All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.
Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.
It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.
Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.
An ending question mark enables fast answers, like Google’s AI summary.
!ki sends your query to the assistant on light research mode. It runs a few searches against their index and summarizes the results.
I typically don’t need more than that. Most stuff I just find through search.
Maybe shopping is the weak area, as Google does get product feeds and Kagi doesn’t. I don’t think this bothers me at all.
Even when Google gets it right (often they don't) I have to wade through a bunch of AI slop and countless ads. After that, it's dozens of SEO referral link sites trying to sell me garbage.
Kagi gives me better results by default, no ads, and I can customize results by prioritizing or blocking different domains. Very much worth the small price.
Many things on the web use Yandex.
It sounds like they use everything to give their subscribers good results. Which is what it sounds like I am paying for.
Anti-drm tools are a big case in point. And so is Bypass Paywalls Clean Firefox plugin. All of these have been purged from the "Great American Corporate Firewall".
Russian people != Russian govt != Russian companies.
I just use the tools that work.
I am truly baffled (and annoyed) about this fact.
Obviously this has security implications, but I don't ordinarily search for anything sketchy on my iPhone so I'm personally not too worried about it.
Third-party keyboards, still not usable but browsers are basically ok.
The one third-party keyboard that seems to work is the one from Google, if you want a better experience than Apple’s.
There's more to device quality than whether a monkey can operate it and looks shiny.
Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.
It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)
You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.
Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.
The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.
The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively.
Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason.
I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.
I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.
I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).
What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.
(In most browsers, you can input any URL with %s as the query string.)
A negative is the high latency.
(Looks like Mistral is not profitable yet[0]. It expects 1 G$ revenue for 1 G$ capex in 2026[1], so it is moving towards profitability, but to be fair it is building a couple datacenters.)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-01-22/mistral-ceo...
Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.
*except for maps results, Kagi is absolute hot trash for maps. I automatically append !gm to the end of all mappy-type searches. I wish Kagi would just kill their map product and redirect to google maps.
- they issue you a code when you are logged in
- they track that code for multiple use
- all they can do is claim that the code was securely generated and it isn’t just an API KEY to your account… but they’re already telling you it is database tracked
How can you have any even the 1/2 best proof it isn’t just an API KEY that directly links to your account? I see no trust path other than “us, bro”.
Does Kagi have the equivalent of either of these privacy mechanisms? Even with the limitations of the ProtonVPN approach, that would be an improvement. As far as I've seen Kagi has no equivalent: it's closed source and has no regular third party audits for privacy.
We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.
I only use Google to search for reddit posts.
The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.
Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
Do not fund the Kremlin!