I want to use Kagi but the internet has given me such trust issues that creating an account with a service that can log and tie all my search history back to a personal account or credit card is such a high wall for me to mentally overcome but I'm glad Kagi is expanding their offerings. I truly hope they succeed.
The way I got over it is knowing that even without an account, regular search providers are able to profile me and tie all my search history back to me anyway. And yes, even if I turn off cookies (but who does that anyway?) and block most advertising and tracking servers at the DNS.
And before anyone says it, I know I can use tor and VPNs and every other privacy tool out there to become more anonymous, but that makes doing normal www things more difficult than it needs to be.
The way I got over eating 15 cinnabons every morning was by going to the city zoo and listening to a zoologist explain that they don't give fruit to animals in the zoo because the animals just end up getting diabetes. I figured if regular fruit from the grocery store is already that fucked, cutting 15 cinnabons out of the equation is not gonna save me.
/s
There's a simpler argument to use instead of trying to bend over backwards justifying this thing you really want to do but deep down know that it's bad for you. In fact, it's already become mainstream lingo. It's called You Only Live Once!
Those are the only four words you have to utter and everyone who was about to start arguing with you will back way instantly and you'll save yourself these strained self-serving justifications. The beauty is there is no counter argument to such pristine nihilistic capitulation.
Once Kagi, a startup, breaks the precedent with this credit card requirement crap and actually starts getting significant marketshare everyone else will say, "these guys just normalized requiring a credit card upfront for this type of service. That's great, we can now open another front in the enshittification of the internet and tie highly revealing information to real people more directly." And yes, some of these people will undoubtedly be less savory types and of more questionable moral character than the Kagi crew. And I dare say in all likelihood, so will the late stage Kagi crew as well.
On the other hand, if you do a little good faith research you'll find some email and vpn providers do allow you to send cash (gasp) via postal service to activate your account. It doesn't matter if only one customer uses that option. It is the existence of that option that creates trust.
Unless there is such an option or something nearly identical in ease and function, all these aspirational cross-my-heart-hope-to-die assurances are just ridiculous.
The most effective way to advocate for Monero support is probably to contact OpenNode[1], Kagi's cryptocurrency payment processor. You can also chime in on Kagi's Feedback site [2]. Their founder specifically addressed Monero there [3]
"""
Just to acknowledge that Kagi already implements with OpenNode to accept crypto payments so this is specifically about Monero.
> I understand the technical issues with implementing Monero, but given the number of users that will be attracted to Kagi specifically because if its privacy, it seems quite inconsistent to only offer non-anonymised payment formats.
We heard the same argument before implementing crypto, and the reality is it attracted very small number of users (less than 0.3% Kagi users pay with crypto). Since this was extremely hard to implement, and there are already ways to convert Monero to Bitcoin so there is path to payment, and based on our previous experience we expect the impact of implementing Monero directly to be minimal, we have decided to focus our very limited resources elsewhere (eg. make search better). Thanks for understanding.
"""
This is the same reason I still haven't become a paying customer. If Kagi had a similar account creation / payment processing setup as Mullvad VPN I would be all in.
You can pay with bitcoin if you want. Bitcoin is not fully anonymous (but for that matter, neither is cash-in-the-mail since TLAs store photos of the outside of envelopes, but I digress). Kagi itself doesn't have the data needed to de-anonymize the transaction, so it's as anonymous as you can reasonably expect.
Bitcoin is not anonymous at all, a public ledger is the opposite of anonymous if anything. At best it's pseudonymous.
I think parent used Mullvad as an example as they actually support creation of accounts 100% anonymously, as you can literally mail them an envelope with cash.
We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
> There is no more incentive to collect, misuse, or otherwise do anything with user data. In fact, for Kagi, user data is a liability. We don’t want it. We have nothing useful to do with it. You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account. But other than that, there is really no incentive for Kagi to ever want to touch your data.
I don't think Kagi, at the moment, is doing anything nefarious with the data that they have. But that paragraph you quoted is pure marketing.
>You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account.
