[freediver]

7 years ago we started the 'you are not the product' movement for digital information consumption with Kagi Search. Since then the paradigm shifted from search to agents. Good to see the need for 'you are not the product' still holds up, maybe even more so now: an agent is only worth trusting if it works for you and nobody else. The second an advertiser gets between you and the answer, that's gone. So we're staying on the user-funded side of this. Boring, but it's the whole point.

[bayindirh]

Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster. Knowing there are no ads and results are higher quality removes a mental load I didn’t know I was carrying.

It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.

[phyalow]

These comments feel like llm authored astro turfing…

[MarleTangible]

You know who else sounds like LLM from time to time? ESL - English as a Second Language. People learn English from books, and get introduced to phrases through reading or interacting with others within the same community. So, it sounds like you're using the LLM argument as a way to diminish their voices as well.

[ajmurmann]

As an ESL person who has spoken English as their main language for two decades now I find this very interesting. The vast majority of my English has been spoken with my wife who used to be a marketing VP or in a professional context. Sometimes people complain about the ways politicians or corporate executives talk and I don't get it and to me it sounds totally normal because that's what I'm used to. Makes you wonder how ESL speakers will sound more and more like LLMs because that's a large part of their exposure.

[radlad]

As a native English speaker, I worry about picking up LLM-speak simply due to interacting with Claude Code all day.

[woodpanel]

I think we're good https://www.instagram.com/ahh.gpt/reel/Da12ufvt69B/

[neonstatic]

As an ESL, it hurts me to see the atrophy of written English. "Your right!" is just painful.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

As an English phrase, that isn't strictly wrong, but I understand what you mean and it's your right to complain. ;)

[neonstatic]

It's only correct if "your right" is used as in "his right", "her right", "their right". Usually what they mean is "you are right", ergo "you're right", and they are just not educated enough to know how it's spelt.

[CGMthrowaway]

That's because many (most?) LLM chatbots were pre-trained by Kenyan ESL people

[InsideOutSanta]

I'm a customer of Kagi who is in no way affiliated with Kagi, other than sending them money. I agree with bayindirh: It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

I know that we live in a world where tech increasingly sucks, and positive comments on tech are (correctly!) seen as suspicious. The thing, though, is that Kagi is genuinely just a great product, and search is such a central part of using the Internet that good, trustworthy search makes a huge difference.

[bilbo0s]

>trustworthy search makes a huge difference

That's the rub. Today on the internet, no one can validate that there exists any "trustworthy search". If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it. Most often that someone is a marketing person at the hosting organization. Occasionally it's a random comment on the internet behind a pseudonym we know nothing about.

People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.

[InsideOutSanta]

> If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it

That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.

> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.

I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.

[bilbo0s]

The entire point of the Constitution was to not trust each other. We wouldn't even need checks or balances if trust were a reasonable governing philosophy. Nor a Bill of Rights, nor any explicit admonition against slavery.

The reason we need these and many more is that we don't trust each other. And it's wise that we don't.

This doesn't mean trust is bad, only that the founders, rightfully, knew that it leads to complacency.

What's landed us where we are is not a lack of trust. (We've lacked trust from day one, that's how we got the Constitution in the first place). What's landed us here is complacency.

[john01dav]

Kagi's business model also aligns incentives better than an ad and/or data mining fueled business model. Of course, this isn't proof, but it is evidence. One can also try the search in areas that one knows deeply and compare it to other search engines to see if it's truly better (I have not done this, but it is possible and isn't just trusting marketing.).

I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.

[Dumblydorr]

Yeah that one was praising in a non-specific way. Whether or not it’s genuinely a user, it did feel like astroturfing, which is sad if it’s a real comment that they can’t compliment a good service.

[bayindirh]

If I wrote the features that I like, and god forbid I use a bullet list, then I'll be labeled as a LLM user or LLM again.

What do you want me to do? :)

I can answer your questions if you want? :D

Edit: Heh, I saw your other comment, too.

[edoceo]

I'm sure they aren't. Folk (like me!) love Kago.

[Gareth321]

> Kago

Nice try, LLM! I'm onto you!

[GreenWatermelon]

On the other hand, your comment sounds to me like Anti-Kagi astroturfing.

[bilbo0s]

Together, both comments make a good example of the reason one should not trust what one reads on the internet.

It sucks. But there's just too much astro-turfing.

[cevn]

This one is so short and only has one LLM-ism, it's entirely possible it was human, I'm 60/40 on it. Unless you are 100% sure it was LLM, please don't call it out.

