111–120 of 264 posts
I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant. The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token. This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave. I wonder if Kagi's using it. Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
Earlier quoted context omitted.
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
I mean, Orion exists (on Mac at least, although I heard there's a Linux version now?). Might not have its own engine built from the ground up, but WebKit is pretty much the next best thing.
Yes, there's a Linux beta. Discussion from a few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970894.
Link to the beta: https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/linux
Earlier quoted context omitted.
imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing
What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?
I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site: every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Kagi's search API with my agents, including their summarizer, and it has been great!
This would be an interesting use case. But it seems API access is not included in the subscription? The value proposition would have been higher if it was (so one subscription for both human and agent use).
Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…
Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer. I only use a search engine to find a specific website…
I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited). The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be inter…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this is also why Google "sucks now". The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But I found that to be a very questionable thesis from the start.
> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe. The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work. I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don'…
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.