If anyone from Kagi is reading this: Now that you have search without an account, is there any chance we can finally get a DNS-based enforced safesearch option like every other major search engine has? It's been in the feedback requests since May 2022[1].

Anyone on an enforced-safesearch network can now go to kagi.com, turn SafeSearch off, and search for porn or anything else, which is just going to get kagi blocked completely on all those networks. If you add a SafeSearch-enforced alternative IP address, then Kagi can still be used.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/3285-safe-search-dns-locking-for-it-administrators

What legitimate reason is there for stuff like that? Workspaces should not be enforcing policies like that - trust your workers - and parental nonsense shouldn't be a goal of an ethical business.

It can be useful at home for parents with kids as well. A decent number of people use Pi-hole, NextDNS, or some other DNS blocker service.

Either way, ultimately the result of not offering the option will more likely be getting blocked entirely, than workers being freed from the shackles of SafeSearch.

What's even the point of DNS based safe search? Anyone can change their DNS and use DNS over https, how does DNS safe search work in that instance?

Also blocking the search is pretty weird, what prevents me of typing the URL directly?

It can be used to keep bad content away from kids. DNS over TLS can be blocked on the network router / firewall and DNS safe search enforced by forwarding lookups to something like Adguard

> What legitimate reason is there for stuff like that? Workspaces should not be enforcing policies like that - trust your workers

It's not just porn, it could be a way to prevent successful phishing through employees filling out a malicious form or whatever.

"Trust your workers" is bad infosec.

Yeah people are dumb if they can get an Amazon gift card or a job offer, see what happened to Binance.

But blocking alternative search engines and AI engines goes a bit far IMO especially if they dont use training. Especially if you're just afraid they will see a nipple on a search engine. That's ridiculous.

For schools

Kagi is already blocked in my workplace due to their AI features, so a 'sanitised', search-only version of the site would be very useful

> Kagi is already blocked in my workplace due to their AI features

Can you expand upon this? Why is there an AI block?

Usually it's "You can only use CoPilot"

Ya Microsoft lobbies for that, at our place too.

The reason is that copilot resells other people's models (they're just a middle man) and there's an easy way to cut them out. So they blow up the dangers of other people's AI. Whereas if your data is in M365 they have it all anyway whether you use copilot or not. So they're trying to build a moat so they don't easily get cut out.

Yes, we can look into prioritizing this internally.

> s there any chance we can finally get a DNS-based enforced safesearch option like every other major search engine has? It's been in the feedback requests since May 2022[1].

Not working with Kagi, but while they have RU contracts this will not be possible, can guarantee.

You mean Yandex/Russia? Yandex itself has an enforced SafeSearch IP (213.180.193.56) so I would have thought Kagi could too.

Haven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.

A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!

https://noai.duck.com

I pay for kagi, but hardly ever use search any more.

Come to think of it, one of my boxes is not logged into kagi, and is mostly ai nonsense.

I guess I’ll keep paying them. :-)

> I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google

I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.

Gemini summary is wrong way too often to be relied on, especially for anything niche

Very rare for me to use Google nowadays for something niche. For those cases, I would assume it requires multiple sources to get a definitive answer, so it goes to ChatGPT.

Ok but there’s still a high error rate, so why would you trust it with general queries? Especially if it’s something you aren’t already knowledgeable about

That is fair. I always ask for sources whenever it is something I am unfamiliar with instead of just trusting the response, that way I can go and double check and it ensures the agent at least read something on the topic

I've found the value of this approach has diminished over time - now I need to go and read the source and try to identify if it was generated by an LLM itself.

Why do you think there’s a high error rate for general queries nowadays?

Because of the high error rate on queries where I know the topic well enough to tell when the answer is way off base

Yeah fair. I guess I have a very different experience, as I mentioned above, I basically never use it for any niche/hard queries that depend on multiple sources or research. For all my common queries, it's reliable.

> For all my common queries, it's reliable.

Is it though? How often are you spot checking sources?

