Hacker News

I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp

It truly is a game changer. I often use it before the regular search now. And no joke, it doesn't just save time, I've had it find things that I actually couldn't doing manual search. The reason is because it often knows when there are alternative names for the same sort of product and so can find things that are rebranded or the like.

I agree with you that I'd love to know more about how it works. The citations to real supporting websites are generally very good (though I've seen a few mistakes).

My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works.

If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

For those wanting to try Kagi does not just have ai search help, but full chat app: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

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.

Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered.

I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.

I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.

On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.

On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

Another +1 for their Asssitant from me. I have the app on my iPhone, and despite having Perplexity/OpenAI/Claude/Gemini paid plans I find myself gravitating to Kagi for q&a.

I've also been pleasantly surprised about Brave's search based AI answers. They have been good for months and cite sources.

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 use it for any first pass searches. It’s great. Add a ? at the end of a search and get an annotated answer. Super happy with it and super happy to keep paying. Plus they send me stickers sometimes that go on my laptop that serve as a conversation starter to evangelize Kagi a bit in person. One of the only few services I happily pay for.

The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.

So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.

One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.

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.

A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.

> 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.

If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!

Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)

Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.

>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).

The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.

Longstanding user and it is great!

It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.

I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.

> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.

Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects

  ^https://(www\.)?reddit.com|https://safereddit.com

Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.

I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.

> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account

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 can still access old.reddit.com from my country/region

> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account

Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.

If they had a "here is what I'm currently subscribed to" that might be valuable. Everybody should subscribe to the local news paper - to get local news. Things that matter to them that they won't hear about. (Odds are you the reader do not live in the same city as me and so have no interest in who is on my local school board - but I'm trying to figure out who to vote for and need more information than I can find).

However tracking that is tricky at best.

Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.

There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.

There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).

Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html

Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

Do you imply that you never order anything online?

Do you use Google instead?

Why do you love it?

I think they have no imagination - like most rich kid “founders” they have no original ideas.

Would never use this trash

ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard

I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.

Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.

I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.

That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.

Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?

Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.

The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.

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.

If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.

Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)

It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.

I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.

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.

Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).

Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.

There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.

Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.

I don't think your strategy is as effective as you think it is for protecting your privacy online. You should also read Kagi's privacy policy before implying Kagi would harm your privacy model.

Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.

>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.).

Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.

It's not that they have anything against them, it's giving their customers who don't want to see them the choice not to.

Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).