If data was really viewed as a liability, they would adopt a data minimization model similar to Mullvad and not tie user accounts and email addresses together at all.
With Mullvad, privacy and anonymization are the goal and with Kagi it is more of a side effect. As such, using email for accounts makes the most sense because it is the default way of doing things and the lowest lift.
They could offer both. There’s no reason you can’t use some sort of uuid to login to your account. If that uuid was lost, well, tough shit and make a new account I guess?
Then normies can login with email and everyone is happy!
I don't think they verify email so you can do that currently with a fake email. There is nothing stopping you from creating a Kagi account with [email protected] other the possibility of someone actually having that email.
"Data breaches don't have consequences" is a new take that I'm not sure how to respond to.
It's not the email alone that is valuable. It is the email paired with your search history that is valuable. If you remove the email, and instead tie to to a uuid, the search history is much less valuable. This is the basics of data minimization.
Which, again, is fine if Kagi doesn't want to do. They just shouldn't pretend that there isn't any other solution other than email, because there is.
> "Data breaches don't have consequences" is a new take that I'm not sure how to respond to.
That is not what I said. Hundreds of data breaches where emails have gotten leaked and there have been no real consequences for the offending company so from a company perspective, email is not data that carries any real liability.
I don't understand their assertion; Kagi has an incentive to collect data... Most companies do. The incentive is money. Kagi would not be the first company to collect data to monetize it later. And Kagi dreams big about all that data:
Instead of being scared to share information with [your search engine], you will chose what data you want it to have and volunteer your data only after knowing its incentives align with yours... The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so!
I cannot find where now, but pretty sure I read recently somewhere that they are working in a kind of anonymous token that can be used to not link the searches with one's account. But I cannot seem to find details, but it would be indeed cool if that happened and it would make some things much easier.
Sounds like Cloudflare Privacy Pass, invented in part to allow Tor users to move around without being stuck in captcha hell [0], I heard about them from someone who wanted to sell anonymous access to a service by handing out these tokens that can be redeemed but not tied back to the point of distribution, but I've never actually seen it implemented this way.
In short, the extension receives blindly signed ‘passes’ for each authentication and these passes can be used to bypass future challenge solutions using an anonymous redemption procedure. For example, Privacy Pass is supported by Cloudflare to enable users to redeem passes instead of having to solve CAPTCHAs to visit Cloudflare-protected websites.
How is GDPR enforced though? With enough disregard for the law, the service provider can just lie about the data they have. I don’t know of a mechanism where you can actually force an audit to confirm that. You can basically ask the provider for all the data they have about you, but you can’t find out if they’re lying.
Everything is based on trust. How do you know that your phone is not sending your browser history once per month at random time at night, along with random legitimate-looking service?
You can hope, but even then processor microcode is likely closed source.
And you cannot really confirm the above use case very well. What if it is so sophisticated that it knows when it is being monitored, or it is so random or well hidden, that it might take years to spot.
"currently" is doing some heavy lifting there (right proper to state it that way).
Is there an enforceable claim that Kagi will never store such info?
The making an account for searching linked to govt-verifiable payment and ID data, however ephemerally, is also a high bar for me (and for women in the US with the incoming administration's focus on over-regulating pregnancy outcomes, holy fork NO)
If the government really wanted to, they can just get SSL private keys from CAs and decrypt all the traffic no matter who you search with, anyway. It's probably only a matter of time...
Kagi would benefit from offering the same account provisioning as Mullvad VPN. Generate a random number, collect payment for it with cash, crypto, or credit card, and leave it at that.
I don't use or trust Kagi but based on what I know about them from my research, this isn't true and sounds like thinly veiled racism because the founder is Russian.
Edit: I was corrected. The founder is Serbian. My apologies.
> thinly veiled racism because the founder is Russian
thanks for the laugh. As far as yandex goes, you are on the right track though: my grandad used to say, "If a russian ever says good morning to you, you have learned two things: it's not good and it's not morning". For the record, the founder is Serbian, As for the claim, sure, they aren't really hiding it: https://kagi.com/changelog#5340
I don't have an opinion either way, but they were perhaps referring to the announcement that they are integrating yandex as a source for images. I didn't follow it all closely, but there was some controversy about it.