It's a AI answer and a huge page of ads

Yeah, agreed. If Claude/ChatGPT would load and respond faster, i’d go for them. But Google’s speed is unmatched for quick queries.

For me, it took 30-60 seconds to notice dark mode preferences on my browser, but popped up an ad saying that search is garbage without the app, and that I should install their malware on my phone.

When I dismissed the popup, it produced much better results than screenshots I’ve seen from logged in browsers.

I guess that’s an improvement?

I use it much less than I did prior to LLM becoming useful. However, when I need to search, it just works. Their AI integration with their search is also great, but I couldn't justify it and ChatGPT subscription. I can't bring myself to cancel Kagi entirely, though. I still did 600 searches this month.

Except the summary doesn't fucking work. It's consistently wrong.

As I mentioned above, if you’re making a niche query, maybe. If you’re making a very generic query “average temperature in Hong Kong in January”, it’s fine. You’re overestimating average complexity of a query.

"Fine" may be "right 95% of the time" but I'll look like a jackass 5% of the time that I trust the Google AI Overview.

And I won't know which ones are the wrong ones, so I may as well trust it 0% of the time.

Most people I know use AI Overview now as their primary way of doing any sort of research or question-answering... and I urge them: If getting an LLM take is suitable for your purpose, at least ask free-tier ChatGPT, which is at least an order of magnitude less likely to vomit up false or confused information. Also, asking actual Gemini is another sane option that is far superior to AI Overview.

Does it really matter that much? Did it matter that everyone's parents pre-internet were wrong half of the time?

Most people are not asking google to build them a train signaling system but to look up some question on Wikipedia for which the answer does not matter that much

If that’s the case, those people should just install a 7M param model on their phones and use that. It’s probably as accurate, but works offline.

Sure but that is harder than pressing a button or saying hey Google. It requires you to think, install a new app, make a UI, etc.

Think of the incentives and the path of absolute least resistance/thinking/energy use and you will arrive at the product people want.

Every time I get a Gemini summary it reminds me not to use google. It's almost always wrong about key data.

> And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.

What a disgusting use of technology. Kicking a query to an agent, that's leveraging a model that has bulk of humanities information in it, so it can use a web browser to go looking for the thing you searched. WTF.

You forgot to mention all the well-documented ad auction fraud that came out during the anti-trust trial (they defraud advertisers and sites and do some shady stuff to users —- on every impression).

I never said that? But when i’n searching for a certain answer, I don’t really care about paragraphs, posts, etc. A good chunk of time it might be data auto-generated from big databases too.

Time and place for every tech/use case. When I’m in the mood for reading long pieces, i do that deliberately.

N+1 I have paid for Kagi for a couple of years. I describe it as google search back when google search was actually useful.

DuckDuckGo has never had good search results.

It's mostly Bing

It’s been statistically indistinguishable or better than Google for at least a decade.

Google intentionally serves bad results now to juice ad impressions (according to sworn testimony from their execs), so I assume DDG is significantly better these days.

Tried them all. When looking for obscure sites, I still find Google to be the best above all. DDG will often miss results, Kagi and Brave will be better but still not have the vast amount of sites indexed like Google does. Also, I'm still surprised to this day that searching "duckdns" on DuckDuckGo doesn't bring up the DuckDNS site -- maybe they have something against other ducks?

As for Google, I typically only use its "Web" search so I skip all the junk Google adds to the `All` tab. With Firefox or Chrome, you can make a custom search engine with `&udm=14` appended, like `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` if you want it to be your default search engine.

I think Kagi more aggressively blocks garbage, which is probably the tradeoff you are seeing.

The last time kagi failed me, I flipped on claude research mode. It found a microfiche archive, OCR’ed it, then started retro-stalking obscure 90’s celebrities (read old interviews, found coworkers, etc).

It took 15 minutes, but it produced an accurate 20-30 page report, then converted it to machine readable form for downstream use. I tried doing the same research myself a few years ago and failed to find anything at all.

As the kids say: Google’s cooked.

