Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
Why?
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.
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.
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
Okay then, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
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.
Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful.
Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
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.
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
They are selling content to google et al for their LLMs and they don't want to give it away for free.
I get a nice
> Log in to use old Reddit
> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
No more, since I installed the "always old reddit" plugin in firefox.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
However tracking that is tricky at best.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
I think they have no imagination - like most rich kid “founders” they have no original ideas.
Would never use this trash
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
That's why this is a good feature.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
it seems rarer, for sure. perhaps the quantity of good journalism is the same but there's a lot more trash to sift through?
but i wouldnt say it went out of business or anything. there's some fantastic journalists out there still.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
So Daily Mail, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, FOX and many others all went out of business decades ago?
That is breaking news to me.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
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.
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.
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
When will this be available into HN, too ?
hn already disallows paywalled links, unless there is an easy/low-effort bypass (noscript, archive link, gift link, etc.).
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
in other words, its not ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that do not have workarounds.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
Super clear now, thank you.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.