> "In their most recent blog post, Kagi announced the integration of Yandex for image search—a company based in Russia. During a discussion, Vlad (Kagi’s founder) stated, “We do not discriminate based on current geopolitical issues.”
EDIT: this is what I found during a search. I did not claim they are fully backed by yandex.
> We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period.
eventually this will be usable (for the 2.5c per search) for any member, without the added 19$ per month (just your standard sub cost). I expect this will come in handy as a tool for AI assistant apps.
Anyway, happy Kagi user for around 2 years now, recommend it very much!
Assistant had many bugs in the early stages, but it's different kind of beast than Search API (more things that can go wrong). With Search API it's probably "only" billing/UI bugs which they want to catch in the beta and maybe some problems with the search results from the API endpoint
Though in this case I'd say a few weeks, maybe 2 months. (They keep things in beta longer than it needs to be, to be completely sure nothing goes haywire especially if it's billing related like the pay per use API endpoint).
> Though in this case I'd say a few weeks, maybe 2 months.
Assuming this page was launched today, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. But this page has said that for as long as I've been a Kagi member (at least a year now I think), so that estimate seems pretty far of :)
Was more looking for someone with inside knowledge who might be able to give some sort of indication for when this becomes available to us "normal" users :)
I’ve specifically asked about this recently and the answer is that API is not top priority. My guess is that Search API will continue to be in Beta in the next 12 months.
Brave has complete search independence and has been doing this for a while, but I hear Kagi has great results, but at the same time I'm perfectly happy with Brave
Would be cool to hear from people who've tried both
They claim independence but they still don't have a user agent that has been seen in server logs. Last time I looked they use a browser user agent and follow Googlebot rules in robots.txt. Which is understandable because some webmasters use a whitelist approach to bots given how many there are, and you wouldn't want your search quality to hurt because e.g. Facebook blocks you. And a lot of their results correlate with Google's based on their historical Cliqz data.
Not that I'm against Brave in any way, I think any alternative to Google's dominance is healthy. It just seems the touting of privacy, independence etc from alt search engines often has very loose meanings on those words, or sometimes comes across as god of the gaps platitudes.
About a year ago when I last tried Brave Search the quality of their results was often poor compared to Google, Bing, and Kagi, however their effort is appreciated and I hope that they continue improving.
Looking at the pricing i dont see really why anyone would use this api. 2,5cent on first look dont seem to be "much" when thinking of the normal by hand usage of a search engine - but in terms of atomated usage (which is the idea for an API right? why else should i use an api...) this will ramp up very quickly to be very expensive.
Apart from that, while i don't like google for all the reasons we all know - still their support of search operators and the results based on them is a magnitude better than all other search engines i tried so far.
And yes my daily driver is duckduckgo atm, tho sometimes i still fall back to google if duckduckgo doesn't deliver and sadly have to admit that google often results in better results than the others... sad but true.
I gave a Kagi trial with limited searches to a friend and they reported using Kagi when Google failed.
Yeah. It's that much better than Google. Which is better than DDG. Time is money, and I have $10/mo to save so much time.
Really it's about incentives. The other engines want me to see what the advertisers want me to see. Kagi's customer is me; they'll show me what I want to see.
Ok, so i just created a test account on Kagi to see if you are right.
As i mentioned in my post, something i personally really value is search operators.
So i did a direct comparsion on Kagi to google with a simple dork (its not like this would be my daily search but its a simple example for the usage of search operators and i just had no better idea *shrug)
intitle:"Index of" intext:2024 intext:backup
Old and simple directory indexing dork for backup files/directories.
Kagi returns me 13 Results.
Google Returns me 108 Results.
The quality of the results is quite similar.