My workflow (return on success):

1. DDG

2. Google

3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand

4. This is information the world was not meant to know

Brave Search is actually better than DDG these days. Kagi is supreme though

(Also Marginalia for deep search)

Isn't Kagi basically Brave search?

No? Different features, different indices, Brave Search is free/ad supported. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html

I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".

The only thing I use Google for anymore is reverse image search.

Kagi is awesome, it's what Google used to be. I tried to switch to DDG, but I found that I had to use the !g option more often than not to get good results. With Kagi, I've never had to do that.

As far as data goes, Kagi often lags behind Google. It will return outdated or irrelevant articles quite often.

However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.

So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.

The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.

I am waiting for someone at Apple[1] to explain why I can't set any arbitrary site as my search provider on mobile on the phone that I paid for.

(Does Chrome on mobile allow it? I use Edge on iOS which also only has a hardcoded list, so while I don't know for sure, but I assume not)

[1] no doubt i will be waiting until i am dead

I'm guessing that apple wants to get paid for placement in the preferred search provider listing.

Yes Firefox does, you just need to visit it once and it's in the list. You can also add it manually if you want. I used it that way both on desktop and android.

Try Kagi. Honestly. It craps on DDG.

Very happy Kagi user for a few years. I extra appreciate the ability for me to set custom rankings for certain sites. For example, I have downranked Reddit so it only shows up if there's almost nothing else. They're also a whole bunch of AI garbage sites or listicle sites that have outright removed from all my search results. I also love that it doesn't try to AI summarize everything I search, it only does it when I put a question mark on there so I can turn it on and easily. And I pay for my account and use it on all my devices without having to buy four licenses.

would be nice to have a curated list of sane rankings

There is a leaderboard

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

Did not expect Pinterest to dominate the “Blocked” dropdown. What does this forgotten site even spam you with? I barely ever hear about them, surprised they even show up in search results.

Pinterest often dominate image search.

no so forgotten by women

I’ve never had to use the kagi downrank feature. It was the reason I signed up.

I suspect they are aware of their own leaderboards and use those in their ranking algorithm.

I love Kagi and have been a very happy subscriber for like a couple years now.

There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.

gitmemory is (was?) just a proxy by and for asians, it used to appear in google results too around 2020 and would sometimes have removed content. not the best result but better than none

I used Kagi for a few years and was completely satisfied.

I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).

Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!

Thanks for the heads up on the Euro-alt. Worth a try. Hadn't heard of Ecosia

Ecosia is just greenwashing, "we'll plant some trees for you if you use us so you can feel good about yourself". Just like the 5€ "carbon offset" you can pay for your flight. And search is powered by bing so you're not really sponsoring anything in the EU other than just lining some smart marketers' pockets.

I'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.

If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.

Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use, and programatic api use/agents can easily 100x that, performing dozens of searches for one user query. So either Kagi plan price increases and API calls then get included in the price (but then this impacts all users even those not using agents) or there is a pay what you use mechanism for API (which there is).

Agentic AI users are familiar with usage caps and rate limiting.

Any API use given away for free eats into Kagi's (already slim) margins, and unlike VC funded businesses, for Kagi money has to come from users or Kagi doesnt exist. It is a reality of running a user-funded business. If the user doesn't pay for something, Kagi has to.

I think the point is that it would be nice if people who are already paying for human-driven searches could also get an API key included in that plan.

Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.

It would be nice indeed, but it's a bit like wanting to share a gym subscription when you're not using it. The economics would fall apart if everyone used 100% of their subscription, unless sharing was priced in from the beginning.

What if the usage were shared between the two and a single API search used more of your quota than a UI search? There's no reason the economics can't line up.

e.g. if you expect the average user to use 50% of the search quota / month through the UI, but 100% through the API, then you make the quota shared between the two but double the effect of usage from the API.

That would work if the average user with Search + API used the same "amount" (Costs to Kagi) as the average account using Search only. If it nets out to a higher cost, Kagi is making less out of the same subscription amount.

Especially if the API induces demand.