[bayindirh]

The funny thing is, In my whole life, this is probably the first time I have used that form, and I wrote it in a completely honest way.

I just want to bang my head to the keyboard.

[cevn]

Reading LLM's all day makes me really cynical, and I have to suppress the urge to judge all text written in that sense. SO I get where they are coming from, but people need to consider that they can be wrong, and that there is a real person whose feelings you can hurt by saying "OH this is like LLM, gotem!"

[bayindirh]

I can relate, because I also try to understand whether the text I'm reading is written by a human or emitted by a model constantly, and I don't use any LLMs day to day.

On the other hand, I'm not new in the internet, and have relatively thick skin. I'm very amused today by the unintentional attention I got with my cloudy, morning brain.

Nevertheless, regardless of what we do, believe or say, we shall be kind first and remember https://xkcd.com/438/ dearly.

This is what I'm trying to do all the time, but I'm not perfect. Just a human, trying his best.

[sebmellen]

Surprisingly, Kagi is actually just a really good business. Look at my comments, I despise AI spam and call it out wherever possible.

[inigyou]

That comment was obviously LLM authored but it is true. Using Kagi really does feel like taking off a huge weight. Or generally any service where you're used to being the product and then you become the customer instead.

[bayindirh]

> That comment was obviously LLM authored...

Wanna bet? =]

[bayindirh]

It's a funny claim about me, who doesn't use any LLMs for writing, coding or reducing any kind of mental or manual load.

My comments are on the open, and I can answer any question or comment you have about any of them. :)

No offense taken though. Made me smile while drinking my tea. :)

[dmacj]

> Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster.

Likely, the "It's not X, it's Y" phrasing is what probably rang the LLM alarm bells.

[andruby]

LLM's are trained on human phrasings. So now we can't use human phrasings anymore?

I am one of those people that used to write em dashes – and now I self-censor them out of my writings :(

[qzx_pierri]

I still use them too. Don’t listen to these nerds. Self censoring is awful.

[bayindirh]

Yeah, I figured the same thing after reading my comment and chuckled. :)

[Dumblydorr]

Wow! Can I ask how Kagi is best for your uses? Would love to try myself

[bayindirh]

Oh, this appeared late in my feed.

I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further. Same for image search which can also filter out AI generated images.

Also, I find lenses very useful (which is a way to limit your search radius) to search for specific things in the specific parts of the internet. i.e. you can define a lens with specific websites for a subject, and if you need something precisely, you can only search these websites.

I recently started to use SlopStop reporting to weed out AI generated webpages from search results, too.

Lastly, all AI features are opt-in. No summaries, no widgets, no extra "bells and whistles" if you don't want on your result page.

[plutokras]

> I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further.

I had an annual Kagi subscription that I let lapse not long ago. That was hands-down the best feature, so I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates it for DuckDuckGo. DDG also lets you turn off ads.

I'd gladly return once they fix the integration issues. In Safari, the redirect via the extension is a bit wonky at times.

[freediver]

Thank you for words of support and love the background picture on your website.

[rubyfan]

/ot Hamburger menu at the bottom right is pretty nice too. Haven’t seen it there before but seems like a very user friendly choice for its placement.

[bayindirh]

Hey! Thanks a ton. I took that photo while waiting to board. I don't remember which airport though, need to look at its date. It's an old one.

Thanks again for everything!

[nater5000]

eww

It's one thing to throw in a, "hey, I've used this service and I recommend it to others," but this is just gross, blatant advertising.

> It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Even if this is true, only an LLM would ever believe posting this sentence would come off as anything other than bullshit lol

[bayindirh]

Thanks for your opinion about my opinion of a service and its effects on my life.

If you can provide me your contact details, I'd love to send my similar comments to you and get them cleared by you to satisfy your standards of endorsement.

For your information and entertainment, ZeroGPT returns 97% human for that whole comment which I wrote while having my breakfast and my phone was laying on the table.

Unbelievable.

[andersonpico]

Keep fighting the good fight. Also, offering a counterpoint for the sibling comments: Yandex results are the most valuable for the type of thing censored in all other search engines. If I want to search for news on the war on Ukraine I go anywhere, but the things yandex works for are censored everywhere else.

[anonymous344]

yes. Remember when google brought the cencoring "because it's only used for cp and we need to protect the ch1ldren, don't we? or are you one of the pps?"