So i can't tell on other searches using operators, and since my kagi kontigent for my free account is 100 searches i will think about some better search terms and try it again tomorrow. But on first sight, i can't approve the Kagi > Google statement.
is your search operators stuff a little bit too specfiic? Kagi uses google, brave and others. i think the operators just dont work correctly and some you use, just dont exist. and your search this way is highly specfic. when you search regulary you will notice the difference. look at the listable filter when search normally. Your example just doesnt work.
btw this gives more, though some incorrecT: 2024 backup intitle:Index intitle:of
Thats interresting because it worked for me, and i only used operators i found in the kagi docs Oo (intitle / inurl - yes intext isnt in so i just added the term instad of with intext)
I also tried others after the post, i just didnt update here - for example i did a site:laughingman.dev (my ___domain) to see what gets indexed, and saw also that google finds more stuff than kagi.
I don't wanne badmouth kagi - please dont missunderstand me. And yes search operators especially in the way i use them is a very specific thing, but well thats something i do daily and i rlly like it - if often helps me to find stuff alot more precise than with just some basic stuff. It also helps to sort out false postive results more reliable. If this is not a case for kagi well than kagi might just not be for me - which doesnt mean its not good for others. Im only speaking for myself
dont you search normally too? When you do this, you notice the main difference. I will create a bug report later, but i think the api isnt allowing this operators on google site? So they arent included
For reference, the biggest competitor is Brave, which costs 5 times less ($5/1000 compared to $25/1000).
Can anyone from Kagi help us understand the reason for the difference? All things equal, I’d love to use Kagi but I can’t tell my client that their search costs went up by 500% for no reason.
Kagi pays market price to the upstream search providers (unless something has changed since I wrote much of their initial backend circa ~2019). Bigger players like Brave are likely able to broker a pricing deal with search providers that is better than the market API price.
I was very adamant early on that they should be investing in developing their own indexing infrastructure so they can have true independence, but this has never been part of the vision as far as I can tell.
I suspect that Google finds value in the role they play in the market.
There is demand for search APIs, and companies like Kagi can build a business around that, grow and then compete more generally with Google over time. Serp makes that difficult.
For competitive reasons Google might not want to sell a search API directly (they might indirectly fuel a lot of competition against their main ad supported product). So letting Serp offer this service in a bit of a gray area makes it hard for competitors to form a beach head in search, while giving Google legal flexibility to shut down any service that tries to compete with them in any way through Serp's data.
It's completely fair to compare prices when you're on the buying side.
It's also strongly recommended when you're on the selling side, as you should be prepared to explain what added value justifies that your product is so much more expensive.
Why would I care about that as a customer though? If I compare options, I look at price and performance. If one is making it harder for themselves without any added value for me, why would I pay more money for that?
Given the economics involved (likely a fixed cost per query), I think it makes business sense to try to get few customers to pay a lot to get a lot, much more so than having many customers that pay a little and get results on par Google's free offering.
High end "boutique" search offering a refined search experience (at high computational cost) is a niche Google search can't compete with, since they're offering their search for free, and they'd take massive losses if they drastically increased the amount of compute per query.
It does seem expensive, but if it wasn't, then there'd be more temptation to simply white-label Kagi via it's own API while undercutting Kagi's own plans.
That's actually not so bad. That company reselling Kagi search is also replacing e.g. Kagi support, so there is less pressure on Kagi staff.
And honestly, anything that gets more people into the idea of using not-Google for searching is good for Kagi - even if it is to an ostensibly competitor.
Perhaps this is just me, but in general I feel like Kagi is holding itself back with its pricing structure. 300 searches a month is not enough for me, and $10/month is too expensive for something I can get 75% of the value of for free elsewhere. I would have adopted it a long time ago if it were $5 a month, or you could pay per search.
I suppose they are choosing the customers they want and aren't growth focused. I wondered if they had any venture capital in them and was surprised to find they have a kind of community funding model where their investors are their users [0]. It's almost positioned as a luxury good, doesn't have to be better, it just captures the market that /wants/ to spend $10 a month on a search engine with the idea that they're funding a French atelier of bespoke software (and I say that as a subscriber :^)
seems somewhat reasonable, if frustrating. I wish there was a mid-ground between this model and the ad-exploitation bonanza that every other search is based on
> But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries
Depends for what use case. For traditional everyday queries, it does sound expensive indeed, if you're not recovering any of the spend from whatever you use the API for.
