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.
I really wanted to like Kagi, I'm onboard with paying for search, but I've had had a big issue with its speed when doing the trial to be honest, am I the only one bothered by this?
Perhaps this is because I'm in Europe and it's faster in the US? A search request to Kagi seems to take around two seconds for me (shows as ~1s in the Kagi UI), it just feels really unpleasant compared to Google, I'm used to firing of a couple searches with different wording / terms and go through results quickly, feels like I'm being held back.
Maybe I'm spoiled, but if I'm paying for search I would really like it to be at least on par with Google, the search result quality seems ok from what I can tell, lenses don't really make sense to me, they seem to filter out too many results I would have liked to actually see, but the customization like adjusting the rating of individual websites is fantastic.
If they can manage to bring the speed to match that of Google, I'd be happy to pay for it I think.
How bizarre. I'm not in the US either - I'm in New Zealand, and have been using Kagi since their beta I think and currently pay for Ultimate, and to me it's a lot faster than Google.
The other day I was using someone else's computer and used Google, and my goodness, the results were just awful and ... bloated?
Sorry to hear your experience hasn’t been great. I’ve been using it from NZ for the last six months and haven’t noticed any speed differences. Just did trips to Canada and the US recently and I didn’t notice any difference in performance.
Possible reasons Google is faster for you is because
1. they simple pull ads from database on the first page instead of actually searching for what you need
2. They load marginally relevant answers instead of doing a better search for what you need
3. Google is multibillion company and can afford faster servers
With Google you waste a lot more than 2 second scrolling down past the ads trying to find answers, assuming you can even find it, and doing another search(es) if you don’t, wasting even more time.
I've been using Kagi for a while too (wow, 2.5 years, didn't realize), and agree that the experience and search results have been excellent. I don't use lenses, but make heavy use of bangs, and I like that I can up- and down-weight domains and even ban domains outright.
But I don't really care about AI assistants. If these AI integrations will improve the bog-standard search experience (I type something in the search bar, get a list of results, and click the one I think will give me what I want), that's great. But if not, this is just noise to me.
I was on the $10 a month plan for a while, but I canceled. Overall the experience of using Kagi was great but not "$10 per month" great compared to free alternatives. On top of that I got the feeling that Kagi is not a super "professional" company; for example by spending huge amounts of money on self-printing useless t-shirts (https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k) or haphazardly suddenly charging tax on subscriptions.
What I want most of all from a search engine is to be "internet plumbing" and mainly stay out of my way, and with Kagi I always had the feeling they would suddenly remove/change/add things because of some strong opinion their founder holds. In which case I don't want to be $108 committed for a year.
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.
Highly unlikely, that would undermine their business model. For the same reason they don't offer pay as you go plan. Vlad explicitly stated somewhere that they are able to make money only because many people do not use their plans to the fullest.
IMHO if you pay for them directly already, then probably not worth it. I cancelled Ultimate because it just wasn't feature competitive to me over OpenWebUI, but if you want to be able to try out several different models from different companies without giving each of them a card and using a different interface, Kagi Assistant could be a good solution.
There’s still a bit nuance to that - in most cases I’ve experienced integrated via API in a third-party app, the results have been mostly underwhelming, as opposed to being used directly, preferably with the configurable contexts. Including GitHub and Microsoft Copilot, various choose-your-AI apps, even corporate chatbots, sentiment analyzers and summarizers I’ve worked with. Asking via ChatGPT or Claude directly has produced more acceptable results to me than via an intermediary.
I’m not sure I read this right, but I think this feature is headed for the $10/mo plan, and currently exclusive to the $25/mo plan only as part of that plan’s early access to new features.
To balance the discussion a bit, I'm someone who pays $25 a month to Kagi instead of paying these companies directly. I like the easy access to the different models and being able to just google with Kagi "!chat (question here)"
For what it's worth, there's already a free Raycast extension that lets you supply your own OpenAI key which lets you do this pretty easily. Wherever possible, I lean towards the BYOK (bring your own key approach).
I actually used this before but Raycast has some really nice presets or macros. I’m not sure what you’d call them, but being able to quicklink settings for different ai engines is really great.
I love being able to uprank, downrank, pin or blacklist specific domains/sites for my personal results. That alone makes it worth it. I also find the search results to be as good or better than Google. Once my personal ranking kicks in it's not even close.
I would say that most alternate search engines don’t perform as well as google. Kagi performs better primarily because you can downrank or flat out block certain domains and also upvote helpful resources so that those domains are more likely to appear in your results. Also there are no ads so you get just the results and nothing else. When you sign up you even get a list of most blocked and downvoted sites from other users like quora is top blocked so it’s easy to improve your results. They also pay for access to certain databases and you get access to little things like court records when you search for people by name or other little improvements. I don’t think privacy is the primary reason to use it at all.