And now they are cencoring everything. Like somewere was a page of tiktok removing requests by country and holy-lheehlll, every day, constantly.

[cuu508]

Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.

[jwr]

Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.

[p-e-w]

If you consider supporting a Russian company equivalent to “supporting Russia”, then I assume you are happy to be supporting the United States by using US services… like the one you are on right now.

[woadwarrior01]

Also, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".

[mort96]

Yandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.

[inigyou]

Good thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine

[mort96]

The criticism is that a share of the money which goes to Kagi goes to Yandex.

[jorisw]

Gathered? Where?

[mort96]

Articles like:

* "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/

* "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin

There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.

[ejohansson]

Ouch. I was not aware. Cancelled.

It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.

[inigyou]

FWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch.

On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.

[ejohansson]

I think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.

[inigyou]

Did you go out of your way to buy a non-Chinese-made phone? You technically have a choice there, but not much of one. About as much of a choice as you have in the search engine business.

[wasabi991011]

Chinese phone-makers and Yandex are behaving pretty differently. China and Russia are also behaving pretty differently.

There's no clear reason why someone couldn't have qualms about one but not the other.

[ejohansson]

Like I wrote, and what you seem to say again here, I agree that it is unfortunate how tough it is to be an ethical consumer these days.

[jabron]

Google? Microsoft? AWS?

[barbs]

Damn, what did Mullvad do?

[mort96]

Founder and CEO funded a Swedish far right party. They stood for roughly 72% of what that party took in.

https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...

Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.

[allarm]

This comment is just unbelievable. With Kagi "canceled" you're back to use your regular search engine powered by the sociopaths destroying the world. But hey, at least your 5 bucks didn't go to Kremlin!

[Hoefner]

What’s wrong with Yandex? How is it any different from Bing, Google etc?

[kreco]

It happens to be Russian. So people boycott it.

You may note that when US goes to war nobody boycott the US.

[wasabi991011]

Plenty of people boycotted (to some extent) the US before that, when it started its trade war(s).

[kreco]

Fair. I should have said that the boycott is totally on a different level.

[TranquilMarmot]

Thank you so much for Kagi, using it has been the most meaningful change I have made in my digital life in the past 5 years.

[handedness]

Stay boring, Vlad.

[dmje]

Love Kagi. Game changer. Keep doing what you’re doing!

[brador]

Free user onboarding is awful. Ios safari.

Half the screen is the kagi sign up ad. Not a good show of the product.

Then it’s all black on white. 2026. Color. Contrast. It’s one of the pillars. Google figured this day 1:Dark blue links. Then the line spacing is too high. Information density doesn’t feel right.

Overall 2/10 experience for a 10/10 product.

[small_scombrus]

I'm on Android and honestly love how it looks, but you can blue-ify your links and change the line spacing if you want. Settings > Appearance > Custom CSS and you can do anything your heart desires.

[undeveloper]

It's a trial

[ShinyLeftPad]

Is being a paid product an assurance you do not also accept much better money from other sources?

[cafebabbe]

Such a refreshing take nowadays. Thanks a lot.

[areoform]

I've been a kagi subscriber for a few months now, and I really want to recommend Kagi to everyone, but the results and index (so far) have been sadly lacking.

I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.

[troyvit]

Kagi likes to hear of searches that don't work well and it's worth sharing on their discord[1]. I have problems with searches there too, and I'm too lazy to share, so I'm kinda being a hypocrite but maybe it'll help.

[1] https://kagi.com/discord

[echelon]

I want to continue to use the enterprise products paid for with billions of dollars of investment, because they still have tremendous value.

Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.

BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.

Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.

Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.

An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.

I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.

This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.

Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.

If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.

A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.

This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.

[bayindirh]

There are so many things I can write about this, but I’ll keep it short:

Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.

So, no, thanks.

[Marha01]

> Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.

This is an unjustified blanket opinion. Sometimes, societal problems can be solved by technological progress. I think you simply lack imagination if you cannot think of any societal problem that would be solved by better technology.

[bayindirh]

Thanks for your comment. Can you provide me some examples so we can discuss on it further?

[Marha01]

For example: the current societal problem of not doing enough against climate change would disappear if we developed cheap fusion power and/or very cheap grid-scale batteries that would remove the intermittency issue from renewables. Such power sources would quickly replace fossil fuels simply due to better economics, no need to change society to care about climate change anymore.

