AI is basically their bread and butter. There is no single useful web search index that does work without AI.

bugtodiffer 2y ago

Stop them ads please

nbenitezl 2y ago

Another happy Kagi user here.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

joshstrange 2y ago

I've been using Kagi for a while and I like it more that Google but I can't quite see myself paying for Kagi Assistant. I can't see myself paying for almost any pass-through AI subscriptions, I'd rather just pay for the core AI tool (ChatGPT/Claude). This field is moving very quickly and since there will always be a lag in getting new features/models into the "wrappers" I'd rather get it from the source. One random thing I wish Kagi could do is offer a way to promote the "official" website to the top of the search results. I have various up/down rankings applied but when I search for "DataDog" I want their official website at the top of the list, not under SO/Reddit/etc posts. If I'm searching for a problem then yes, I want those sites higher but it's slightly frustrating to have to scroll down 3-5 results to find the main website for a product/service/company. I feel like they should be able to differentiate between "search about X product" vs "X product".

slaughtr 2y ago
You could just pin those domains as you come across them. I’ve definitely done that with one or two things that I hit this issue with. Funny you mention Datadog, I specifically struggle to keep their blog/promotion/etc official results out of the way when digging around for documentation and troubleshooting. If I’m trying to find a solution to something weird with Datadog I’m often facing the opposite of your problem and wish Datadog’s site would get out of the way.

jaxr 2y ago

I've been trying out the new Android app. I know it's still beta, but it sucks big time. I'm a fan and paying user of kagi, just wanted to point that out in case any kagi developer is reading :) among other things, it randomly says I have no connectivity in an awful modal, I click to search and the keyboard doesn't open, I hit "enter" to search and nothing happens (I need to tap on the search suggestion). pretty bad so far. will try it again in a couple of weeks to see if there is any progress...

guerrilla 2y ago

Is there some reason Brave Search isn't more popular on this site? It already has an incredibly helpful assistant built into the search and it's free. I don't even use Brave Browser (long live Firefox!) but I feel like people are sleeping on theur search.

xigoi 2y ago
Brave is generally disliked here because of the affiliation with cryptocurrency.

yunwal 2y ago

No markdown blocks for code makes assistants really tough to use. It also seems to end up recommending that you search the exact same thing you ask it. For example, if I ask "name 5 websites similar to hackernews", it'll end up spitting out a link to a kagi search with "websites similar to hackernews". I might end up disabling web search until they've tweaked it a little more. I really like kagi search so I feel pretty confident that they'll get it, but I don't think it's ready to replace the brand-name chatbots.

z64 2y ago
Hi Yunwal, I work at Kagi. > No markdown blocks for code makes assistants really tough to use. Could you clarify if you are referring to the markdown from your prompt not rendering? Or the response from the model not rendering markdown for code blocks? The former was an intentional choice for now to simplify release; it is on our roadmap. The latter would be a bug - in which case, you can email the thread URL to zac@kagi.com and I'd be happy to take a closer look.

mr_machine 2y ago

I've been using (and paying for) Kagi since the beginning. For the first while, the search results were inarguably better than any alternative. I was thrilled and was recommending Kagi to anyone who'd listen. In the last six months or so, things have gone downhill. More often, my results ignore some of my search terms and I have to try to "trick" Kagi into matching them all. More often, I get only one or two pages of results when other engines give me notably more relevant hits. And more often, my search hangs or fails to return at all. I don't care if they noodle with AI or make T-shirts as long as the search is great. What I've experienced is the search getting worse while they noodle with AI and make T-shirts, though. The two may be entirely unrelated but from an outside perspective, it feels like their core offering is suffering because of these other-than-search undertakings. So far, I'm sticking with it, but my enthusiasm has definitely diminished. A couple of my friends have canceled their subscriptions in disappointment and I've started to consider cancelling mine, as well.

prinny_ 2y ago

I have been paying for Kagi for the past five or six months and apart from the truly niche cases where I need top of the shelf search results the majority of the time the top results are not that much different from, say, duck duck go. My other issue is that I am on the first subscription tier which currently supports 300 searches and I often find myself reaching that limit sooner that I would like. I will continue to pay for the service, but so far the, admittedly, better results haven't given me this light and day experience other users describe. Maybe I am just not using the engine to its full potential...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

I am paying phind $20 for seemingly the same functionality. Is kagi any better?