Over a year ago they said something along the lines, that they pay around 1-2ct per search query (for API calls to the different search providers they use).
If this is still true, then this seems to be fairly priced.
Though If the API will get available, I won't use it as much as I want to.
I have ~1700 searches per month and use the professional plan (10$/month), which would be 1.7*$25 = $42.5 per month, which I'm glad I don't need to pay.
While simple APIs can be nice, I can't help but feel that this is too simplistic. It's paid per request and there's no pagination, does that mean I'm incentivized to just use whatever the largest possible value is for the limit parameter? As is, this feels half baked.
It also simply takes the settings from your account for its search results. I hope when it's out of closed beta that there will be a lot more flexibility to it. Though if it will truly be available to any member, creating an account specifically for your bot doesn't sound too terrible.
Wrote a simple typescript client [1] for the whole api (not just search), a while back.
Used it to write a simple plugin for Obsidian, to send a selection to the fastGPT of Kagi.
This is really cool. It's little things like this that keep me coming back to HN. I can't justify the cost of Kagi yet based on my current use, but I'm glad that people are out there building things like this. Thanks for your contribution and for making Obsidian and Kagi that much better!
Likewise. It’s a wonderful QoL improvement for a few bucks a month.
I’ve been using it for about a year and Google makes me wince now, in much the same way as using a browser without an ad blocker. Plenty of people do that every day just fine, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I love that they're making an API available but I struggle to understand why there is an extra cost for it. Shouldn't that just be considered part of my regular search usage that I am already paying for?
I understand paying extra for the LLM API but this confuses me.
Would be trivial to implement API limits to prevent that. As a personal Kagi user I would love to be able to experiment with the API but I'm not gonna pay for it. But I guess since this is only available at their business tier I'm not the target user anyway.
I've been considering Kagi a lot, but I find it sorta expensive (especially if compared to 'free') at least in my region. I learnt that they were discussing regional pricing[1], like the one in Netflix and other services.
Frankly, reading through that discussion, it doesn't seem like it's actually being seriously considered by them. It's just being advocated for by some users with them explaining why it's not really realistic to introduce.
Any information about the licensing terms of data that comes back from the search API?
A lot of APIs like this have serious restrictions on what you can do with the returned data, such as not being able to store it. This can greatly limit potential applications for anything beyond just "show some search results to a user".
On a related topic, I tried to use Selenium with Chrome with Google search. My idea was to find the result , read the search result web pages and feed it to an LLM and have it summarize the information.
Somehow Google detected it was a bot and my script crashed. Has anyone done something similar?
How is it that Kagi and Brave seem to have working micropayment systems but such are not implemented everywhere on the web so everyone who provides value can receive compensation?
i switched fulltime to kagi, it gives me mostly better results than google and bing.
its possibly quite a clever strategy to have a high price, essentially the tesla playbook:
get a good standing with HNW people and provide an awesome product, meanwhile the incumbents laugh at it because its not scalable and has no significant growth. But also they do not shoot it down. Once its big enough and economies of scale kick in, then the price is lowered or the market pays that price.
I'm pretty sure it is just ratio of points/time which matters. Number of comments has negative influence on rankings if number of comments >>> points. Sometimes truth is just boring.
I can only assume that a number of factors play into the ranking. Probably aspects you can't see (how many people followed through to the link at Kagi.com? How many people loaded up the comments for the submission?). Upvotes and comments are almost certainly not the only factors in ranking on HN.
It’s a mix of time on HN and points. Which means articles which are of interest to the people here make it up rather fast.
There isn’t really anything secret to HN. It’s not unbiased, but it’s easy to see which posts are “sponsored” as in the case of job postings. Obviously Kagi will rank well since it’s very popular with HN, but any “startup” tech company which has new features will typically rank high here.
