I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).

On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.

On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.

You can get it on at least iOS as well as its own app. You can select from bunch of China-models, I use Kim pretty much always. You can also do a system prompt and bunch of the same stuff you can with Claude etc. But it lies to me hardly ever. I don’t know how they did that.

This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.

Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.

It will say that nothing in the provided search context has your answer which seems like a simple system prompt but somehow other models from bigger companies have a much harder time saying "I don't know" by default.

The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes.

https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi

I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information.

You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.

https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...

I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.

I use it all the time.

I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.

With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

which model?

The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.

You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.

So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.

So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.

Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.

So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.

One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...

Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.

Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)

If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.

We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.

And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.

So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.

Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).

It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.

I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.

True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.

  ^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com

I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!

(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)

I don't understand why this is a barrier considering their accounts aren't invasive at all since you can use a temporary email account to sign up, and then you never have to do anything via email after that.

Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.

However tracking that is tricky at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.

Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.

I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html

Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.

I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.

The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).

Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.

I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.

I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.

Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.

In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.

And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.

Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)

Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.

Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.

Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.

I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.

edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE

If it was 50-75% as good as Kagi, I’d pay a subscription.

I’d also really like a way to use it in safari/mobile safari.

hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).

If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.

Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.

The app isn't great, but the price is right.

Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.

If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.

An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie

The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.

Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.