(Don't shoot the messenger, just trying to explain why it makes sense that they're not doing this)

I think the only way to make it not harmful to their finances would be if they lowered the cap (even for human use) to where heavy users and API users alike ended up paying 'overages' constantly. Everybody who has studied consumer behavior generally finds that people hate overage charges to an irrational extent[1] so that would be a terrible move compared to just saying "API users, you've got to pay extra, sorry."

[1] Meaning, they are more satisfied with an 'unlimited' or just way-more-than-you'll-ever-need option, even when it costs them more when averaged over even a few months. I'm not saying this makes you an irrational person -- I have the same illogical feelings myself.

That's not really illogical, it's just because many companies use the fine print to fleece customers that are slightly above the limit. Think Ryanair. Or mobile roaming.

This is why unlimited or at least a service stop instead of overage is highly preferable. It's the reason I only use prepaid mobile plans too so they can never overcharge me (and it's cheaper than a contract too)

Is the same not true of 50/100 free browser-based searches?

No, and it's a real problem for free and trial tiers for services like this.

When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.

AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.

Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.

Defeats the purpose of the free tier.

> Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening.

Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.

> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.

That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.

If burning tokens is free then the user doesn’t care. None of this changes until free money stops flowing into AI companies.

The people on AI company plans don't need these services because they're included in the plans.

It's the people downloading open weight models and running OpenClaw (or this month's trend) who don't care how many tokens it takes because it only costs them electricity.

> That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.

Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.

It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.

Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.

Only in the trivial sense that they also cost.

But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users. Not to mention, as the "50/100" says, they're capped.

> Only in the trivial sense that they also cost.

I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).

> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.

"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.

> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.

... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.

Why would API searches be lighter? The searches are expensive, not the rendering.

I guess because a web-based search is fundamentally one or more API calls so everything before and after it is expense. Maybe it's very near zero.

>I don't get it, what other sense is there?

Obvioulsy the TYPE and RETURNS of some cost.

>These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.

50 searches from the web feel way more generous to a user than using the agent (most wont even hit them), hitting the 50 cap in like 10 minutes, and being negative about the whole experience.

>... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.

Which is exactly why it wouldn't work well for API use with such cap.

This comes out of marketing budget for new user acquisition.

Insurmountable then.

Or not a problem to begin with :)

>Any API use given away for free eats into Kagi's (already slim) margins

I refuse to believe there is a negligible margin decrease for agents using the regular search budget. Searching is cheap.

It’s about repackaging. With free/bundled API pricing, resellers could provide agents that min/maxed Kago API tokens in the background, eating Kagi’s compute abd effectively repackaging a competitor that deterred new human subscriptions.

That’s a bad business decision in the same way it would be a bad business decision for Netflix to re-enable infinite account sharing.

They already include capped usage on assistant and translate, doesn’t seem like a huge ask to do the same for API.

Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use

A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.

I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.

I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.

I was just really surprised.

I think most of us might be surprised too. Searching 'The Whole Internet' used to be so useful. Now, I know most of the names of the sites that might hold the answer to my question, since many sites are either gone or pivoted to intrusive ads and paywalls. So now, often I could just go to the right site directly. e.g. genius dot com, some specific vendor's website, justwatch dot com, etc. And on top of that, I know what questions AI will nail much better ("What's the episode of Friends where Joey is scared by a spider?"). And adding to all of that, the sheer degree of degradation the search engines' indexes have suffered. Google can tell you the right website for, say, the city government of Philadelphia. So it has some use. But if you search for most open-ended topics, you're just going to get 1000 AI-written content farm sites with nonsense domains.

Others have argued the point at depth, but its somewhat more simple than that.

Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?

Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?

I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.

I mentioned this in another thread. There's clearly a market for an agentic search engine for home/on-premise LLMs. I can download whatever frontier model, but I still have to crawl the web if I want it to have the latest information.

There are many for this: Exa, Parallel, Brave Search

Exa is what is typically used

Yeah the agent API access part is kind of lame. I do think i will start paying for Kagi search API at some point though. The search quality and ability to surface small blogs and sources which other search engines miss is probably well worth the cost.