Honestly it’s awesome I use a software at work so I upvote that site and block the site of the competing software for example so I get the correct help guide. I don’t understand why google doesn’t offer many of these features.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I missing something?
You can use something like OpenRouter, which lets you access essentially all commercially available models. Including open-source models. There are no rate limits.
You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and loaded 50$ 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.
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.
There's also BigAgi (really a weird ass name - probably hurting them) that is good for the same use case. Just paste in your API key and you get a really nice UI to chat through at-cost.
Also, if you're already a Kagi Pro subscriber it's really only $15/mo more for access to both models. This is the first time I've actually been tempted by one of these subscription LLMs.
It was a little janky when I tested it in beta and you don't get all the features of paying for ChatGPT directly (no multimodal, no DALL-E, etc) but otherwise yeah it's a good deal.
If you just want text chat with different models it's great.
What is the best paid service for private, anonymous, censorship free access to an LLM chatbot? Are there any that let you choose between multiple LLM backends to be able to compare answers or avoid being subject to secret system prompts, while still retaining privacy?
"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.
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.
Just using quotes usually was enough to make these words/phrases “required”. However, I believe there was a change (last year?) where they now sprinkle in other “relevant” results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Perhaps this is because I'm in Europe and it's faster in the US? A search request to Kagi seems to take around two seconds for me (shows as ~1s in the Kagi UI), it just feels really unpleasant compared to Google, I'm used to firing of a couple searches with different wording / terms and go through results quickly, feels like I'm being held back.
Maybe I'm spoiled, but if I'm paying for search I would really like it to be at least on par with Google, the search result quality seems ok from what I can tell, lenses don't really make sense to me, they seem to filter out too many results I would have liked to actually see, but the customization like adjusting the rating of individual websites is fantastic.
If they can manage to bring the speed to match that of Google, I'd be happy to pay for it I think.
You may consider reaching out to them about what you are seeing, it might be something they could investigate and resolve if they know about it.
I'm not slamming you, or your experience or preferences. That said, I find very little difference between 2 seconds and one second or less than that.
Search taking a small fragment of time just isn't a big deal and I search sometimes many times per day.
What is the gain for you that makes 2 seconds an exception to using the product?
Just curious. Peace, live well.
The other day I was using someone else's computer and used Google, and my goodness, the results were just awful and ... bloated?
If so: that's your root cause.
1. they simple pull ads from database on the first page instead of actually searching for what you need
2. They load marginally relevant answers instead of doing a better search for what you need
3. Google is multibillion company and can afford faster servers
With Google you waste a lot more than 2 second scrolling down past the ads trying to find answers, assuming you can even find it, and doing another search(es) if you don’t, wasting even more time.
But do what you want.
Status Connected to: EUROPE-WEST2 Network latency: 47ms
Dead Comment
But I don't really care about AI assistants. If these AI integrations will improve the bog-standard search experience (I type something in the search bar, get a list of results, and click the one I think will give me what I want), that's great. But if not, this is just noise to me.
What I want most of all from a search engine is to be "internet plumbing" and mainly stay out of my way, and with Kagi I always had the feeling they would suddenly remove/change/add things because of some strong opinion their founder holds. In which case I don't want to be $108 committed for a year.
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I love Kagi and can’t recommend it enough. I wish I could just give them my api key for this instead of paying several different service providers for the same ai access to the same models. This is getting expensive.
I imagine the intersect between paid Kagi users and paid LLM users is pretty high, and many people probably don't want to double-dip on LLM spending.
https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/99c7c7c4fa02afba9...
https://www.alfredapp.com/whats-new/
Honestly it’s awesome I use a software at work so I upvote that site and block the site of the competing software for example so I get the correct help guide. I don’t understand why google doesn’t offer many of these features.
It essentially summarizes the top search results for you, leaning in on a strength of LLMs (summarizing) while reducing its greatest weakness (hallucinations).
Kagi has AI generated stubs for some of the search results, probably originating from some of the search indexes they pay for.
You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and loaded 50$ 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.
This means that it's more expensive than calling OpenAI directly, even though they have the same price per token.
https://get.big-agi.com/
https://openrouter.ai/docs/limits
...haven't had issues with them, but they are there
If you just want text chat with different models it's great.
Here's their blog post: https://www.spreadprivacy.com/ai-chat/
It's since been updated to include newer models: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/aichat/
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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
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.