[marcta]

May I interest you in Jevon's paradox: if a thing becomes cheaper or more efficient, usage tends to go up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[cwmoore]

Sure, so then what does society do with all of the cheap energy? Human nature is still there. Among other things, leads directly to discarding even more plastic junk wherever it’s convenient and no one complains too much.

[erikerikson]

Like money? Or agriculture?

Sincerely though, can you explain?

[passivegains]

"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.

"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.

"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.

[senordevnyc]

What? Why? Why would those first two be "technical problems" that we can "solve" with innovation, but that last example isn't? What makes something a technical problem vs. a societal problem?

[bayindirh]

Generally, if you're targeting behavior of the people or the masses, you're targeting a societal problem.

People bullying other people is not a technical problem. People driving dangerously is not a technical problem. People shoplifting is not a technical problem. All of them have different reasons deep down, and preventing the symptom doesn't solve the problem.

When you effectively prevent bullying, the bully might damage something else or may do self-harm to soothe their demons. Same for people driving dangerously or have to shoplift to survive.

When you cure the root problem, which is generally harder BTW, the problem you're technically trying to prevent disappears, too.

Hope this helps.

[one33seven]

Yes like money and agriculture. We produce enough food for everyone and then throw it away because some dont have money for it. Very good example!

[inigyou]

We have an agent between us and the web. It's called a web browser. Or in last millennium terms, a user-agent. You can customize it by installing extensions, unless you chose to use Chrome, where extension support is limited.

[DigiEggz]

That's creating a slippery, echoey slope for the role of the agent / butler. You may end up replacing one problem with another.

[ifh-hn]

People have been trying to use technology to solve the problems technology since this began.

Your solution is probably the worse pipe dream I've ever seen articulated.

You state that current alternatives are too rubbish because you want to use the services you seem to despise. And your willing to pin your hopes on yet another technology to do it because this one is definitely trustworthy and has your best interests at heart... Naivety doesn't quite cover this.

[echelon]

Why is everyone here so myopic?

Why pay Kagi or whatever at all? How can you trust them or anyone, if this is your belief?

Why even pay your ISP? Just go back to candlelight and corn flakes and stay away from radio waves.

You'd better not own a smart phone if this is truly how you feel about the world, because it clashes with what you just said.

Come on.

[inigyou]

People here are myopic because of focusing on screens and/or books during early childhood. It causes your eyes to mis-detect the shape they need for optimal focusing.

[senordevnyc]

It's a boring answer, but nerds are cynical because they think it makes them look smarter.

[ifh-hn]

So people that don't agree with you are myopic?

You solution is to hope that a better technology will be invented that won't be subject to what every technology before it has been subject to. You rally against "the algorithm" and beg for another algorithm to save you. You want to live in a filter bubble and not be challenged on you believes. I can't think of anything worse, but I wish you the best.

Also I don't know what comment you read but it's clearly not mine...

[echelon]

I only have so much energy to reply to all of this negativity. Half of it is being cut off at the legs by HN filters from the constant downvotes and flagging. Downvotes and flagging for attempting to be positive and excited about tech progress.

You're not going to do anything about big tech by sitting on the sidelines. I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Nobody's built websites that show people how to contact their legislators. Nobody's building alternative tech.

We have a chance to use this tech to cut off the big tech overlords. I don't see how you're all missing this. We can literally build new browsers now. It reasons that we can place filters at every level of the stack to catch the stuff we don't like and prevent it from reaching us.

For people who supposedly care so much about tech and privacy and digital freedoms, I just see complaints.

I propose a solution to neuter big tech and you label it as a filter bubble instead of a victory.

But you're probably right - I'd like to filter out every grumpy HN person with a negative outlook sentiment score and move on with my day. It'd save me time. I shouldn't be wasting any energy responding to this den of depression.

[ifh-hn]

Negativity does not equals disagreement. I disagree with you I'm not being negative. I can't speak to downvotes and flagging.

Also I find it ironic that you would state no one is building alternatives when you previously lambasted the alternatives (blue sky, kagi, etc). What are you doing? Apart from engaging in fantasy.

Your solution is to have big tech filter out the stuff you don't like. These agents are a product of big tech. They need massive resources in terms of money, hardware, and resources to run. This isn't tech for the poor and downtrodden, it's tech for the rich and privileged. By the time the poor can afford it (if it doesn't destroy the environment first) it'll already be infected by what you despise in current big tech; if it isn't already.

[zombot]

> I would pay a thousand dollars a year

More incentive to keep up enshittification, lest your appreciation of de-shittification wane.