TANSTAAFL

It’s not free, I’m paying ten buck a month for it.

I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.

I'm paying ten bucks a month and I don't want to be paying for an API I don't use. If the options are raise everyone's prices to cover the cost of the searches that an extreme minority of people want to use or ask those people to pay a little bit more for that extra functionality I think the second option makes the most sense.

You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.

You could argue that it also includes the assistant that I’m barely using at all… Why is this included in the sub while the main reason I use Kagi is the search, and the search itself is not included if performed via an agent?

Because they made a calculation that the assistant product has broader appeal. Including either product has the potential to acquire users, and retain other users, but they think their target market has a lot more people who might enjoy using the assistant, than they do people who want a search API as a free addon. Or that someone who starts using the assistant is more valuable (due to stronger retention) than someone who uses the search API because the latter is more of a commodity that you can replace in 5 minutes if a new startup offers a cheaper option.

I mean, presumably at some level you are using the search API - it's just a programmatic interface into the same underlying database calls. I don't know if Kagi web search uses the public API directly or if they share an underlying internal API, but I imagine there's not a lot of difference on Kagi's end.

The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.

That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, the only non-Kagi workflow I end up using frequently is !gm instead of using the Kagi maps. Hopefully that gap closes up in the future.

Anything specific we can do? Feel free to reach out here publically or to [email protected]. Latency is a weak link rn for sure (from aggrigating so many 3rd party data providers) but we have a solution we're working through for that... along with many tweaks to continue to close that gap.

Hopefully we can win you over soon enough <3

- dylan (maps team)

As a happy 2.5-year Kagi subscriber, my biggest missing pieces on Kagi Maps are:

1. Transit. I'm in NYC, and Google Maps does a great job of showing the MTA, trains and busses. Every route, all the stations, which trains stop there and when, even where the entrances are. Kagi Maps has no train routes or layers. There's stations, most of them at least, but it's basically the Wikipedia entry for that station. No up-to-date info or routes.

2. Mobile apps. At least half of the time, my maps use is an Android intent for address or directions, which only an app can answer. And the only really good way to get your location and see what's around you.

I don't really notice latency at all personally, but fixing those things might bring my Kagi Maps usage from 0% to like 50%+.

I know, it's probably a pain in the butt to integrate with the transit systems of hundreds of cities for up-to-date info, but OSM does at least have the stations and routes. Not much point trying to beat the official MTA app in functionality, but something is better than nothing.

It's also weirdly hard to get to. Why isn't it an option in the main list of Kagi things? To get there from the Kagi homepage, I have to click on search options, then maps.

I'm in the same boat, but honestly it's mostly out of habit.

But Google Maps has been getting worse over time for me, and I want something better. GM results contain items that are completely irrelevant to what I search, selecting "4.5+ Stars" filter returns places rated only 3 stars and hides valid 4.5+ star results, "open now" includes places that the results themselves say are closed, the list goes on...

I just went through my recent !gm history, compared it to Kagi, and I'm impressed with the results and that things like ratings are there, but do have a few notes.

- Filters. Sorting is great, but filters would be more ideal. Example use-case for me you can probably guess from my gm gripes. Finding restaurants with filters for ratings, cuisine, "open now" and/or open hours, and distance. The ratings and "open now" filters would be enough for me to switch.

- Searching for something, then panning away or zooming feels like it's missing a "search this area" button, since the results don't automatically adapt.

- Map initializes in the correct general area. Clicking the crosshairs location button shows a "Couldn't find your location" error, even after allowing location in the site permissions and refreshing a bunch. (reproduced in Brave and Safari. Chrome doesn't seem to have this issue, same permissions prompts for browser/OS popped up for all three)

- Opening the "Control Center" right sidebar and scrolling randomly produces artifacts, like it's flashing by disappearing/reappearing. (reproduced in Chrome and Brave, Safari seems fine)

Yes, Google Maps is becoming so frustrating:

1. Navigation makes pointless detours.

2. The "rotate the map back to north-up" button doesn't work.

3. "You're looking at Barcelona and asked for restaurants? I know a few, in Tokyo"

4. Half of navigation window is useless UI elements I cannot hide.

I've been trying mapy.cz for a while because they were fantastic for tourism purposes, but they're locking more and more features behind a paywall and I'm not sure I want to pay for that. The killer features of Google Maps are the POIs, reviews, photos, Street View, and public transport planning. I cannot really switch to another map app without having those.

