715 points by Ch00k 307 days ago | 467 comments on HN
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Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 13:48:50 0
Summary Information Discovery Access Advocates
This personal technology blog post advocates for switching from Google to Kagi based on superior search result quality and reduced advertising clutter. While the underlying concern—reliable access to information—touches on UDHR Article 19, the author frames this as a consumer quality issue rather than a human rights concern. The endorsement of a paid service over free alternatives introduces potential digital equity concerns.
Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products.
Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedrive, and finally search to kagi and perplexity. Took me ten years.
The top four hits on duckduckgo are from gov.uk (I did a "region-less" search).
The ddg AI assist shows links to gov.uk and visitbritain.com (which says "Please note that www.gov.uk is the only official place to apply for an ETA.")
That said, I do get scammy links from ddg some times too, and have been tempted to try kagi because of that.
"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."
This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.
It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".
I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.
I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.
[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary
This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real
Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap? I'm close to the fence but thus far have stayed on the far side mostly due to price. At $5 a month unlimited I'd be in for sure and probably usually not hit the 300 number. The AI included level is intriguing though.
About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.
This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.
What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.
But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.
I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.
My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had come to rely on subconsciously for all my queries through a day, was too jarring and even after a month I couldn't get used to it. Having had an adblocker and Youtube Premium I don't really ever see any advertisements anywhere anyway so I couldn't find the value there too.
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.
I've been using Kagi for almost 18 months. In that time we've had a baby, and I have done many many searches about baby related things. It took months after he was born before I started getting any baby related targeted advertising (I'm pretty sure it was a result of a Facebook post). Whereas for the other parents, every advert they've seen has been baby stuff since well before the baby was born.
I like Kagi, I like the principle of aligned priorities over my privacy and I like the search quality. But that really cemented why it's worth it to me.
For me (a multi-year paying subscriber), one of the many indications of Kagi's difference is a) that it has a changelog and b) that the changelog shows so much granular work.
As a long time Kagi user, the thing I miss the most is Google Maps integration for search results. It's nice to search for a restaurant or an address, see results for it, and with one click open up Google Maps to see how to get there and nearby attractions. Google Maps is such a large moat for Google, especially in locations that Apple Maps (the only real alternative) has poor coverage.
Outside of that use case, I enjoy using Kagi and recommend it to most people.
My initial feeling with kagi is that it feels like google used to before it went downhill.
So far I'm testing my first premium month and will continue to use it.
It would be nice to have a unlimited search tier without AI thats a bit cheaper tho.
Kagi is something I want to use purely for their principles alone. But I still struggle to justify the cost. I'm not opposed to paying for anything- one (not directly, but comparable in my mind) service I pay for is NextDNS- if the cost were in that range it would be a complete no-brainer for me. I just hope the economies of scale can get there some day. (Keep it simple, don't add more cruft. The core product and idea is gold.)
Being "apolitical" is no excuse for funding a russian company (yandex). If they did not do this I would probably be a paying customer. There is nothing else in this space that has the trust or features that kagi has.
The other point I have heard them say about using yandex is that there isn't another index that they could use that would be as good. This is a sound argument, but I would rather have worse image search than pay (even indirectly) russia. I wish they would "do the hard thing" and make their own (which I am sure is easier said than done).
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.
Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.
Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS
Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.
> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country
It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.
Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?
It’s not surprising. This is an article about Kagi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something about iOS’ search engine management in an early draft and then edited that part out because it’s off-topic.
Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other.
Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.
Curious, I just tried it for the first time. Install Kagi Extension for Safari from the App Store, open up Safari, go to Manage Extensions, turn it on. Then tap it in the extensions menu and accept permissions. Then it works.
> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.
I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.
I guess I'm a power user, I'm at
> Total searches this period 1,216
> Assistant interactions this period 92
I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.
YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.
> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.
These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.
That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).
I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.
Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.
I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.
What is the connection between your e-mail account and a search engine? Should the price of a glass of juice in a bar be equivalent to the price of gas for a car?
> I guess this is a long winded way of saying I'm cheap?
I think it is. If something isn't worth even $10 per month to me, then I would never think about that thing again.
Same for me. I don't understand why they are not able to cleanly separate themselves from Yandex. Their explanations don't help me understand it but only serve as "we hear you and consciously decide to still fund a Russian company".
If anybody reading this is willing to disabuse me of this I'll try to be open for a different perspective.
Content advocates for improved access to reliable information and critiques barriers to discovery (ads, AI summaries, sponsored results obscuring official sources). Frames information accessibility as a consumer quality issue rather than a human rights concern, which moderates the alignment signal.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Author describes multiple personal experiences where Google search results were obscured by sponsored links and advertisements, preventing discovery of official government information sources.
Author compares Google and Kagi search results for the same queries, showing Kagi places official government pages higher in search rankings.
Author explicitly critiques Google's AI Overview summaries and sponsored result placement as hindering ability to find official information.
Website page is publicly accessible without paywall or login requirement.
Inferences
The author implicitly values reliable access to accurate information, evidenced by frustration with Google's information presentation barriers.
The advocacy for better search result accessibility indirectly aligns with UDHR Article 19's principle of seeking and receiving information.
Recommending a paid search service may exacerbate digital divides based on economic capacity to pay.
The piece prioritizes commercial product recommendation over systemic analysis of information access as a human right.
Website is free and publicly accessible without login or paywall, supporting information access principle. Endorsed solution (Kagi) requires paid subscription, creating potential barrier for low-income users. Overall structural signal is neutral.
Author states 'People I trust on the Internet, including the Apple blogger John Gruber and novelist Cory Doctorow, recommended a new search engine called Kagi,' suggesting consensus among trusted authority figures.
appeal to authority
Author cites John Gruber and Cory Doctorow as trusted sources recommending Kagi without independent verification of their expertise or conflict.