If I am searching a map, it is for one of three things:

1) navigation

2) give me more info about this business that I tapped on

3) reviews; find related businesses, yelp style

I cannot figure out how to do any of those things with your UI.

Ideally, for (1), it’d let me choose to open in organic maps (reliably works at all) or apple maps (better when it works, which is rare offline, even with offline maps turned on) on my phone.

This might he fantasy land, but if it could send the location to BMW’s app, then that’d be awesome too. (The bmw app can send the location on to my car.)

One other thing: Lot’s of people are asking for an app. “Add to homescreen” works well on first glance, at least in iOS. The big thing is integration with the other apps. (Something like avenza would be cool for parks.)

90% of my maps usage happens on my phone, so an iOS app is my top need to give it a proper try.

I guess the biggest problem is and will always be the quality of data. The reason I can't use CoMaps much is because OSM just doesn't have the same accuracy and recency of data on businesses and POIs in my area as compared to Google/Apple.

Not the OP but one thing I've noticed in my own town is locations that have moved still showing up at their old (and new) location, and sometimes the places that moved into the old locations not showing up at all. I tend to be fine with it for general geography but not for searching for places in an unfamiliar location.

would love the ability to give kagi a general location to use rather than whatever it is they use now. results for things like restaurants or events can be anywhere from a few towns over to halfway across the country so I often have to search again with !g or my specific location

what's `!gm`? can you elaborate please?

They're bangs — shortcuts to directly search on a particular website.

> For example, searching Kagi for !w Monty Python will search Wikipedia directly for "Monty Python" and take you to that Wikipedia search result. [1]

If you're on a plan with limited searches per month, it does not count against your quota.

DuckDuckGo has bangs as well.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

Looks like a shortcut (shebang) in the search text to send the search to Google Maps instead of Kagi Maps

bang, shebang would be #! :)

I’d imagine it searches google maps.

You just append it to the end of a query and it reroutes it to google maps.

The thing I use most is kagi AI assistant. They have a bunch of models like Deepseek 4.1 and I don't think they have any usage limit.

They have. Look in your account, it's in usage. If your usage exceeds what you have paid you will get told.

This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:

    Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5

    Anthropic's flagship model with always-on adaptive
    thinking ($$$$$). Best for deep reasoning, agentic
    coding, and long-horizon work.

    Cost    $$$$$
    Quality ●●●●●
    Speed   ●●

I have quite the opposite experience here where I almost never use the assistant. I much prefer the frontier labs alternative (I’m lucky enough to have my work pay for the subs).

They do, it’s capped at whatever your subscription cost is. But if you don’t have Ultimate the models are cheap and it’s hard to spend it all on assistant use.

I've come close to my limit a few times, and I'm sure you could hit it if you're using expensive models a lot, but it's still pretty generous.

For those that are looking for it, you can track your current month's billing/ai-usage here: https://kagi.com/settings/billing

I've been kinda disappointed with the $10 plan tier of the AI assistant. It looks good at first glance - shows you that it's doing a bunch of research, you can see which sources it's looking at etc. But then when it goes to report results on anything data heavy it makes a lot of mistakes with putting figures under the wrong headers, using incorrect values etc.

The last time I used it heavily was a few months ago so it might have gotten better, and I assume the more expensive tier where you can choose which models it uses might be a bit better depending on which model you choose. I much prefer just pointing my own local agent harness at a search api at this point though.

if I'm using Kagi it's because I don't want AI replies. If I wanted AI, I'd use Google/Gemini (which is arguably better at this particular type of task than the open models).

Splendid news! I definitely think getting Kagi in front of people to try will be easier than requiring a sign up... Obviously it won't be for everyone, not everyone values the benefits of good search, but plenty would if only they saw it.

I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.

I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.

First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.

I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.

The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.

I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.

My own workflow (for all search engines) is to add a keyword search in Firefox. This is way better than the built-in "search engine" feature because it supports pretty much any website.

I have a bookmark for `https://kagi.com/search?token=...&q=%s` (you can get the token from somewhere in the settings) and a keyword `k`. When I want to search, I type `k giant isopod` and hit enter -- that takes me to the search results. Note that that also works in private browsing windows, whether you want it to or not. :-P So you never have to worry about whether you're signed in.

Keyword searches are cool because you can use them for any site that exposes a query through any part of the URL.

It's possible in Firefox! Kagi just don't have helpful docs for how to set it up

> it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on

May I recommend a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC[0], with a YubiKey[1] and some folder synchronization across machines?

[0]: https://keepassxc.org/

[1]: https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-yubikey-howto

I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem and so I have my passwords almost everywhere that way. But like, I have a lot of devices and a whole family. Sometimes it turns out one is not set up properly and I logged in with a QR code.

I had similar problems for a while. Especially Safari tabs that were dumped from memory on iOS. Logging in again was annoying. A quite over-engineered solution that slowly evolved in my Kagi usage uses Tailscale Golink [0].

Case 1: Kagi extension for Safari redirects from Ecosia to Kagi when on the good path. I rely on this mostly because it’s first-party so there’s a bit more trust with my queries.

Case 2: Safari Redirect Extension [1] redirects unauthenticated Kagi pages to Golink. Golink redirects back to the original page with a Kagi Token appended. Instantly authenticated.

Also, I highly recommend setting custom DNS records on Ecosia/DDG/whoever-you-redirect-from to prevent query leakage.

[0] https://github.com/tailscale/golink

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/id1571283503

I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.

There's a $10 plan with no AI.

No there isn't.

https://kagi.com/pricing

We can haggle over the ideal price but I do see sense in a cheaper version without the AI to appeal to more cost conscious people - I am a Kagi subscriber I never use the AI part (but I'm not so bothered that I'd demand a discount, maybe others are)

I didn't use the AI and would have preferred a subscription without it. I ended up canceling anyway.

Same here. It's not a big difference but that's what you get when you're right at the cut-off point. At $10/month, I find it hard to justify switching from duckduckgo when the results are not noticeably better (I've tried). And as someone who's online a lot, I'd be out of queries in a not-so-extraordinary month on the smaller plan (I've tried). Adding 20% to the smaller plan (in queries and in price) would make more sense for me than going for "unlimited" at twice the price (just quote me a price per query please, it's not as if each additional query costs you nothing)

There are also real downsides, like needing to be logged in all the time. I can visit ddg.gg on a customer's laptop in 0.2s, but won't be logging into my Kagi to do a quick web search

I also don't need anything but search and image search: for maps I use OSM, for LLM inference there are various free and paid providers, for videos one sadly doesn't find much outside of youtube anyhow (save for specific genres like conference talks at media.ccc.de, in which case I already know where to go). All this stuff included in the ultra fancy plus version incurs costs for them so it makes sense that it's not in the base product, but I won't use it so I feel silly paying for it

I'd love if they did a bundle deal with other service providers like email and data storage.

Same here, I like Kagi but I'm not paying that much for search. I tried it for a while but it was not worth the money over DDG for me.

I'm very cost conscious for services though. I wouldn't pay more than €3 a month or so. Being in a medium wage eu country I just don't want money flying or left right and center.

For comparison i pay €2 a month for my email, online storage and web office, EU based also.

I don't get it. They do have a $5/month plan.

If you can find at least one other person you care about a little, then they do in fact offer unlimited for $7 or even $3.33

I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.

There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.

I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.

I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.

But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.

Kagi is very good but the iOS story needs work.

I assume this is Apple’s issue moreso than Kagi’s. If anyone is reading this from the Safari team, setting Kagi as default search is far too difficult and the app workaround is unreliable.

I continue to pay for Kagi despite barely using it (Kagi doesn’t charge you if you don’t search in a given month! Fantastically consumer friendly feature) but this issue makes it useless on my mobile devices where I use search most.

For some reason after latest MacOS update (27.2) Kagi extension for Safari started failing frequently. I have Kagi configured to redirect Google, but now I just see Google search show up and stay there. It only redirects if I click the Kagi extension button myself. Seems like a bug, but happens so often that it really ruins the experience.

The extension is open source and macOS changes do interfere with it working. Apple is not making it easy. It is one of the reasons we created Orion - same lightweight, native Safari experience but integrated with Kagi.

https://orionbrowser.com

Orion is really good, especially for people who appreciate Safari.

Seems like we’re long past the time Apple should add more options (or let the user).

I wish they would. The extension works well for me most of the time, but every once in a while I end up on Ecosia and I’m confused for 2 seconds.

i tried Kagi against Duckduckgo, Google, Bing, Yandex. It turned out more complete, old-web results whereas all the rest merely returned duds (same search, something difficult to find).

Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.

Is there a search widget available for iOS? I tried installing the kagi for safari app, but apple’s intentionally scary warnings did it’s job and convinced me not to enable it. I'd rather just have a widget on my homescreen which opens results in a safari tab. I built one with shortcuts, but it’s ugly.

I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.

It's sad that we have to pay a different company to do it, but it seems they mostly just remove junk or re-priorize Google results. Google is showing us results in a way that maximizes ad/click revenue for Google. Kagi is showing results in a way that maximizes the likelihood that you will pay Kagi for that search service itself.

This makes it sound nefarious but isn’t Kagi maximizing for subscriptions synonymous with them maximizing a great product that returns the desired results for users?

I knew Kagi was essentially a meta-search provider (they use lots of indexes to try and produce a more accurate search result), but wasn't aware they use a SERP provider with Google results. Uruky does and it seems to be offered upfront for users that want a more Google-like experience. I'm wondering where you found that out?

If you take them at their word, they would love to be able to pay Google directly for such an API. But I think it would take a government requiring it for Google to do it.

They say "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide": https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription

Very happy with it and also extremely happy that you can actually get support from them. Very impressed.

I was a subscriber for 2 years but as of late, I've had less and less need for Kagi's awesome search experience. Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.

But what happens when search gets so optimized for delivering ads through AI, that your AI starts giving you crappy ad-driven results (which is already happening).

We'll need a way to hook up the agent to a subscriber search service.

They have a $5/month plan now, if that makes a difference to you

> Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.

This is more work up front, but I have a bot I communicate with via Telegram, and I've hooked up Kagi API Search and Extract, and now achieve something similar. I just ask it to do a web search to try to find the answer to my question.

It's pay-as-you-go. Not particularly expensive.

Kagi is playing a smart game. They will catch the search traffic that Google is abandoning. Similar to what happened to RSS when Google Reader was shut down - a few other players caught a good amount users.

Pessimistically, I get the strong impression that AI is cannibalizing search traffic, not competing search engines. The delivery format overall is changing, even if power users prefer the traditional approach.

For my use of Kagi, probably more three quarters of "my" searches are made by Kagi's assistant or a custom assistant I've made via their interface, as a result of the assistant formulating a response to one of my queries to it. Kagi search is so much better than Google, so the assistant ingests much better context (i.e. the results) before it answers. In that sense, Kagi is still picking up the search traffic Google and others are leaving on the table, but the relationship is healthier. I'm paying to use a search because of the quality and there are no ads to show, so the assistant doing the searches is just as beneficial for both parties (I get a more powerful tool and they get a happy subscriber) as human initiated searches.

Reading down the page, I didn't realize they had apps for AI and news and stuff. Pretty cool! It feels so much better to be using a service that is NOT supported by ads

Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.

That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?

I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.

> I end up going directly to certain websites instead.

Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.

The biggest value for me is:

- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.

- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).

Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.

Everyone I mentioned it to scoffed at the idea of paying for search.